What are Cybernetic Organisms?

Biological cybernetics is a theory that uses the general principles of cybernetics to study the reception, transmission, storage, processing, and feedback of control and information in biological systems.

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It can study the control and information processes in biological systems at all levels: from the feedback mechanism of studying the biochemical synthesis of cells at the molecular level to the analysis and simulation of ecosystems. China and many other countries also use it in areas such as population forecasting. But biological cybernetics has studied the most and the deepest is the control and information processes at the level of organs and physiological systems, including the analysis of physiological systems and neural cybernetics.

System view and holistic view. In the study of life phenomena, biological cybernetics regards the biological system under study as a multi-level part that is interconnected, interacts, and interacts with the external environment, and performs some kind of The unity of a unified function; The concept of energy does not play a substantial role. Biological cybernetics focuses on the exchange of information between various parts of the system and between the system and the environment, that is, the reception, transmission, processing, storage and feedback of information. The concept of energy, which is usually very important, does not play a substantial role here; Quantitative, biological cybernetics adopts a quantitative method when studying the dynamic processes and functions of biological systems, measuring certain quantities related to biological systems, The mathematical relationship between these quantities is studied, and the quantitative laws of information and control processes in biological systems are established in a formal language, that is, mathematical models of biological systems are established or simulated on computers.

Compared with engineering control systems, biological systems are much more complex. For researchers, the internal structure of biological systems is generally

Biological cybernetics

Unclear or less clear, ie the biological system is a "black box" or "gray box". The biological system is often a hierarchical multi-level control system, that is, there are control centers of different levels; the high-level control center can control and modify the activities of the low-level control center. For example, the cerebral cortex, brain stem, and spinal cord are several different levels of control centers. Biological systems are also often non-linear, that is, they do not meet the superposition principle (the superposition principle refers to the system's response to different combinations of stimuli is equal to its corresponding combination of responses to each stimulus). The time-varying nature of biological systems (that is, the structure or parameters of a system that changes over time) is also prominent. Biological systems are usually affected by multiple factors and react at the same time. There are multiple feedback loops in their internal and external environments. That is, biological systems are multi-input, multi-output, and multi-loop systems. The cross-linking between various parts of a biological system is also very complicated, and it is often difficult to isolate a part of it without affecting its normal function. Therefore, in the study of biological cybernetics, we must also pay attention to these characteristics of biological systems, and combine biological knowledge and cybernetic methods for research. ^[3]