Subsequent to Edward LORENZ'es, David RUELLE's and Florin TALKEN's secular discoveries of "pseudochaotic coordination" in hydro-aero-dynamic systems, the strange coexistence of indeterminate kinematics and apparently deterministic dynamics has become the topic of intensive, computer based research in the physical sciences. Using the mere phenomenological analogy between evolution of systems with sensitive dependency on the initiating conditions, positive LYAPUNOV exponents and fractal multi-dimensionality, sterile extrapolations from idealising physicalism to profound natural sciences became popular, inter alia by search for "chaoticity" in the time series of cardio-vascular, endocrinological and/or skeletomuscular reactions. All of these are long known in their microscopic details and behavioural traits of "re-exitable membrane channels", the most important element for "non-linear-non-equilibrium phase transitions". These were systematically studied since the days of SHERRINGTON, one of the founding fathers of physiological synergetics around the turn of the 19th century. Hermann HAKEN, here cooperating with Hans Peter KOEPCHEN, the leading authority of the autonomous nervous system in the 1990ies: the two authors postulated that neurodynamic behavioural traits are characterised by only transient, self-limiting phases of coherent performance. To paraphrase the latter in a intuitive manner, they proposed to use the term "quasi attractor" in describing such short lived emergence and subsequent submergence of procedural coherency: methods to display this "natural behaviour" have now been developed.
Using time series obtained in awake human subjects exposed to cold environment, in patients undergoing psychomotor relaxation, in patients and volunteers undergoing pain stimuli and in subjects undergoing a specific regimen of bicycle ergometry, multiple base-line time series (skeletomotor cardiovascular, respiratory, continuous skin galvanic response) were analysed by a comprehensive algorithm based on primary MORLET-wavelet analysis, ARMA-procedures (moving average) and were then plotted as time frequency plots ("prosodograms" depicting in intuitive manner the emergence and submergence of preferred attractors). The combined data clearly corroborated the basic assumptions of the HAKEN-KOEPCHEN paradigm: in addition, clear indicators of n:m synchronisation (see Lecture TASS) became evident in even short lived coherency separated by likewise clearly detectable transient. In proposing that a moratorium should be it placed on the future publication of dynamic portraits from "single base-line" recordings, it can be anticipated that the "adaptive nature" of normal physiological reactions will become evident to the educated (and soon the general public) ending a "short lived historical transient" where natural adaptivity was misconceived as "chaos".
HAKEN's proposal that rapidly emerging and subsequently submerging "dominance" of preferred "attractor" behaviour were the cause of apparent "chaoticity" of biological systems is guiding the project of physiological synergetics: it can be put it into the proper perspective by postulating, that owing to well known behavioural traits of ensembles of membrane channels on the microscopic, and of ensembles of effector neurons and inhibitor neurons, rapid "phase synchronisation" on the one hand, and automatic re-inhibition on the other forms the basis of functional adaptivity.
These concepts also apply - under boundary conditions with steep potential gradients mimicking those prevailing in vivo - , to prebiotic systems capable of undergoing "drive dependent consensualisation of a priori independent movements" (our rheological definition for the vague term "self-organisation"). In studying a wide spectrum of prebiotic (putatively) chaotic prebiotic systems (ranging form sand pile kinematics and hour glass behaviour, over dripping faucets and water clocks, the holocoherent BENARD-MARANGONI hyper-stability and various new versions of the BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKI reaction as paradigmatic example of self-organised catalytic activity, the HAKEN-KOEPCHEN-quasi attractor concept could be verified. In the latter, the well known "periodicity" could be enhanced, blurred or even abolished completely by the appropriate choice of "setting" providing "sinks" for products (CO2, electrons). Lastly, calcium waves in isolated cells (beating myocardiocytes) and in suspension of sarcoplasmatic reticulum in agar were studied: they all showed identical behaviour, i.e. autowaves due to self-limiting discharge, refractorisation with restitution of the "kinetic threshold" allowing "critical slowing" and "enthalpy peaking" as basis for BRILLOIN's negentropy principle of information.
Using disarmingly simple cellular automata simulating eruptive, self-limiting discharge and variable length of refractory periods, the above described (putatively universal) behavioural traits could be modelled, the resulting patterns displaying the very same "apparent kinematic indeterminancy" (due to spatio-temporal in-homogeneities) which can be easily corrected by choosing the proper combination (and homogeneity) of parameters reflecting the well known determinants for resonance prone behaviour, namely generalised inertance, generalised capacitive resilience and generalised inhibitance. We propose that, eruptivity abounds in "nature" (in highly "non-linear" reactions) due to the multiphase nature of natural materials, especially when systems are driven into the strongly dysequilibrated modes of operation first identified by BERTALANFFY as "cause" of sustained transfer of energy and matter "feeding the negentropy" postulated by SCHRÖDINGER for living systems.