It is truly astounding how little we know about ourselves and how every new discovery unlocks so much potential. If our rate of scientific progress continues to rise I am incredibly excited for the next 100, and 1000 years- even if I won’t be around to see it.
The one that still gets me is the little understood role of gut bacterial, seems like that subsystem is incredibly incredibly important yet we understand so little about it.
Any other example of recently discovered body parts?
I remember the recent discovery of a new tissue in the eye that is one cell wide which explain why it has been discovered only recently. I expect a few other remaining extremely small (in surface or in width) new tissues to remain undiscovered.
Which ask the question: would it be possible to cut an organ incrementally (ideally one cell width at a time (e.g with a powerful laser like for transistors)) it would enable an exhaustive search!
There have been people who were (presumably with consent) frozen in gelatin after death, and then "sliced" (by shaving off layers) very thinly and imaged to create volumetric models. I don't know if they had enough resolution to see individual cells.
I think there has been a bit of debate among retina specialists as to whether this constitutes a new tissue or a guy looking to name an already well known existing phenomenon after himself
so are many others, there could be some very new opportunities to understand for pathology, therapy, and disease processes in general, even the whole mind over matter thing, psychosomatic illness, etc.
There's a lymph system in the brain that was so subtle that it went undiscovered until 2016. Lymph nodes are centralized pathogen collectors in the body's immune response system that allow the body to determine an appropriate immune response. There may be a connection between immune response and cognition, now that these nodes have been discovered in the brain. Not much else is known at this time.
It's particularly interesting given that it followed up on earlier stories related to the waste clearance in the brain. You can read up more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system
It could happen that it weren't randomly distributed and that it occurs with a statistically higher frequency in the part of the planet where it was done.
The sex tip in the article is that you have to include the clitoris - and once you’ve done that there’s no single special G-spot you can touch to get orgasmic magic, but rather it’s anything that keeps working on the clit from the inside.
There is a SCP that is used in the Ad astra canon. A book that shows how to remove any body part with certain pressure applied around it. They basically have a guy walk in to a donor center for a full donation and the surgeons pull him apart without any trauma and go to lunch. Has something to do with a extra brain lobe, augen lapen. Where the humans in that book are shown to have that and we do not.
But it turns out we discover fairly major new things about the body fairly frequently.
2018 - did scientist really no know what 20% of the fluids in the body are?: "The ground-breaking discovery of the new organ meant that old mysteries could be solved. For instance, scientists always knew that 20 per cent of body fluids were missing in a total tally, in between blood, lymph, serum and other bodily fluids" https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-28/scientists-discover-n...
“ meaning we’ve been wrong about some basic ways in which the brain and immune system are connected.” I’ve been screaming this at my doctors for years. For those who don’t want to read the article, the quote sums it up. They discovered new lymphatic vessels in the brain in 2016 where previously the brain wasn’t thought to have any.
2 years ago I had a stressful life event. I became schizophrenic because of it. I accidentally discovered that ketosis cures the schizophrenia. It turns out a doctor at Harvard has been sounding the alarm about this and nobody is listening to him [1].
After researching these things somewhat deeply, it appears that almost all diseases that involve the death or inactivity of neurons (Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, etc) are sometimes caused by “inflammatory signals,” as I call them, which interfere with the metabolism of glucose. Note the way I worded that — there’s more than one way for those neurons to become deactivated. What we currently think of as being a single disease might be many diseases, many different types of pathology that ultimately lead to the silencing of the same general population of neurons and thereby causing the same symptoms. The point is that the metabolic angle doesn’t explain all neural pathology, so keep that in mind when ketosis is found to only put 20% of schizophrenics into remission in the next five years.
There is currently exactly one study looking at the effect of ketosis on schizophrenia, in Finland, and it keeps getting delayed.
When a cells glucose metabolism is interfered with by inflammatory signals, ketone metabolism is not affected apparently. Plaques are a downstream effect of metabolic dysfunction, not the cause.
Doctor Mary Newport has been sounding the alarm for years after witnessing the remission of her husbands Alzheimer’s following administration of ketogenic foods and nobody is listening to her [2].
Doctor Robert Naviaux at UC San Diego is provoking astounding recoveries in children with autism with a drug that is thought to interfere with immunological signaling [3]. If you have chronic fatigue syndrome, pay close attention to this.
In a bizarre plot twist, people who eat nothing but beef are experiencing the most miraculous recoveries from autoimmune problems that I have seen so far in becoming preoccupied with this general area of research [4][5]. It appears that ketone bodies are somewhat anti-inflammatory [6] but their main benefit is providing fuel that can power cells that are being shut down by inflammatory signals, whereas the carnivore diet seems to deactivate inflammation that is currently underway for many people.
This is 100% a medical revolution that is still in the pipes. The work being done in this area of brain inflammation and inflammation in general will rock the medical establishment, cure thousands of diseases seemingly overnight and turn a burning light onto the cruel and sordid apathy that has infected western medicine in the last 80 years.
Total layman here and know almost nothing about biology. But I'm skeptical of this comment mainly because your sources are youtube videos. Which of course doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but I wanted to go over some of the people behind these. Some of them (e.g. Dr. Steve Phinney) seem like area experts, some I wasn't able to verify credentials of (e.g. Dr. Mary Newport) and some seem to have controversial (and possibly fringe?) opinions regarding nutritional science (i.e. Jordan Peterson, who is a psychologist not a medical expert).
So may I please ask experts chime in here, how reliable information in this comment? What are some papers one can read on this issue? [1]
[1] Except obviously OP. But OP is from 2016, and if this is understood, I expect there to be more papers on this? Also the relationship between parent comment and OP paper isn't clear to me, so maybe an expert can explain whether the parallel is justifiable.
The science is not all sorted out and I can't find anything that's a nice succinct summary, but locally grown, grass-fed beef is very likely much better for the environment than the way beef is typically produced these days. Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster.
> Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster.
I disagree. A giant environmental disaster is inherent in man's livestock addiction -- even if you disregard the unsustainable emissions that come with it:
> Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories […] If everyone were to adopt the average diet of the United States, we would need to convert all of our [global] habitable land to agriculture, and we’d still be 38 percent short.
One of my all time favorite books is called "How to lie with statistics." Your source in no way rebuts my comment.
First, one of the reasons humans consume beef (as well as certain other kinds of meat) is that cows can convert grass to protein, something humans cannot do. So in savannas, eating animals that convert the grass to protein is one of the ways humans make life work at all.
Second, much of the world's beef supply is not grass fed. It is corn fed.
This gets done in part because it makes the beef fattier and thus makes it more profitable. It also makes it less healthy to eat and much more land intensive and wastes the thing that historically made cows valuable to humans.
In a scenario where we raise products like corn -- that the human body can already use for its protein content -- and feed it to cattle to produce beef, yes, that's hugely, hugely wasteful. It's also problematic that we ship so much beef long distances because of the energy costs involved.
If you work on moving towards grass fed beef and local consumption, you begin to dramatically reduce the resources involved in consuming beef.
Additionally, I am not advocating for the entire world to move to a 100 percent beef diet. That's crazy talk on the face of it.
Most religions advocate for a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet. Religion tends to contain historic wisdom concerning what works well for humans based on firsthand observation.
But there is plenty of room for the occasional human "carnivore" as well as for some people continuing to eat beef regularly. We don't need to vilify the consumption of meat in order to pursue environmental goals.
If eating beef helps eliminate health issues in some people, then letting those people eat beef is likely to be less resource intensive than insisting they eat a vegetarian diet and take a boatload of drugs.
This is a problem space I've thought about a whole lot. I have a serious medical condition that I control with diet and lifestyle. I wanted to be vegetarian and I tend to eat less meat most of the time than most Americans, but I also sometimes eat beef for medicinal purposes and I eat bacon somewhat regularly because bacon fat is one of the fats I tolerate well. My body misprocesses fats and there is a somewhat long list of plant oils I actively avoid.
I am supposed to be on thousands of dollars of drugs every month even when I'm not actively sick, just as "maintenance," and more when I'm actually sick. If the dollar value of the drugs I'm supposed to be taking is any measure at all of their environmental impact, then eating some meat is vastly less environmental burden than the drugs I am supposed to be on.
No one but you is saying "We should all just eat like carnivores" and you said it sarcastically. That extremist scenario is nothing anyone is genuinely advocating for.
I am all for making it easier and "cooler" for most Americans to eat less meat on average than they currently do. I am also for letting a small number of weirdos peaceably coexist with the rest of us who choose to eat nothing but meat because they find it beneficial to stubborn health issues that doctors don't know how to fix.
The way you lower our aggregate carbon footprint with regards to diet is you make it easier to find good vegetarian options. I don't eat hamburgers. Finding some source of protein at a fast food joint that isn't a fucking hamburger can be challenging.
