Reddit mentions of Networks of the Brain (MIT Press)

For the type of graph (network) theory that is currently hot in neuroscience contexts, [Newman's book](http://www.amazon.com/Networks-An-Introduction-Mark-Newman/dp/0199206651
) is a great compendium (quite readable, but fairly comprehensive).

For bedside reading about mammalian cortical networks in particular, Networks of the Brain and Discovering the Human Connectome, both by Olaf Sporns, are well worth a look.

From there... it's already becoming a pretty big literature. If you have some specific areas of interest, I can do my best to point you to resources. Take my suggestions with a grain of salt, though... I'm a pure mathematician who kinda got seduced into applied maths... which means I probably don't know as much about either discipline as I should.

Yes I think the smooth pursuit is a really interesting example actually. It is a 'gray area' with respect to the distinction I am drawing, because the eyes are very close to the CNS. I do think the 'least retinal slip' is best seen as a heuristic to achieve pursuit, agreed. And it would be nonobvious before that was discovered, thats what makes it a discovery.

In Olaf Sporns' book networks of the brain http://www.amazon.com/Networks-Brain-Olaf-Sporns/dp/0262014696 the last chapter is devoted to 'embodied computation' where he has some examples of limb elasticity doing computational work and such. So that is a challenge neuroscientists face, the question of where is what taking place and how? And typically we have to answer that question by hypothesis testing. Depending on how we bound our system, different hypotheses might be generated. Moreover, it is a methodological challenge. If i had outfielders watch fly balls being hit on a screen in an mri machine, would we capture much of what the brain does when catching fly balls?

You might find it to be an 'uninteresting distinction', but in my opinion that just shows me that you are missing the larger point in favor of justifying your own arbitrarily chosen favorite level of abstraction (ie the nervous system at a particular scale).

Oh looks like you may be interested in studying complex systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

Here's some stuff on using complex systems analysis to look at the brain: http://vimeo.com/13953303
http://www.amazon.com/Networks-Brain-Olaf-Sporns/dp/0262014696

>I mean the concept that Life is a force of the Universe present since its absolute beginning with a function of building toward higher complexity as an opposing force to Entropy, which builds toward nothingness. That the experience of consciousness as we know it is the result of organic matter reaching a critical threshold of complex structure in our brains.

Some people have been working on quantifying consciousness, and they're doing it by measuring reduction in entropy! Maybe you'd be interested in that? Check out Integrated Information Theory. It kinda requires some understanding of Shannon information theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory