From this epistemology in turn stemmed a research program concerning optimal-wiring models of global brain and genome anatomy, a structuralist approach.
This insight in turn indicates that NP-completeness is of parallel interest: computational intractability of a cosmos-consuming scale is a practical counterpart to traditional absolute uncomputability - another layer of impossibility for the idealizations.
[4][5] This research program proceeds from a holistic rather than compartmentalized perspective, where in an inherent ambiguity philosophy and science are distinct but inextricably interconnected.
In addition, it is perhaps natural to extend the bounded-resource approach along these lines down from philosophical rationality to the physical brainwiring hardware level (and its associated organic neuroanatomy).
Wiring minimization can be detected at multiple levels (e.g., placement of the entire brain, layout of its ganglia and/or cortex areas, subcellular architecture of dendrite arbors, etc.).
However, such problems are NP-complete; exact solutions generally appear to entail bruteforce searches, with exponentially exploding costs.
(This is a generalization of a related perspective-dependent idea seen in theology, to account for the problem of evil – of apparent imperfections in the Universe with an omnipotent, benevolent deity.)
With such a network optimization framework, these “Save wire” results have been extended and replicated for the complete living human cerebrum via fMRI,[10] another predictive success.
A next chapter of this research program: Concepts from the theory of computation can be applied to understand the structure and function of organisms' DNA.
The Crick-Watson double-helix model emerged at the same place and time as Turing's final work, namely Cambridge around 1950, so the idea of DNA-as-Turing-machine-tape has floated around for decades.
In particular, the genome can be treated like a "nano-brain” or pico-computer to see whether similar connection minimization strategies also appear in gene networks.
For example, a statistically significant supra-chromosomal homunculus – a global representation of the human body - appears to extend over the entire genome in the nucleus.