Fortunately, affordable and convenient vegetarian options are somewhat easier for me to find than they used to be, such as vegetarian pizza and bean burritos. So my life works better than it used to because it's so much easier than it used to be to find something cheap and readily available wherever I go that isn't a fucking hamburger.
Hamburgers tend to be pretty goddamned disgusting, in part because we typically use the lowest quality beef to make them on the theory that we can just grind it up and turn it into a p...
It would be fair to point out that a lot of land suitable for grazing is unusable for producing wheat or other staple products. Grass grows almost anywhere, including places too rocky, uneven etc. for mechanisation to move over. But beasts can walk where machines won't be able to.
There is a reason why transhumance (moving cattle to high places for the summer to eat mountain grass and grow fat on it) has been practised since before civilization. Ötzi, the famous dead from the Tyrolean glacier, was probably a transhumanc-practicing pastoralist, 4000 years ago.
That's true, but you certainly can't feed 7 billion people on an all-beef diet from locally grown, grass-fed beef.
With some simple math, assuming people could eat 500g of meat a day, each person would eat an entire adult cow every ~3 years. So you would need a population of ~2.5 billion cows every year to support this - and that's assuming that there is no waste, that we could consume the entire weight of an adult cow (including bones), and that 500g of meat per day is enough.
No one in their right mind anywhere in the universe would, in all seriousness, actually advocate for all humans everywhere to eat an all beef diet. That's so ridiculous on the face of it I didn't feel I needed to say that.
There has to be a word for this kind of nit-picking. It's usually done by way of extrapolating to the limit as a counter-example, as if there is anything that is perfectly good or bad. I guess faulty generalization? I've certainly been guilty of it in the past but I do try to catch myself and talk more about where tradeoffs intersect or how one might extrapolate.
In this case we're not in a position to adjust our biology, so maybe lab-grown meat has more benefit than to sate the ethics of those that would otherwise avoid it on the same grounds.
Most people who advocate for a healthier diet actually intend for a vast majority of the population to adopt their recommendation - vegetarians and vegans and people who recommend the food pyramid or the balanced plate and so on intend for, ideally, the entire population to follow this recommendation.
So if someone comes and recommends an all-meat diet as being healthier for almost everyone than the current plant+meat based diet; and someone else points out that it would be an environmental disaster; and you talk about how local farming can mean that meat eating is not necessarily that bad for the environment - then your argument is only relevant if it is still true when a significant proportion of the population follows this new diet. Hence my extrapolation to ~7B people following said recommendation.
To call a diet sustainable or unsustainable, it only makes sense to talk about its impact IF it caught on for a significant proportion of the population for whom it is recommended. There is no unsustainable diet if we're only thinking of a few people following it. I could recommend an all-Saffron diet and you could call it sustainable if only 10 people have to follow it.
So again, an all-meat diet, even if it were actually healthy , would be an unsustainable recommendation to make for the general population. It may well be a very good recommendation for people with specific conditions, and it could be made sustainable if those people were a tiny minority of the population. For the general population, the only possible diet that doesn't bleed the earth dry is one that is mostly vegetarian, with some amount of meat maybe once a week or even more rarely.
I think most people do this thing of wanting everyone to try it for two reasons:
1. Humans routinely make the mistake of thinking that what works for them will work for everyone.
2. The world is full of assholes who give people a really hard time for being the weirdo doing the weird thing, even if it isn't hurting anyone at all, so people want everyone to do it to try to defend against the negative consequences of being the weirdo that people will give hell to for simply being weird.
And yet even vegetarians can't all get on the same page, which is part of why we even have the world vegan to distinguish some subset of extremists from the rest of them. Similarly, there are myriad sects of Christianity because even people who all agree that they believe in Jesus Christ can't get on the same page about a lot of things and Islam is an extreme example of that: Just as Christianity grew out of Judaism yet it seen as distinct from being Jewish, Islam grew out of Christianity.
A man who grew up Muslim told me Jesus Christ is one of the major saints of Islam. It does not entirely eschew the ideas of the Christian Bible, it just believes in and celebrates a more recent prophet, the Prophet Muhammad.
Muhammad ...was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet, sent to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets.
I have zero fear that all of humanity or even the majority of humanity will start consuming an entirely beef-based diet any time soon. I think it is high time we got over our delusions that all humans everywhere will ever be on the same page at the same time on any given topic and embrace the fact that people eat different, people express spiritual beliefs differently and so forth and it's actually okay and for the best to let some people have their extremist diet without treating them terribly for finding something that works for them and without acting like that needs to become the new norm for everyone else as well.
I’m still new to it but the concept is fascinating. Advocates point out that most plants are inedible while most animals are edible. Also, all of the nutrients required by the human body are present in animals, if you eat their organs. There is a small amount of vitamin c in animal meats, but it turns out you only need large amounts of vitamin c if you are metabolizing mostly carbohydrates. Compare this to the heavy supplementation required on a vegan diet, it seems a lot more likely that our bodies are designed to eat animals. There are massive holes in the studies that connect meat with colon cancer and other diseases — it turns out there isn’t a single randomized, controlled study that looks at that.
Jordan Peterson and his daughter don’t need to be experts in order to offer their anecdotes. Instead of relying on experts, who universally reject everything I’ve said, crack open a biochemistry textbook. But be careful, the most popular biochemistry textbook in the United States, the latest edition from 2017, states plainly that a ketogenic diet always leads to diabetic ketoacidodis. This is false, thousands of people have been in ketosis for months to years at a time without developing diabetic ketoacidosis.
If the textbooks that the doctors read don’t get all the details right then how are you supposed to trust doctors to get the details right?
And why should you trust them when they have nothing at stake? Meanwhile your life is at stake. Guess who is going to sweat all the details and consider every possibility, doctor or patient? Here’s a clue, when is the last time a doctor cracked open a textbook for your sake?
I had schizophrenia and the doctors told me I was peckish. They didn’t listen to me. And they certainly didn’t listen to me when I told them ketosis was curing my symptoms. Just wait until it’s your turn to have a medical problem that the doctors don’t believe is real. Then you’ll look back on this comment very differently.
I forgot to mention, the links are for YouTube because more people prefer that. You can find the relevant papers in their descriptions or by googling the relevant names.
> I had schizophrenia and the doctors told me I was peckish. They didn’t listen to me. And they certainly didn’t listen to me when I told them ketosis was curing my symptoms. Just wait until it’s your turn to have a medical problem that the doctors don’t believe is real. Then you’ll look back on this comment very differently.
Ok but how do you know your anecdote is merely coincidental? How do you know there is a strong causation without data?
When it's your own body, it's fairly easy to gather a lot of data.* Most people eat multiple times per day. If you are on the diet and symptom free and then off the diet and your symptoms come back, it gets to pretty quickly be hard to pretend this is merely "wild coincidence."
Yes, you need more rigorous documentation to get it into the medical literature and prescribed by doctors and yadda. But experimenting on yourself? It's totally possible to draw a firm and reasonable conclusion that "X diet is helpful for managing my symptoms and making my life more functional."
If it's subtle or really complicated, a journal and making one and only one change at a time are enormously helpful "best practices" for self experimentation.
But for the assertion here that "ketogenic diet helps with schizophrenia," neither a ketogenic diet nor schizophrenia are subtle things.
And that last tip of separate things by X hours? That's actually a generally useful thing that applies to a number of things.
Calcium and iron interfere with each other, which is likely why a kosher diet has edicts against consuming beef and (I think) cheese/milk products together in the same diet. I try to separate them by at least 30 minutes, especially if I am specifically trying to treat anemia or a need for calcium. (But I generally try to separate them because consuming them together amounts to wasting the nutritional resources they represent.)
Zithromax (plus related drugs, I think) and magnesium are supposed to be consumed separately. They use the same attachment sites on a cell and actively interfere with each other's absorption. So consuming them together means you don't get the magnesium you need and you are undermining the effectiveness of the drug you are on.
In the opposite direction, some things need to be consumed together for best effect. This is the principle advocated for in the book Diet for a Small Planet that promotes protein complementarity as a means for vegetarians to get enough protein.
In later writing, she says she regrets making it sound so challenging. Most historically vegetarian ethnic diets already use ingredients in the appropriate ratios, so many traditional dishes already fit the model she advocates for.
The book also has a few really excellent recipes in it, so it's worth having even if you skip the first half of the book which is a political work outlining how beef contributes to civil war and starvation globally and proving that all countries, even poor countries, can feed their people on traditional locally sourced diets. What we can't do is sell imported beef to peasants and expect them to be able to afford it as a staple and a lot of starvation is due to war (often civil war) cutting people off from food access.
It's more complicated than that and if you want a stronger argument for promoting vegetarianism as the practical choice for reducing some of the problems in this world, it's got some excellent information in it, better than a lot of the BS scare tactics and high-handed moralizing that is all too common. But you can just flip to the back of the book and look up Complementary Pie (a bean and rice quiche dish) or Mjeddra and happily go to town cooking.
Watch the first video cited in my comment. I find it to be more convincing than reading the paper. It’s a doctor at Harvard who has witnessed the remission of very serious textbook schizophrenia after administration of a ketogenic diet. If you can trust anyone’s judgement, you can trust his. He swears by it. He also wrote an article in psychology today about it.
The ketogenic diet has many side effects and it can be very harsh. Because of this, I found myself going on and off of it frequently in the beginning. My psychotic symptoms, just as described by that doctor, came and went in perfect correlation with whether or not I was in ketosis. I would wake up in the middle of the night multiple times, getting just one or two hours of sleep. This is a textbook aspect of psychotic disorders. Then when I was in ketosis I would get a full nights sleep like a baby. It could not have been the placebo affect. There was nothing else that correlated with the changes in my symptoms. There was no ambiguity, it was extremely obvious.
Putting all of that together, I think it’s quite convincing.
I absolutely agree that advocating for yourself as a patient is important and that you are the best guardian of your own interests .. but I also know that one symptom of schizophrenia is strongly held delusional beliefs.
Peterson had been talking about the difficulties of benzo addiction and the epidemic of addicts in the US before he got ill. He was aware of the risks and his behaviour shows us it is possible to get off benzos with a trip through hell and specialist treatment.
The peterson formula is to talk about a social problem empathically and with some expertise. Then he goes through the problem personally and models behaviour. Lastly he lectures people on what should be done. It's good at making people roar with outrage sometimes, but its mostly notmal teacher stuff turned up to 11.
Ketogenic diet as something beneficial for certain disorders -- including brain disorders, like epilepsy -- is extremely well established science and readily googled up:
I've also heard that some people experience "miracle cures" eating an all beef diet. Or a vegetarian diet. Or a vegan diet. Or a ketogenic diet. Or from fasting.
The gut biome is barely understood and 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in the body can be found in the gut. So it shouldn't exactly shock people that messing with diet can have dramatic health effects.
The problem is we aren't at a point of being able to reliably say which weirdo diet to apply to which conditions in some kind of completely reliable fashion and our understanding of why and how those things help is in its infancy.
(I am not a doctor. I don't play one TV. Verifying that what the GP is saying is not straight up crazy talk is not hard at all, though the comment is a hair overenthusiastic as if this is absolutely some kind of solved problem when it probably isn't.)
I think you're right on the money here. We just don't understand anything like a direct cause and effect between all the variables of personal gut biomes and genetics that create the metabolome.
My n=1 experience has been that a fasting-mimicking diet where I emphasize low protein (especially BCAAs) for several days functions as a great reset after I refeed. I think if nothing else people may benefit from "jiggling the handle" metabolic fixes from temporary diet alterations, and various diets may push the microbiome, metabolism, and immune system to a more beneficial state, but that will look different for each person. I also think that starving out various gut bugs of certain nutrients like starches, protein, (yes, we know fat and carbs can be bad in excess. But too much protein isn't often talked about!) sugars, etc. will exert selective pressure on them. The ones that can cooperate with the body will gain over the ones that just extract easy nutrients. And of course, many things like antibiotics just blow away the whole ecology, like burning down a rainforest. It takes a long time to recover.
I like to think of diet as a supply chain: if there's an excess of something, it's going to take cellular work to use it or put it somewhere else for later (e.g. fat, waste). If there's an overabundance of building blocks, the body will not be pushed to scavenge for those from old, broken down cell materials and they'll pile up. So changing the inputs up can give some pathways time to catch up. Fasting in general can also function in that way. The only problem is that it's kind of miserable to do, just like exercise.
I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of these cases were different forms of GLUT1 deficiency, or similar, which have shown improvement with a ketogenic diets.
It's not just mental health that the ketone diet could contribute to, but other aspects of immunity as well. A recent paper showed that a normally-dormant subset of T-cells was activated during ketosis, and that this led to protection of mice from the influenza virus:
Ketogenic diet activates protective γδ T cell responses against influenza virus infection.
Thus, the system not only allows for recirculation of bodily fluid, but it also provides a means for the immune system to sift through material from around the body in order to scan for infection. Without lymphatics, fluid would build up in body tissues, and there would be no way to alert the adaptive immune system to invading pathogens.
Something medical texts tend to not spell out:
Lymph is more or less blood, minus certain blood parts (like red blood cells). And when it gets into the tissues it gets called interstitial fluid.
This is all the same fluid circulating through the body, with different elements added or removed in different contexts. It's really quite elegant and you can think of it sort of like the water cycle. (https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle-kids-adv.html)
Interstitial fluid would be sort of like groundwater. And like groundwater, it gets into the tissues via seepage.
The circulatory system would be kind of like rivers and streams.
So part of this fluid cycle is controlled by the pump action of the heart. When it is in your blood vessels (and I think also when it is in the lymphatic system), the heart pumps it, driving the circulation.
When it is out in the tissues, it is beyond the reach of the heart. And this is where things get really fascinating.
It is driven back to the circulatory system via two different methods, depending on where it is. The brain has a separate system from the rest of the body.
In the brain, the glymphatic system flushes fluids from the tissues while you sleep. This is a primary function of sleep and flushing these fluids out is how the body "takes out the trash," which is likely why sleep deprivation is increasingly shown as associated with both the build-up of certain proteins in the brain and, ultimately, certain brain disorders.
In other tissues, muscle action drives the fluid back to the circulatory system. (Remember, the heart is just a big muscle. So this makes perfect sense.) So exercise dramatically increases the rate at which interstitial fluid gets returned to the circulatory system.
This means that one of the functions of exercise is "taking out the trash." And this is likely a huge and overlooked factor in why exercise is so beneficial to your health.
Different sources cite different rates, but exercise may increase the outflow by as much as eight times the normal speed of outflow via seepage. It's really a big difference.
If you have any health issues, understanding this human internal "water cycle" is something I highly recommend as enormously helpful. I sometimes take a walk to help myself feel better and I know that at least part of why that sometimes helps is it clears waste products from my tissues by pumping up the volume -- literally -- on the body taking out the trash.
> sift through material from around the body in order to scan for infection. Without lymphatics, fluid would build up in body tissues, and there would be no way to alert the adaptive immune system to invading pathogens
sift/scan/alert/invade
I always find it interesting how much agency we assign these systems when we describe them. Listen to some of the descriptions of our genetic machinery, you’ll hear the same thing. I understand much of it is to help the audience understand, but even when you dive deep into a topic it doesn’t seem to go away entirely.
We routinely use terms like "dependency injection" for programming, "drop the beat" for music, "oscillating" for a set of political views and how they develop throuh time, or even "transcribing" for DNA-related activities in the cell, if you want a biological one. None of those have to do with apes or their everyday lives. Or try explaining "political correctness" to an ape...
We are perfectly fine abstracting high-order things that have nothing to do with apes, and using those terms and abstractions IF they are useful. We are also perfectly fine to not bother with it if existing terms offer the best possible utility.
So no, our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape.
I'm not sure where this fascination with undermining the great intellectual feats human brains are capable of is coming from?
> our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape.
> great intellectual feats
I think it is, exactly, a feat of the imagination to arrive an an explanation which does not require this premise.
But it is not our default presumption. Hence 100,000 years of superstition, and 500 years of rare scientific moments.
Concepts seeming abstract, is in some sense, a bit of an illusion. Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor. They succeed in "abstracting" from our bodies, sure, by metaphor. But the genealogy of that metaphor is the psychomotor system of an ape.
Consider your words: injection, drop, beat, oscillate... these are about how our bodies behave in (with, towards) our environment; and become "abstracted".
I think there is something quite fundamentally apeish when we think of a song dropping a beat, in the sense that our relatedness to the song is actually facilitated by an apeish psychomotor state of "dropping something".
Yes, we can reduce our engagement with some phenomenon to a purely cognitive model (pieces and their relations); but that is very hard, and typically is only useful is narrowly solving known problems.
Innovation (, creativity, etc.), including the scientific, relies quite heavily on our being able to impart to alien things some intuitive apishness which we then, at best, abstract away.
Many of course cannot perform this final abstraction. Which is why we speak of "The Economy" and other such apelike characters of the imagination.
If you turn your argument around, almost every example can be used to support a different hypothesis:
our terms and thinking is based on abstraction, a certain feat of processing information. Other earlier Great Apes and even other animals are simply less able to implement this abstraction, and because of this they only use the abstraction for computation of their simple lives like motor skills or "psychomotor states". Since we have more brainpower, we are able to implement a higher percentage of abstractability.
Thus, the core aspect is the program of "abstractability" (or it would be more common to use the word consciousness or awareness). We implement it to a higher degree than other apes, but since we both implement parts of it, of course we are going to share some aspects of it in our lives.
> Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor
Even this seems much more accurate to view the other way around: both psychomotor skills and concepts require computation and abstractability. Concepts are always based on abstraction. But psychomotor skills are also based on abstraction.
And again, what does "political correctness" have to do with a psychomotor engine of an ape that can jump between trees, hold a balance and throw things at a distance? You would need to use some serious imagination to convince people that the most occam's razored hypothesis of that concept is based primarily(!) on mechanical skills?
But I guess hey, we won't know for sure until we make AGI so who knows ;)
In a sense both views are correct. Our psychomotor states instantiate the abstraction which are drawn from them (or else, why abstract?).
eg., there is a level of abstraction at which an ape "alerting" another ape is the same as an chemical "alerting" a cell
My point is that these things are only equivalent to these abstractions in a very narrow kind of activity (cognition).
A concept in the brain-body of an ape is a means for coordinating itself with respect to its environment: coordinating its eye, its hand, and latterly, its mind (, emotions, thought patterns, etc.). (NB. political correctness is here just a regulation on how we socially coordinate).
That's just what we use concepts for.
They also play a purely cognitive role in the sense that "circle" is both a guide to the motion of my hand in drawing a circle, and also a "Form" to which cognition can be purely and abstractly directed (ie., a shape with various properties...).
But this cognitive role is derivative of their non-cognitive origins in, quite literally, structuring the meat of our bodies. It is this structuring process which is how we "conceptualise" the world.
A dog is replete with many concepts; it is the dumb cognitive illusion of apes lacking self-awareness to think their linguistic cognition is where "concepts" lie. This is a cognitive shadow of how every animal navigates its environment.
Your "AGI" remark indicates to me that you may take this cognitive view. I think this is the consequence of a mathematical discipline (computer science) being "let into the room" -- it should be thrown back out.
Mathematics hasn't much to say about intelligence. The dumb walnut we call a frontal lobe possesses no models of how it actually works, and only the shadow of concepts it calls "abstractions". It is a delusional Cartesian place with little to offer self-understanding.
Everything important for the development of intelligence, etc. will come from the non-cognitive (, bodily) aspects of mental function which will require building animals. Cognitive ai systems cannot conceptualise, they only automate the walnut.
You might have some interesting ideas but I am having a hard time following them to see a point you are trying to make.
Also you constant usage of the word "dumb" or "delusional" confuses, it looks like you apply some personal judgements onto parts of the discussion where it has no reasonable place to be.
So far it seems that you are trying to make the point "This is a cognitive shadow of how every animal navigates its environment.". This interpretation seems to me like an attempt by you to fit the data into this non-fitting notion that everything is based on psychomotor processing, because your mind is in love with this idea. And it's a beautiful idea, I agree. But I don't think it's the most truthful one in this space.
> (NB. political correctness is here just a regulation on how we socially coordinate).
The question was, how specifically is it rooted in motor cortex or psychomotor functions? To explain that you will likely have to widen the definition of "psychomotor" to such an extent that it would lose all its useful meaning. Which is exactly one of the signs, for me personally, that your theory is only making very limited sense with regards to everything we know about brains and minds and behavior of consciousness. That it's a beautiful theory that unfortunately too thin to fit the real world in it.
You touched on an interesting thing regarding AGI. In the purely practical sense, I see that a lot of people have taken this apparent rule(or a "universal truth") of making an AGI that says "a mind requires a body to even function or be able to be aware"-thing. People think it means actual bodies. In reality they can very likely be implemented as virtual bodies or just address spaces that can interact with their environment in an adressable way. Thus, a "body" is just a part of the AGI, a computation structured in a certain way to make sure the rest of it works properly. Like a generator in a GAN network.
In very simple terms, the machines' bodies can be just avatars in some video game, it would be enough to satisfy the requirement of the aforementioned rule, if game connects all the inputs in the correct way.
With "dumb" i wish to debase and defuse the pretentions of the intellect.
And I dont mean your intellect. I mean the thing we call "reasoning" towards which we can draw our awareness.
This is in some profound way, quite dumb. It seems smart for all sorts of reasons: in particular, it is furnished with concepts that have taken millions of years of cultural evolution to develop.
An ape, such as us, absent this cultural context would seem precisely as dumb as it really is: very dumb indeed.
We misattribute our reasoning with these concepts for their inherent intelligence. This intelligence, which we might call conceptualization, is not a congitive process. The real intelligence is animal intelligence, it's the bedrock of our cognition which is always outside of it; and cannot be observed from within.
> Thus, a "body" is just a part of the AGI,
Not at all. A body is just the place the world changes. It's the thing in direct causal contact with the world; whose effect is a kind of painful restructuring. eg., the bike rider learns to ride a bike not by "evolving his cognition", but by the structure of his muscles changing.
(Indeed, by his eye swirling differently in its socket).
It is this restructuring which is an essential aspect of conceptualization (whose effect we see in consciousness).
I strongly suspect that this kind of restructuring is necessarily organic: it is growing differently given the impact of the world. I am open to other systems which can evolve their physical structure in this way, certainly, i do not think sand qualifies.
re Political Correctness
Correctness = straightness, fit
Fit = environment-body "matching"
Political = other bodies wanting from me, my wanting from them
political correctness = criteria for the fit of my body with other bodies as we want from each other
In being a criteria it is a "concept about a concept" and therefore its heavily on the psych-side of psychomotor, ie., it is a kind of regulating mechanism on reasoning (specifically, reasoning about my fit in an environment of people).
> This intelligence, which we might call conceptualization, is not a cognitive process. The real intelligence is animal intelligence
I can only partially see what you mean exactly by "cognitive" or "animal" (with regards to intelligence), it doesn't seem like you use the words in their precisely common meanings.
I also never claimed that intelligence is in its base cognitive.
The original claim was that all of the intelligence is based in "ape-ish" motor skills, that it's basically their motor cortex that is just a little more advanced that gives rise to all the behaviors that we call intelligent.
This idea would basically mean that a task such as writing and publicizing a great book such as Shakespeare's Hamlet (including accumulating all the life experience required to produce it, and make it being so good) - is "basically a motor skills task".
This just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
While it does of course require motor skills like taking a pen and putting the words to the paper, it requires a lot more other complex skills as well that have so little to do with motor intelligence that I don't see any honest reason to put them in the same category.
Thus, my comment that your theory requires expanding the concept of "psychomotor" to such extent that the word loses all of its useful meaning.
> political correctness = criteria for the fit of my body with other bodies as we want from each other
It's just not a good explanation, it loses 90% of all of the intricacies. Try using it to explain it to someone who doesn't know what political correctness is- it doesn't do the job.
I just mean any system of inference over propositions, or anything which looks like it .
We are told our frontal lobe is the most unique aspect of our brains: not true! Our motor cortex is.
We are the only animal which learns almost all skills after-birth, via our significant and adaptable motor cortex.
> Try using it to explain it to someone
Yes, concepts need to be converted/reduced to propositional (and then linguistic) forms in order to be cognized and then to be communicated.
You can't really acquire a novel basic concept via communication, but you can acquire metaconcepts (like criteria for things) which are just combinations of basic concepts you have already learnt (ie., motor concepts).
I'm not saying that there is no propositional content to concepts, ie., that they fail in being instances of some abstract Form.
I am saying, rather, what they are; and how we acquire them.
I have significant doubts that the world can be conceptualised by mere cognition, ie., that the contents of an inferential process can be arrived at via an inferential process.
I think this is an illusion: and it is apparent with machines. There is no mechanism for their understanding what they are processing.
We aren't aware, i'd say, at all, of how we actually conceptualise the world. All we're aware of, as far as our intelligence goes, is inference(/cognition). (Though many greats have attributed mysterious immediate insights to the divine: rather it is just their actual intelligence).
I think that sets us up for a highly misleading paradigm of intelligence (cf. Cartesian dualism, etc. )
Is there any problem with it? That's just how the language works. In many of the contexts and on many of the logical levels the body does indeed have agency: the linguistic expression embedded in agency terms and all related expressions are just the most accurate and compressed and useful descriptions of phenomena we are studying. They have all the useful connotations and sub-meanings that help the process of expanding knowledge forward. All I see in those terms is best possible ways to explain the actual found relationships between parts of the immune system, instead of some description of meaningless facts or chemical reactions.
If you insist on being on some imaginary laplace daemon lowest level of interaction with the world, maybe theoretically you could escape the agency component (but even then you have problems with questions like "what makes all particles interact with each other at all"), but nobody lives on that level anyway. Just because in some distant theory it is possible to reduce everything to interaction of some miriad of particles with exactly known states and rules, it doesn't mean that you (or other human or society) can effictively and practically compute anything of value on that level of abstraction. Nobody interacts with life on that level. No useful discussions are had on that level in most of the scientific pursuits.
This is a matter of using the language effectively, not a matter of superstition. I don't see scientists cargo culting the immune system or organs of the body.
Think about it like this: if I'm programming in Python, I'm going to think about variables, scopes and closures, not about high and low voltage levels or number of silicon atoms in my processor. A closure is not an illusion just because there is no transistor that specifically makes it work, a closure is still the most useful term on it's own level of abstraction.
