A month ago I cut my fingertip with an electric machine used by carpenters to file lumber pieces. This incident occurred while I was installing the kitchen and I had to file a little piece. The piece was so small that I maintained the machine with one hand and shifted the piece with the other hand over the blades of the machine. I didn't notice the presence of a basic physics concept I learned some years ago in school: the inertia force associated with every movement. Therefore, my finger was carried out by the inertia and was cut off by the machine's blades. Surprisingly, I could bear the situation; there was blood everywhere.
I went to the nearest hospital and the doctor put a gel with a rare color over my fingertip. She couldn't stitch the injury because of the lack of flesh in my finger; I had lost my fingertip partially, so I had lost my identity too.
I didn't feel almost any pain the next days but the feeling sensation in my finger was quite unknown. It's amazing the bunch of layers covering each part of our body. Every one has it own functions. Most amazing is the self-healing power our body has. Nowadays, it's the only system able to repair itself, determining whether to repair all the injury -as it was in my case- or to isolate it to not damage the rest of the organism. As the doctor told me, the last phase is to recover the fingerprint and the return of the feelings carried out by the new nerves.
Thinking in terms of all the information needed by the organism in order to repair the injury, I end up quite confused. Moreover, it's not just the repairing of the injury, it's also the increment of defense due to the direct exposure of the finger without skin! Imagine - I'm a computer engineer, so let's think in micro-operations - the Terabytes of micro-operations codified at the DNA level or wherever are planning a right response.
Honestly, I think we never will be able to design and build a system capable of repairing itself as our organism does. As Hotstadter told in his book "Godel, Escher, Bach": all intelligent systems end up with auto-referencing; I don't know any system by now.
