Dynamical Systems For Herbalism

## What Is A Dynamical System? A dynamical system is any system that changes over time according to a set of rules.  ## Three Questions - What is the system's current state? - How does the state change over time? - What are the rules that govern that change?  ## How this shows up within the body - Where is the person’s body right now? - What is the trajectory? Is this pattern worsening, cycling, stable, or slowly resolving? - What is the body’s preferred state? - What drives the system? What are the feedback mechanisms? The Resources? The constraints?  ## Example Within The Body  ### Feedback Mechanisms  ### Types of Constraints  ## Pertubations, Resilience & Return to Home **Pertubation** is any force that pushes the system away from its current state, for better or worse. **Resilience** is the capacity of a system to absorb perturbations and still return to it’s healthy attractor.  ### Insufficient Resistance The system is pushed too easily. This causes hypersensitivty, reactivity, vulnerability etc. Which presents as: catching every cold, being thrown by minor stressors, reacting to foods or exposures that bother no one else.  ### Insufficient Recovery The system is pushed into a new configuration and cannot find its way back. This presents as chronic disease. A crisis occurs that the person can never fully recover from and a new worse baseline establishes itself.  ## Trajectories A trajectory is a path that the system takes through the state space over time. Reading a trajectory is reading a prognosis. A system moves purposefully through a recognizable arc: - Infection - Inflammation - Resolution  ## States A state is a complete snapshot in time for a system. In the body this can include: - Temperature - Tissue - Moisture - Nervous Tone - Balance of Stimulation etc. within each organ system, degree of inflammatory activity etc.  ## State Space The state space is the map of all the possibile states that the system could be in. The shape of the state space around a current state, determines where that state is likely to go.  ## Galenic State Space The Galenic state space can be seen as a four dimensional space where the axes hold the four tissue states of: - Hot - Cold - Dry - Moist  ## Attractors Not all locations within the state space are equal. Some regions pull the system there and keep it there. An attractor acts as a magnet or gravity within the state space for shifting ones state over time. For example; someone who has been sick in one way or another their whole life will have an attractor that is pulling them in that direction and away from healthy states within the state space. **Three Kinds Of Attractors** - Fixed Point - Limit Cycle - Strange Attractor  ### Fixed-Point Attractor: The system settles into a single stable state and stays there. A constitution at its natural temperament baseline.  ### Limit Cycle Attractor (Periodic) The system settles into a regular rhythm, revisting the same sequence of states over and over. For example: the sleep-wake cycle.  ### Strange Attractor (Chaotic) The system moves endlessly through the state space in a pattern that never repeats and never escapes a bounded region. Complex, ‘irregular’ variation however is often a sign of health.  ### Pathological Attractors A chronic disease state is itself an attractor: the body has organized around a pattern of dysfunction and will return to it even after temporary interventions. Symptoms = States Patterns = Attractors  ## Basin of Attraction Every attractor has a basin or a surrounding region / state space which the system will eventually be drawn towards. - Wide Basin - Deep Basin - Shallow Basin / Narrow Basin  ### Wide Basin The attractor can absorb large pertubations without losing the system. A person with a wide health basin can get sick, sleep poorly, eat badly, and still return to baseline without significant intervention.  ### Deep Basin The attractor is strongly stabilizing - the walls are steep, the pull is strong. Once in the basin, the system returns quickly and powerfully.  ### Shallow or Narrow Basin The attractor is fragile. Small disturbances can knock the system out of the basin entirely, sending it toward a different attractor, even a pathological one.  ## Bifurcations Point where a small change in the underlying condition produces a large, qualitative change in the systems behavior. It’s a rapid switch or flip to a new landscape. Some types of bifurcations in the body include: - Puberty - Menopause - Onset of Type-2 Diabetes  ### Saddle-Node Bifurcation A tipping point. Imagine two valleys (two attractors) separated by a ridge. As conditions slowly change, the two valleys shift. At some critical condition, one valley merges with the ridge and disappears. The system suddenly has only one basin to fall into — the other one. This is why chronic disease often appears to worsen slowly and then suddenly become entrenched. The healthy attractor is being slowly eroded while the pathological one deepens.  When systems are approaching a bifurcation point, they show a characteristic signature: - Slower to recover from pertubations. - Basin becomes more shallow. - Restoring force is weakened. - Each ‘bump’ takes longer to settle. This mainfests as increasing sensitivity, longer and slower recovery times from illness, longer duration of symptoms etc.  ## Feedback The output loops back and modifies the input. Allowing for stabilization or destabilization. The body is saturated with feedback loops at every scale.  ### Negative Feedback (Stabilizer) Negative feedback is a stabilizer in living systems. The HPA-axis is an example which regulates cortisol release duing stressful events. When this loop is disrupted by chronic stress, nutritional deficiency etc., the self limiting mechanism fails and chronic health conditions emerge.  ### Positive Feedback (Amplifier) Positive feedback amplifies a respose that pushes it further in that same direction. Examples include: - Blood clotting - Aute Immune Response  ### Pathological Feedback These are loops that constantly reinforce a cycle and build. It can be chronic inflammation which damages the tissues, causing more inflammation etc. Breaking a pathological feedback loop often required addressing multiple points in the cycle simultaneously.  ## Phase Transitions & Critical Thresholds  ### Fever Stages - Rise - Crest - Crisis - Resoltion Each stage involves qualitatively different organization modes. Different immune activity, metabolic priorities, tissue behavior etc.  ### Inflammatory Cascade Onset Inflammation can smolder under the radar for years before it becomes disease. When a threshold is crossed or a second stressor is added, the system transitions into clinical pathology.  ### Healing Crisis Temporary intensification of symptoms during recovery that may represent a phase transition where the body reorganizes from a chronic attractor back towards a healthier one.  When a system passes through a states and does not return, it is called ‘hysteresis’.  ### Menopausal Transition A complete reorganization of the thermoregulatory, metabolic, and neuroendorcrine systems around a new post-reproductive attractor.  ## Emergence & Irreducibility A property is emergent when it arises from the interactions of a system’s parts but cannot be found in, predicted from, or reduced to any individual part.  ## Time, Trajectory & Memory Dynamical systems are spatial and temporal. A trajectory takes the system through state space. It’s not just history, but affects the present and future possibilities for the system. See: Whitehead’s Process Philosophy.