(Recommended reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter)
This reminds me of a point my physiology instructor worked hard to hammer home in the senior year of my bio degree: do not assign agency to unconscious processes. I forget the rationale for this but find myself reflecting on it often.
There is an essay[1] from last month, which argues for assigning agency to biological systems and not just for illustration for the general public but for research.
For me, a layman, it had some convincing arguments, at least in abstract.
I find this semantic critique interesting but I have to disagree with you. Underlying the critique is a hidden arrogance.
Agency language is strongly tied to our ability to understand the mechanism by which phenomena occurred. For example, take 4 different chess bots:
1. The bot moves in a 100% predictable way to you (say it checks each piece in order to find a possible move, the first it finds that's legal it moves)
2. The bot moves randomly
3. The bot uses minimax + library (traditional chess engine)
4. The bot is running via reinforcement learning
When we discuss the moves the bot made, in which of the above scenarios would we say it 'chose' to move in a particular way? These different examples call out different forms of 'agency'. In cases 3 and 4 (maybe even 2?) most people - including the creator of the bot - would say the bot chose to move pawn to c4.
As effect gets sufficiently far removed from cause it's natural to ascribe agency to the mechanism. In a very real sense in case 4 the creator designed the bot but has no idea why it moves in certain ways - they can analyze the weights of course - but why did it 'choose' those weights over others during training? If we knew that we wouldn't need the costly training in the first place.
So back to your distaste of agency language when describing a phenomena. We're talking about _incredibly_ complex machinery. There is no guarantee that these mechanisms are a 1. or even a 3. type bot. They could be a 5. or 6. (whatever that even means). Thus even if we knew _everything_ about the last order mechanism, we would still ascribe agency to the effect.
If you are too impaired to exercise, massage, warm salt-water baths and eating/drinking the right things to help flush wastes from the system can help compensate for the lack of exercise.
If you have problems with fluids gathering in your lymph nodes (which is a medical condition that often arises from e.g. having some lymph nodes removed due to tumors, cancer, etc), your doctor will prescribe you regular lymph massages, to do exactly that. It's a specialized field and not the usual muscle-focused massage, but a physical therapist might train for that as an extra.
So why doesn't the brain do this sort of housekeeping all the time? Nedergaard thinks it's because cleaning takes a lot of energy. "It's probably not possible for the brain to both clean itself and at the same time [be] aware of the surroundings and talk and move and so on," she says.
Is it known what mechanism triggers the cleaning process at the cellular level? Is there some molecule/hormone that says "I'm asleep now, go clean up the mess", and does it happen in the entire brain simultaneously or is it done in phases in different parts of the brain?
It seems to be driven by norepinephrine levels,[1] which seems like it it might have some interesting implications.
>Our analysis showed that norepinephrine also is a key regulator of glymphatic activity and that norepinephrine might be responsible for suppression of glymphatic during wakefulness.
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636982/
In some old Western movie -- as in The Wild West with cowboys -- there was a Samurai character who claimed to sleep while they marched somewhere.
I have no idea how to look up a citation supporting the idea that this was a real phenomenon, but I did find this article that I kind of skimmed and I don't think it says anything on the topic I want a citation for and additional googling gets me absolutely nothing of value:
Once, while in the military on a three day exercise with little/no sleep I fell asleep while running in formation (returning from an exercise). I woke up three hours later when the instructors drug us out of our tents.
I won't swear that I was "truly" asleep, but I have no memory of the last three miles of that run, nor of climbing into the fartsack.
> In the brain, the glymphatic system flushes fluids from the tissues while you sleep. This is a primary function of sleep and flushing these fluids out is how the body "takes out the trash," which is likely why sleep deprivation is increasingly shown as associated with both the build-up of certain proteins in the brain and, ultimately, certain brain disorders.
As someone who's severely sleep-deprived, can you please share more / share a source? Thanks in advance
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it makes sense considering some neurological disorders seem to be associate with immune dis/function
Methinkss that that'd be hard to not be reproducible.
It could happen that it weren't randomly distributed and that it occurs with a statistically higher frequency in the part of the planet where it was done.
But that is quite rare for organs.
On the other hand, the existence of the G-spot has been controversial for almost 40 years so reproducibility can't be taken for granted.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/nov/01/the-sol...
[0]: http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-2828
But it turns out we discover fairly major new things about the body fairly frequently.
2018 - did scientist really no know what 20% of the fluids in the body are?: "The ground-breaking discovery of the new organ meant that old mysteries could be solved. For instance, scientists always knew that 20 per cent of body fluids were missing in a total tally, in between blood, lymph, serum and other bodily fluids" https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-28/scientists-discover-n...
2020 - extra saliva glands inside our head no one knew about: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/you-may-have-new-org...
2 years ago I had a stressful life event. I became schizophrenic because of it. I accidentally discovered that ketosis cures the schizophrenia. It turns out a doctor at Harvard has been sounding the alarm about this and nobody is listening to him [1].
After researching these things somewhat deeply, it appears that almost all diseases that involve the death or inactivity of neurons (Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, etc) are sometimes caused by “inflammatory signals,” as I call them, which interfere with the metabolism of glucose. Note the way I worded that — there’s more than one way for those neurons to become deactivated. What we currently think of as being a single disease might be many diseases, many different types of pathology that ultimately lead to the silencing of the same general population of neurons and thereby causing the same symptoms. The point is that the metabolic angle doesn’t explain all neural pathology, so keep that in mind when ketosis is found to only put 20% of schizophrenics into remission in the next five years.
There is currently exactly one study looking at the effect of ketosis on schizophrenia, in Finland, and it keeps getting delayed.
When a cells glucose metabolism is interfered with by inflammatory signals, ketone metabolism is not affected apparently. Plaques are a downstream effect of metabolic dysfunction, not the cause.
Doctor Mary Newport has been sounding the alarm for years after witnessing the remission of her husbands Alzheimer’s following administration of ketogenic foods and nobody is listening to her [2].
Doctor Robert Naviaux at UC San Diego is provoking astounding recoveries in children with autism with a drug that is thought to interfere with immunological signaling [3]. If you have chronic fatigue syndrome, pay close attention to this.
In a bizarre plot twist, people who eat nothing but beef are experiencing the most miraculous recoveries from autoimmune problems that I have seen so far in becoming preoccupied with this general area of research [4][5]. It appears that ketone bodies are somewhat anti-inflammatory [6] but their main benefit is providing fuel that can power cells that are being shut down by inflammatory signals, whereas the carnivore diet seems to deactivate inflammation that is currently underway for many people.
This is 100% a medical revolution that is still in the pipes. The work being done in this area of brain inflammation and inflammation in general will rock the medical establishment, cure thousands of diseases seemingly overnight and turn a burning light onto the cruel and sordid apathy that has infected western medicine in the last 80 years.
https://youtu.be/06e-PwhmSq8
[1] https://youtu.be/eQwRSuwRP9c
[2] https://youtu.be/Ux68qHr4CnI
[3] https://youtu.be/iWWF5nN7fUA
[4] https://youtu.be/N39o_DI5laI
[5] https://youtu.be/HLF29w6YqXs
[6] https://youtu.be/A5_R13Luit0
So may I please ask experts chime in here, how reliable information in this comment? What are some papers one can read on this issue? [1]
[1] Except obviously OP. But OP is from 2016, and if this is understood, I expect there to be more papers on this? Also the relationship between parent comment and OP paper isn't clear to me, so maybe an expert can explain whether the parallel is justifiable.
I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true!
Yeah, let's all do that and see how many degrees we can tickle out of this whole climate change thing by 2050.
I disagree. A giant environmental disaster is inherent in man's livestock addiction -- even if you disregard the unsustainable emissions that come with it:
> Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories […] If everyone were to adopt the average diet of the United States, we would need to convert all of our [global] habitable land to agriculture, and we’d still be 38 percent short.
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
First, one of the reasons humans consume beef (as well as certain other kinds of meat) is that cows can convert grass to protein, something humans cannot do. So in savannas, eating animals that convert the grass to protein is one of the ways humans make life work at all.
Second, much of the world's beef supply is not grass fed. It is corn fed.
This gets done in part because it makes the beef fattier and thus makes it more profitable. It also makes it less healthy to eat and much more land intensive and wastes the thing that historically made cows valuable to humans.
In a scenario where we raise products like corn -- that the human body can already use for its protein content -- and feed it to cattle to produce beef, yes, that's hugely, hugely wasteful. It's also problematic that we ship so much beef long distances because of the energy costs involved.
If you work on moving towards grass fed beef and local consumption, you begin to dramatically reduce the resources involved in consuming beef.
Additionally, I am not advocating for the entire world to move to a 100 percent beef diet. That's crazy talk on the face of it.
Most religions advocate for a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet. Religion tends to contain historic wisdom concerning what works well for humans based on firsthand observation.
