Table 1. The Chinese five-fold discretization and dependency-relationships Element Direction Planet Seasons Color Tastes Emotion Yang Organ Yin Organ Sensory Organs Water North Mercury Winter Black Salty Fear Urinary Bladder Kidney Ears Sources: Hicks A et al. and Maciocia G. (17,18). Wood East Jupiter Spring Green Sour Anger Gallbladder Liver Eyes Fire South Mars Summer Red Bitter Joy Small intestine Heart Tongue eCAM 2007;4(3) 295 Earth Centre Saturn Late Summer Yellow Sweet Pensive Stomach Spleen Mouth Metal West Venus Autumn White Acrid Grief Large intestine Lung Nose Figure 2. The concept map of the healthy Sheng and Ke cycles. Lines in the opposite direction form the unhealthy Cheng and Wu cycles. Source: Al Stone, Lung Cancer and Five Elements. www.acupuncture. com. Reprinted with permission. instantiated to. A system of cyclic vectors interlinks all variables by four series of ‘parental’ influences. There are two healthy series: the Generating (Sheng) and the Controlling (Ke) vectors, and two unhealthy ones, the Overacting (Cheng) and the Insulting (Wu) ones (Fig. 2). The pictogram of this semantic network amounts to a digraph (directed graph) with five nodes and ten vectors—a shape alike to a pentagram. The cognitive value of this fully-connected semantic network resides in the fact that with sufficient training it can facilitate the quasi-mechanical structural recognition, classification and generalization of complex patterns based on the aggregation of variable-weights and relationship-strengths alone (9,10). Similar cognitive constructs are still widely used to design algorithms for machine learning and automated pattern recognition (11). Due to its non-hierarchical structure, this model can be used as a global inference model in a variety of situations where detailed information about a phenom- enon is incomplete, conflicting and vague, or where a phenomenon is culturally attributed to the occult and the supernatural. This conceptualization schema is also used in ‘holistic sciences,’ such as in Systems Biology and in Systemic Medicine for the overall representation of complex non-linear biological phenomena where the whole is more than the algebraic sum of the parts and where analytical approaches have failed to predict Figure 3. Hopfield-style networks are used in the context of Systems Biology. Source: Institute for Systems Biology. www.systemsbiology. org. Reprinted with permission. nature’s complex, adaptive, and emergent behavior (Fig. 3) (12–15). In the context of Chinese natural philosophy, this model is also paired with the ‘magick’ (exclusively meaning ‘paranormal’) belief in the existence of a second set of dependency-relationships between domains, where, by analogical reasoning, the manipulation of a variable in one domain is believed to cause changes in a parallel one (Table 1) (16). Hence, by means of a multiparameter pattern recognition model, and with sufficient ‘supervised learning,’ a skilled folk healer can intuitively recognize a disease-pattern based on the instantiation of variable- weights (temperature, pulse and tongue conditions, etc.) and relationship-strengths (more pain than distention, less sweating than fever, etc.), and without any real knowledge of anatomy and physiology, or despite a lack of specific concepts and words for such a pattern (19). Then, he or she can treat the disease with an empirically- established remedy with actions attributed to the magick correspondences between domains. As for the use of five parameters instead of another number, it might be due to numerology and geomancy, such as the practice of Feng Shui (20). One might speculate that the notions of health and good fortune through sacred geometry and the divine or celestial harmony in terms of astrology, directions, location, the elements and proportions have determined its selection. The selection of five and the pentagram might also be related to the mathematical fact that the ratios of the lengths of the