Computations in living organisms modeled by marked graphs

by John M. Myers and Hadi Madjid

Cognition and other biological processes, including human thinking, are subject to unpredictable changes. Thus, computation is a part, but by no means the whole, of cognition. The paper is philosophical in that we propose a novel way in which humans and other living organisms are more than computers. We propose that biological organisms perform computations that are continuously being re-wired by something external. Ignoring for the moment what this external something might be, we provide the mathematical tools to simulate this re-wiring. In this way we provide thought tools for asking new questions-and sometimes answering them-about the intertwined role of logical operations and surprises in biology.

Surprises reset clocks.