But there is plenty of room for the occasional human "carnivore" as well as for some people continuing to eat beef regularly. We don't need to vilify the consumption of meat in order to pursue environmental goals.
If eating beef helps eliminate health issues in some people, then letting those people eat beef is likely to be less resource intensive than insisting they eat a vegetarian diet and take a boatload of drugs.
This is a problem space I've thought about a whole lot. I have a serious medical condition that I control with diet and lifestyle. I wanted to be vegetarian and I tend to eat less meat most of the time than most Americans, but I also sometimes eat beef for medicinal purposes and I eat bacon somewhat regularly because bacon fat is one of the fats I tolerate well. My body misprocesses fats and there is a somewhat long list of plant oils I actively avoid.
I am supposed to be on thousands of dollars of drugs every month even when I'm not actively sick, just as "maintenance," and more when I'm actually sick. If the dollar value of the drugs I'm supposed to be taking is any measure at all of their environmental impact, then eating some meat is vastly less environmental burden than the drugs I am supposed to be on.
No one but you is saying "We should all just eat like carnivores" and you said it sarcastically. That extremist scenario is nothing anyone is genuinely advocating for.
I am all for making it easier and "cooler" for most Americans to eat less meat on average than they currently do. I am also for letting a small number of weirdos peaceably coexist with the rest of us who choose to eat nothing but meat because they find it beneficial to stubborn health issues that doctors don't know how to fix.
The way you lower our aggregate carbon footprint with regards to diet is you make it easier to find good vegetarian options. I don't eat hamburgers. Finding some source of protein at a fast food joint that isn't a fucking hamburger can be challenging.
Fortunately, affordable and convenient vegetarian options are somewhat easier for me to find than they used to be, such as vegetarian pizza and bean burritos. So my life works better than it used to because it's so much easier than it used to be to find something cheap and readily available wherever I go that isn't a fucking hamburger.
Hamburgers tend to be pretty goddamned disgusting, in part because we typically use the lowest quality beef to make them on the theory that we can just grind it up and turn it into a p...
There is a reason why transhumance (moving cattle to high places for the summer to eat mountain grass and grow fat on it) has been practised since before civilization. Ötzi, the famous dead from the Tyrolean glacier, was probably a transhumanc-practicing pastoralist, 4000 years ago.
With some simple math, assuming people could eat 500g of meat a day, each person would eat an entire adult cow every ~3 years. So you would need a population of ~2.5 billion cows every year to support this - and that's assuming that there is no waste, that we could consume the entire weight of an adult cow (including bones), and that 500g of meat per day is enough.
In this case we're not in a position to adjust our biology, so maybe lab-grown meat has more benefit than to sate the ethics of those that would otherwise avoid it on the same grounds.
If there isn't a word or phrase for it, we should make one up.
So if someone comes and recommends an all-meat diet as being healthier for almost everyone than the current plant+meat based diet; and someone else points out that it would be an environmental disaster; and you talk about how local farming can mean that meat eating is not necessarily that bad for the environment - then your argument is only relevant if it is still true when a significant proportion of the population follows this new diet. Hence my extrapolation to ~7B people following said recommendation.
To call a diet sustainable or unsustainable, it only makes sense to talk about its impact IF it caught on for a significant proportion of the population for whom it is recommended. There is no unsustainable diet if we're only thinking of a few people following it. I could recommend an all-Saffron diet and you could call it sustainable if only 10 people have to follow it.
So again, an all-meat diet, even if it were actually healthy , would be an unsustainable recommendation to make for the general population. It may well be a very good recommendation for people with specific conditions, and it could be made sustainable if those people were a tiny minority of the population. For the general population, the only possible diet that doesn't bleed the earth dry is one that is mostly vegetarian, with some amount of meat maybe once a week or even more rarely.
1. Humans routinely make the mistake of thinking that what works for them will work for everyone.
2. The world is full of assholes who give people a really hard time for being the weirdo doing the weird thing, even if it isn't hurting anyone at all, so people want everyone to do it to try to defend against the negative consequences of being the weirdo that people will give hell to for simply being weird.
And yet even vegetarians can't all get on the same page, which is part of why we even have the world vegan to distinguish some subset of extremists from the rest of them. Similarly, there are myriad sects of Christianity because even people who all agree that they believe in Jesus Christ can't get on the same page about a lot of things and Islam is an extreme example of that: Just as Christianity grew out of Judaism yet it seen as distinct from being Jewish, Islam grew out of Christianity.
A man who grew up Muslim told me Jesus Christ is one of the major saints of Islam. It does not entirely eschew the ideas of the Christian Bible, it just believes in and celebrates a more recent prophet, the Prophet Muhammad.
Muhammad ...was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet, sent to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
I have zero fear that all of humanity or even the majority of humanity will start consuming an entirely beef-based diet any time soon. I think it is high time we got over our delusions that all humans everywhere will ever be on the same page at the same time on any given topic and embrace the fact that people eat different, people express spiritual beliefs differently and so forth and it's actually okay and for the best to let some people have their extremist diet without treating them terribly for finding something that works for them and without acting like that needs to become the new norm for everyone else as well.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/
I’m still new to it but the concept is fascinating. Advocates point out that most plants are inedible while most animals are edible. Also, all of the nutrients required by the human body are present in animals, if you eat their organs. There is a small amount of vitamin c in animal meats, but it turns out you only need large amounts of vitamin c if you are metabolizing mostly carbohydrates. Compare this to the heavy supplementation required on a vegan diet, it seems a lot more likely that our bodies are designed to eat animals. There are massive holes in the studies that connect meat with colon cancer and other diseases — it turns out there isn’t a single randomized, controlled study that looks at that.
If the textbooks that the doctors read don’t get all the details right then how are you supposed to trust doctors to get the details right?
And why should you trust them when they have nothing at stake? Meanwhile your life is at stake. Guess who is going to sweat all the details and consider every possibility, doctor or patient? Here’s a clue, when is the last time a doctor cracked open a textbook for your sake?
I had schizophrenia and the doctors told me I was peckish. They didn’t listen to me. And they certainly didn’t listen to me when I told them ketosis was curing my symptoms. Just wait until it’s your turn to have a medical problem that the doctors don’t believe is real. Then you’ll look back on this comment very differently.
I forgot to mention, the links are for YouTube because more people prefer that. You can find the relevant papers in their descriptions or by googling the relevant names.
Ok but how do you know your anecdote is merely coincidental? How do you know there is a strong causation without data?
Yes, you need more rigorous documentation to get it into the medical literature and prescribed by doctors and yadda. But experimenting on yourself? It's totally possible to draw a firm and reasonable conclusion that "X diet is helpful for managing my symptoms and making my life more functional."
* Observed data, not necessarily documented.
Spent years doing trial and error with medications and food. 1 change at a time to see how things affected me.
I get crap from everyone for doing this. Family, doctors, etc.
Results is I have a long sheet of medications and exact effects and drug interdictions.
Gotten to the point where I asked my doctor about an interaction of 2 drugs I was on. He was very dismissive, claiming not possible.
Asked pharmacist, who filed both of them. After a confused moment, she said yes, rare but seperate doses by 12 hours to be safe.
But for the assertion here that "ketogenic diet helps with schizophrenia," neither a ketogenic diet nor schizophrenia are subtle things.
And that last tip of separate things by X hours? That's actually a generally useful thing that applies to a number of things.
Calcium and iron interfere with each other, which is likely why a kosher diet has edicts against consuming beef and (I think) cheese/milk products together in the same diet. I try to separate them by at least 30 minutes, especially if I am specifically trying to treat anemia or a need for calcium. (But I generally try to separate them because consuming them together amounts to wasting the nutritional resources they represent.)
Zithromax (plus related drugs, I think) and magnesium are supposed to be consumed separately. They use the same attachment sites on a cell and actively interfere with each other's absorption. So consuming them together means you don't get the magnesium you need and you are undermining the effectiveness of the drug you are on.
In the opposite direction, some things need to be consumed together for best effect. This is the principle advocated for in the book Diet for a Small Planet that promotes protein complementarity as a means for vegetarians to get enough protein.
In later writing, she says she regrets making it sound so challenging. Most historically vegetarian ethnic diets already use ingredients in the appropriate ratios, so many traditional dishes already fit the model she advocates for.
The book also has a few really excellent recipes in it, so it's worth having even if you skip the first half of the book which is a political work outlining how beef contributes to civil war and starvation globally and proving that all countries, even poor countries, can feed their people on traditional locally sourced diets. What we can't do is sell imported beef to peasants and expect them to be able to afford it as a staple and a lot of starvation is due to war (often civil war) cutting people off from food access.
It's more complicated than that and if you want a stronger argument for promoting vegetarianism as the practical choice for reducing some of the problems in this world, it's got some excellent information in it, better than a lot of the BS scare tactics and high-handed moralizing that is all too common. But you can just flip to the back of the book and look up Complementary Pie (a bean and rice quiche dish) or Mjeddra and happily go to town cooking.
