A collection of twenty articles on the nature of life and on the objective of the natural sciences. It challenges the paradox of the brain as organism and the receptacle of scientific reasoning. It also reflects on the quandary of side effects, moments when science confronts unpredicted outgrowths of a process thought to be reduced to a system.

Preface Part I : On Biology and Physics 1. The Schrodinger Question, What Is Life? Fifty-Five Years Later 2. Biological Challenges to Contemporary Paradigms of Physics and Mimetics 3. What Is Biology? Part II : On Biology and the Mind 4. The Church-Pythagoras Thesis 5. Drawing the Boundary Between Subject and Object: Comments on the Mind-Brain Problem 6. Mind as Phenotype 7. On Psychomimesis 8. The Mind-Brain Problem and the Physics of Reductionism Part III : On Genericity 9. Genericity as Information 10. Syntactics and Semantics in Languages 11. How Universal Is a Universal Unfolding? 12. System Closure and Dynamical Degeneracy 13. Some Random Thoughts About Chaos and Some Chaotic Thoughts About Randomness Part IV: Similarity and Dissimilarity in Biology 14. Optimality in Biology and Medicine 15. Morphogenesis in Networks 16. Order and Disorder in Biological Control Systems 17. What Does It Take to Make an Organism? Part V: On Biology and Technology 18. Some Lessons of Biology 19. Bionics Revisited 20. On the Philosophy of Craft 21. Cooperation and Chimera 22. Are Our Modeling Paradigms Nongeneric? References Index