Hierarchical Organization in Automata Theoretic Models of the Central Nervous System

Perhaps the most striking feature of biological organization is its hierarchical character. Conversely, hierarchical organization in biological systems has characteristics quite different from those we customarily observe in the physical world and in the world of mechanical artifacts with which we are increasingly surrounding ourselves. For this reason our scientific intuition, which has been largely built on physics and engineering, has always been somewhat at a loss in dealing with hierarchical organizations of all kinds, biological and sociological.