Billy Buffington, MD⚕️

Life Enthusiast // specialist generalist // epistemic expansionist // fellow explorer

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

A Biological Case for God

Within natural ecosystems, all organisms coordinate via bioelectric fields. That coordination sustains homeostasis through a nested hierarchy of cognitive homeostats.

All organisms within natural ecosystems are part of what we can think of as a transjective cognitive process, a kind of intelligence that arises from top-down relationships between parts and wholes. It’s not just that individual organisms process information, but that the ecosystem itself does, through patterns of coordination and feedback that entwine biological, atmospheric, hydrological, and geoelectric processes into a single self-regulating system.

That’s how both ecosystem and organisms maintain non-equilibrium steady state. Unlike a closed system that runs down to equilibrium, a living system stays far from equilibrium by constantly exchanging energy and information with its environment. It maintains itself through dynamic balance, continuously adapting to flux while preserving coherence and vitality.

The medium and the message, in this view, is bioelectric. Every cell, tissue, and organism communicates through voltage gradients and electrical fields. These nested Markovian bioelectric fields (so called because their changes depend probabilistically on their prior states) form feedback networks that store and transmit information about the system as a whole.

In systems theory, these networks can be described as Markov blankets—boundaries that separate a system from its environment while still allowing the exchange of information and energy. Each level of biological organization, from the cell membrane to the organism to the ecosystem, maintains its own Markov blanket. These layers are nested within one another, forming a hierarchy of self-organizing boundaries that both define and connect living systems.

This organization begins even below the level of the cell. As @drmichaellevin’s work has shown, ionic networks and cytoskeletal conduction pathways form electrical gradients that prefigure the emergence of cellular boundaries and later tissue patterning. From there, the same bioelectric logic extends upward through nested fields of coherence: cells couple electrically into tissues, tissues synchronize into organ-level oscillations, and those oscillations integrate within the organism through large-scale electrical rhythms, think cardiac and neural waves as examples.

When we say the process is scale invariant, we mean that the same basic principles repeat across these levels. The same self-organizing rules that govern electrical signaling between cells also appear, in transformed form, in the interactions between organs, between organisms, and ultimately between species within an ecosystem. In this way, life expresses a fractal logic: patterns of coordination that hold true from the micro to the macro.

This electrical patterning is as essential to biological order as DNA or the biochemistry that sustains it, the medium through which matter becomes coherent.

So everything within an organism communicates using a synchronized network of such bioelectric fields, what we might call intersubjective communication at the horizontal level (cell to cell, organ to organ, across) and transjective communication at higher levels (whole to part, organism to environment, up and down).

If we apply the principle of scale invariance, the idea that the same organizing laws repeat at multiple levels of structure, then the same kind of communication that coordinates a body also coordinates an ecosystem. In other words, ecosystems themselves are bioelectrically synchronized organisms, composed of smaller organisms whose fields are nested within a larger field.
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[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@stevemagness Thank you for your service, Steve. This charade is so ridiculous

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@RomeoStevens76 @uncledoomer Great recs.

I’d toss in taurine and reasonably high dose glycine in acute situations, a gram of which can be held in mouth for rapid sublingual absorption.

Intransasal theanine, similarly, can be great for rapid onset while awaiting higher dose oral / first pass metabolism.

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@DanielLanino cc @DanielCohrsMD

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@DanielLanino Wow — this looks incredible! Very excited to read

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@_ramsaybrown When I say gc I mean for you and Trevor specifically. That’s a quorum.

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@AbudBakri @PGC1a_RB Playing an enhanced game out here my friend

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

I agree with Eric’s alarm bells here. The same political/economic forces now rhetorically embracing deprescribing are also accelerating the destruction of public care infrastructure, continuity of care, and long-term therapeutic relationships—all the things needed for any complex deprescribing!

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@DanielCohrsMD @_Eric_Reinhart Ordinary med mgmt coding is valid in both directions: up or down. Does this actually change that? My cursory understanding was this is more in spirit, it doesn’t change the substance of reimbursement beyond what ordinary med mgmt coding would. But i’m not familiar w the details

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@txmedai @doc_brower @nickmmark Yeah, that was word around Columbia – people were all the more perplexed/disappointed because he was somewhat of a rising star.

He was also involved in developing MitraClip, catheter-based valve repair device that took 15 years but got FDA approval. He’s named on the patent.

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@JeremiahEnglan5 @St_Rev @Meaningness Yup. And hyperbolic actually *underestimates* the degree of nonlinearity here because receptor occupancy is only one layer in a cascade of nonlinear transformations between dose and clinical effect

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@TylerAlterman I believe in you

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@_ramsaybrown Ramsay— I think you need it

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@credorelief Oh my, what a treat. Thank you 💙

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@simonsarris In a word: libido

In a thousand words:
https://t.co/sysZ0giHrN

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

"Despair is a development of pride so great that it chooses one's certitude rather than admit God is more creative than we are. "

–Ernst Toller (played by Ethan Hawke) paraphrasing Merton in Paul Schrader's "First Reformed"

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@RogerSeheult @angie_rasmussen Remarkable

[Josh Balk @joshbalk]

The pork industry lost with voters. Lost at the Supreme Court. So they turned to Congress—and got the "Save Our Bacon" Act buried in the House Farm Bill. It's the biggest rollback of animal welfare protections in U.S. history. A thread. 🧵

[Billy Buffington, MD⚕️ @BillyBuffington]

@TheMindScourge You mean the Eye of Sauron