The ketogenic diet has many side effects and it can be very harsh. Because of this, I found myself going on and off of it frequently in the beginning. My psychotic symptoms, just as described by that doctor, came and went in perfect correlation with whether or not I was in ketosis. I would wake up in the middle of the night multiple times, getting just one or two hours of sleep. This is a textbook aspect of psychotic disorders. Then when I was in ketosis I would get a full nights sleep like a baby. It could not have been the placebo affect. There was nothing else that correlated with the changes in my symptoms. There was no ambiguity, it was extremely obvious.
Putting all of that together, I think it’s quite convincing.
I absolutely agree that advocating for yourself as a patient is important and that you are the best guardian of your own interests .. but I also know that one symptom of schizophrenia is strongly held delusional beliefs.
The peterson formula is to talk about a social problem empathically and with some expertise. Then he goes through the problem personally and models behaviour. Lastly he lectures people on what should be done. It's good at making people roar with outrage sometimes, but its mostly notmal teacher stuff turned up to 11.
https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps...
And here is a scientific paper specifically about schizophrenia and ketogenic diet:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30037619/
I've also heard that some people experience "miracle cures" eating an all beef diet. Or a vegetarian diet. Or a vegan diet. Or a ketogenic diet. Or from fasting.
The gut biome is barely understood and 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in the body can be found in the gut. So it shouldn't exactly shock people that messing with diet can have dramatic health effects.
The problem is we aren't at a point of being able to reliably say which weirdo diet to apply to which conditions in some kind of completely reliable fashion and our understanding of why and how those things help is in its infancy.
(I am not a doctor. I don't play one TV. Verifying that what the GP is saying is not straight up crazy talk is not hard at all, though the comment is a hair overenthusiastic as if this is absolutely some kind of solved problem when it probably isn't.)
My n=1 experience has been that a fasting-mimicking diet where I emphasize low protein (especially BCAAs) for several days functions as a great reset after I refeed. I think if nothing else people may benefit from "jiggling the handle" metabolic fixes from temporary diet alterations, and various diets may push the microbiome, metabolism, and immune system to a more beneficial state, but that will look different for each person. I also think that starving out various gut bugs of certain nutrients like starches, protein, (yes, we know fat and carbs can be bad in excess. But too much protein isn't often talked about!) sugars, etc. will exert selective pressure on them. The ones that can cooperate with the body will gain over the ones that just extract easy nutrients. And of course, many things like antibiotics just blow away the whole ecology, like burning down a rainforest. It takes a long time to recover.
I like to think of diet as a supply chain: if there's an excess of something, it's going to take cellular work to use it or put it somewhere else for later (e.g. fat, waste). If there's an overabundance of building blocks, the body will not be pushed to scavenge for those from old, broken down cell materials and they'll pile up. So changing the inputs up can give some pathways time to catch up. Fasting in general can also function in that way. The only problem is that it's kind of miserable to do, just like exercise.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23801573/
Brain fog is a common part of this.
Getting inflammation under control becomes your life.
Lots of successes (not all)
Autoimmune protocol Diet is meant for controlling inflammation.
It’s almost a Keto diet, but some Kinds carbs allowed, some things not allowed.
Overall your hives with personal experience and my own research.
Ketogenic diet activates protective γδ T cell responses against influenza virus infection.
https://immunology.sciencemag.org/content/4/41/eaav2026
Something medical texts tend to not spell out:
Lymph is more or less blood, minus certain blood parts (like red blood cells). And when it gets into the tissues it gets called interstitial fluid.
This is all the same fluid circulating through the body, with different elements added or removed in different contexts. It's really quite elegant and you can think of it sort of like the water cycle. (https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle-kids-adv.html)
Interstitial fluid would be sort of like groundwater. And like groundwater, it gets into the tissues via seepage.
The circulatory system would be kind of like rivers and streams.
So part of this fluid cycle is controlled by the pump action of the heart. When it is in your blood vessels (and I think also when it is in the lymphatic system), the heart pumps it, driving the circulation.
When it is out in the tissues, it is beyond the reach of the heart. And this is where things get really fascinating.
It is driven back to the circulatory system via two different methods, depending on where it is. The brain has a separate system from the rest of the body.
In the brain, the glymphatic system flushes fluids from the tissues while you sleep. This is a primary function of sleep and flushing these fluids out is how the body "takes out the trash," which is likely why sleep deprivation is increasingly shown as associated with both the build-up of certain proteins in the brain and, ultimately, certain brain disorders.
In other tissues, muscle action drives the fluid back to the circulatory system. (Remember, the heart is just a big muscle. So this makes perfect sense.) So exercise dramatically increases the rate at which interstitial fluid gets returned to the circulatory system.
This means that one of the functions of exercise is "taking out the trash." And this is likely a huge and overlooked factor in why exercise is so beneficial to your health.
Different sources cite different rates, but exercise may increase the outflow by as much as eight times the normal speed of outflow via seepage. It's really a big difference.
If you have any health issues, understanding this human internal "water cycle" is something I highly recommend as enormously helpful. I sometimes take a walk to help myself feel better and I know that at least part of why that sometimes helps is it clears waste products from my tissues by pumping up the volume -- literally -- on the body taking out the trash.
I think that's everything I wanted to say.
sift/scan/alert/invade
I always find it interesting how much agency we assign these systems when we describe them. Listen to some of the descriptions of our genetic machinery, you’ll hear the same thing. I understand much of it is to help the audience understand, but even when you dive deep into a topic it doesn’t seem to go away entirely.
It's very hard for us to find any other kind of explanation intuitive.
We are perfectly fine abstracting high-order things that have nothing to do with apes, and using those terms and abstractions IF they are useful. We are also perfectly fine to not bother with it if existing terms offer the best possible utility.
So no, our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape.
I'm not sure where this fascination with undermining the great intellectual feats human brains are capable of is coming from?
I think it is, exactly, a feat of the imagination to arrive an an explanation which does not require this premise.
But it is not our default presumption. Hence 100,000 years of superstition, and 500 years of rare scientific moments.
Concepts seeming abstract, is in some sense, a bit of an illusion. Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor. They succeed in "abstracting" from our bodies, sure, by metaphor. But the genealogy of that metaphor is the psychomotor system of an ape.
Consider your words: injection, drop, beat, oscillate... these are about how our bodies behave in (with, towards) our environment; and become "abstracted".
I think there is something quite fundamentally apeish when we think of a song dropping a beat, in the sense that our relatedness to the song is actually facilitated by an apeish psychomotor state of "dropping something".
Yes, we can reduce our engagement with some phenomenon to a purely cognitive model (pieces and their relations); but that is very hard, and typically is only useful is narrowly solving known problems.
Innovation (, creativity, etc.), including the scientific, relies quite heavily on our being able to impart to alien things some intuitive apishness which we then, at best, abstract away.
Many of course cannot perform this final abstraction. Which is why we speak of "The Economy" and other such apelike characters of the imagination.
our terms and thinking is based on abstraction, a certain feat of processing information. Other earlier Great Apes and even other animals are simply less able to implement this abstraction, and because of this they only use the abstraction for computation of their simple lives like motor skills or "psychomotor states". Since we have more brainpower, we are able to implement a higher percentage of abstractability.
Thus, the core aspect is the program of "abstractability" (or it would be more common to use the word consciousness or awareness). We implement it to a higher degree than other apes, but since we both implement parts of it, of course we are going to share some aspects of it in our lives.
> Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor
Even this seems much more accurate to view the other way around: both psychomotor skills and concepts require computation and abstractability. Concepts are always based on abstraction. But psychomotor skills are also based on abstraction.
And again, what does "political correctness" have to do with a psychomotor engine of an ape that can jump between trees, hold a balance and throw things at a distance? You would need to use some serious imagination to convince people that the most occam's razored hypothesis of that concept is based primarily(!) on mechanical skills?
But I guess hey, we won't know for sure until we make AGI so who knows ;)
eg., there is a level of abstraction at which an ape "alerting" another ape is the same as an chemical "alerting" a cell
My point is that these things are only equivalent to these abstractions in a very narrow kind of activity (cognition).
A concept in the brain-body of an ape is a means for coordinating itself with respect to its environment: coordinating its eye, its hand, and latterly, its mind (, emotions, thought patterns, etc.). (NB. political correctness is here just a regulation on how we socially coordinate).
That's just what we use concepts for.
They also play a purely cognitive role in the sense that "circle" is both a guide to the motion of my hand in drawing a circle, and also a "Form" to which cognition can be purely and abstractly directed (ie., a shape with various properties...).
But this cognitive role is derivative of their non-cognitive origins in, quite literally, structuring the meat of our bodies. It is this structuring process which is how we "conceptualise" the world.
A dog is replete with many concepts; it is the dumb cognitive illusion of apes lacking self-awareness to think their linguistic cognition is where "concepts" lie. This is a cognitive shadow of how every animal navigates its environment.
Your "AGI" remark indicates to me that you may take this cognitive view. I think this is the consequence of a mathematical discipline (computer science) being "let into the room" -- it should be thrown back out.
Mathematics hasn't much to say about intelligence. The dumb walnut we call a frontal lobe possesses no models of how it actually works, and only the shadow of concepts it calls "abstractions". It is a delusional Cartesian place with little to offer self-understanding.
Everything important for the development of intelligence, etc. will come from the non-cognitive (, bodily) aspects of mental function which will require building animals. Cognitive ai systems cannot conceptualise, they only automate the walnut.
Also you constant usage of the word "dumb" or "delusional" confuses, it looks like you apply some personal judgements onto parts of the discussion where it has no reasonable place to be.
So far it seems that you are trying to make the point "This is a cognitive shadow of how every animal navigates its environment.". This interpretation seems to me like an attempt by you to fit the data into this non-fitting notion that everything is based on psychomotor processing, because your mind is in love with this idea. And it's a beautiful idea, I agree. But I don't think it's the most truthful one in this space.
> (NB. political correctness is here just a regulation on how we socially coordinate).
The question was, how specifically is it rooted in motor cortex or psychomotor functions? To explain that you will likely have to widen the definition of "psychomotor" to such an extent that it would lose all its useful meaning. Which is exactly one of the signs, for me personally, that your theory is only making very limited sense with regards to everything we know about brains and minds and behavior of consciousness. That it's a beautiful theory that unfortunately too thin to fit the real world in it.
You touched on an interesting thing regarding AGI. In the purely practical sense, I see that a lot of people have taken this apparent rule(or a "universal truth") of making an AGI that says "a mind requires a body to even function or be able to be aware"-thing. People think it means actual bodies. In reality they can very likely be implemented as virtual bodies or just address spaces that can interact with their environment in an adressable way. Thus, a "body" is just a part of the AGI, a computation structured in a certain way to make sure the rest of it works properly. Like a generator in a GAN network.
In very simple terms, the machines' bodies can be just avatars in some video game, it would be enough to satisfy the requirement of the aforementioned rule, if game connects all the inputs in the correct way.
And I dont mean your intellect. I mean the thing we call "reasoning" towards which we can draw our awareness.
This is in some profound way, quite dumb. It seems smart for all sorts of reasons: in particular, it is furnished with concepts that have taken millions of years of cultural evolution to develop.
An ape, such as us, absent this cultural context would seem precisely as dumb as it really is: very dumb indeed.
We misattribute our reasoning with these concepts for their inherent intelligence. This intelligence, which we might call conceptualization, is not a congitive process. The real intelligence is animal intelligence, it's the bedrock of our cognition which is always outside of it; and cannot be observed from within.
> Thus, a "body" is just a part of the AGI,
Not at all. A body is just the place the world changes. It's the thing in direct causal contact with the world; whose effect is a kind of painful restructuring. eg., the bike rider learns to ride a bike not by "evolving his cognition", but by the structure of his muscles changing.
(Indeed, by his eye swirling differently in its socket).
It is this restructuring which is an essential aspect of conceptualization (whose effect we see in consciousness).
I strongly suspect that this kind of restructuring is necessarily organic: it is growing differently given the impact of the world. I am open to other systems which can evolve their physical structure in this way, certainly, i do not think sand qualifies.
re Political Correctness
Correctness = straightness, fit Fit = environment-body "matching"
Political = other bodies wanting from me, my wanting from them
political correctness = criteria for the fit of my body with other bodies as we want from each other
In being a criteria it is a "concept about a concept" and therefore its heavily on the psych-side of psychomotor, ie., it is a kind of regulating mechanism on reasoning (specifically, reasoning about my fit in an environment of people).
I can only partially see what you mean exactly by "cognitive" or "animal" (with regards to intelligence), it doesn't seem like you use the words in their precisely common meanings.
I also never claimed that intelligence is in its base cognitive.
The original claim was that all of the intelligence is based in "ape-ish" motor skills, that it's basically their motor cortex that is just a little more advanced that gives rise to all the behaviors that we call intelligent.
This idea would basically mean that a task such as writing and publicizing a great book such as Shakespeare's Hamlet (including accumulating all the life experience required to produce it, and make it being so good) - is "basically a motor skills task".
This just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
While it does of course require motor skills like taking a pen and putting the words to the paper, it requires a lot more other complex skills as well that have so little to do with motor intelligence that I don't see any honest reason to put them in the same category.
Thus, my comment that your theory requires expanding the concept of "psychomotor" to such extent that the word loses all of its useful meaning.
> political correctness = criteria for the fit of my body with other bodies as we want from each other
It's just not a good explanation, it loses 90% of all of the intricacies. Try using it to explain it to someone who doesn't know what political correctness is- it doesn't do the job.
I just mean any system of inference over propositions, or anything which looks like it .
We are told our frontal lobe is the most unique aspect of our brains: not true! Our motor cortex is.
We are the only animal which learns almost all skills after-birth, via our significant and adaptable motor cortex.
> Try using it to explain it to someone
Yes, concepts need to be converted/reduced to propositional (and then linguistic) forms in order to be cognized and then to be communicated.
You can't really acquire a novel basic concept via communication, but you can acquire metaconcepts (like criteria for things) which are just combinations of basic concepts you have already learnt (ie., motor concepts).
I'm not saying that there is no propositional content to concepts, ie., that they fail in being instances of some abstract Form.
I am saying, rather, what they are; and how we acquire them.
I have significant doubts that the world can be conceptualised by mere cognition, ie., that the contents of an inferential process can be arrived at via an inferential process.
I think this is an illusion: and it is apparent with machines. There is no mechanism for their understanding what they are processing.
We aren't aware, i'd say, at all, of how we actually conceptualise the world. All we're aware of, as far as our intelligence goes, is inference(/cognition). (Though many greats have attributed mysterious immediate insights to the divine: rather it is just their actual intelligence).
I think that sets us up for a highly misleading paradigm of intelligence (cf. Cartesian dualism, etc. )
If you insist on being on some imaginary laplace daemon lowest level of interaction with the world, maybe theoretically you could escape the agency component (but even then you have problems with questions like "what makes all particles interact with each other at all"), but nobody lives on that level anyway. Just because in some distant theory it is possible to reduce everything to interaction of some miriad of particles with exactly known states and rules, it doesn't mean that you (or other human or society) can effictively and practically compute anything of value on that level of abstraction. Nobody interacts with life on that level. No useful discussions are had on that level in most of the scientific pursuits.
This is a matter of using the language effectively, not a matter of superstition. I don't see scientists cargo culting the immune system or organs of the body.
Think about it like this: if I'm programming in Python, I'm going to think about variables, scopes and closures, not about high and low voltage levels or number of silicon atoms in my processor. A closure is not an illusion just because there is no transistor that specifically makes it work, a closure is still the most useful term on it's own level of abstraction.
(Recommended reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter)
No problem at all. Re-reading it there was much more snark than I intended (which was 0)
For me, a layman, it had some convincing arguments, at least in abstract.
[1] - https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...
Agency language is strongly tied to our ability to understand the mechanism by which phenomena occurred. For example, take 4 different chess bots:
1. The bot moves in a 100% predictable way to you (say it checks each piece in order to find a possible move, the first it finds that's legal it moves)
2. The bot moves randomly
3. The bot uses minimax + library (traditional chess engine)
4. The bot is running via reinforcement learning
When we discuss the moves the bot made, in which of the above scenarios would we say it 'chose' to move in a particular way? These different examples call out different forms of 'agency'. In cases 3 and 4 (maybe even 2?) most people - including the creator of the bot - would say the bot chose to move pawn to c4.
As effect gets sufficiently far removed from cause it's natural to ascribe agency to the mechanism. In a very real sense in case 4 the creator designed the bot but has no idea why it moves in certain ways - they can analyze the weights of course - but why did it 'choose' those weights over others during training? If we knew that we wouldn't need the costly training in the first place.
So back to your distaste of agency language when describing a phenomena. We're talking about _incredibly_ complex machinery. There is no guarantee that these mechanisms are a 1. or even a 3. type bot. They could be a 5. or 6. (whatever that even means). Thus even if we knew _everything_ about the last order mechanism, we would still ascribe agency to the effect.
Sorry rereading my note I can see why this seemed like a critique. I really mean 'interesting' in its standard denotation.
Could one of the effects of massage be something similar?
If you are too impaired to exercise, massage, warm salt-water baths and eating/drinking the right things to help flush wastes from the system can help compensate for the lack of exercise.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/10/18/2362118...
If you want more info than that, it's easy to google this question and come up with other articles.
>Our analysis showed that norepinephrine also is a key regulator of glymphatic activity and that norepinephrine might be responsible for suppression of glymphatic during wakefulness. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636982/
https://www.audubon.org/news/scientists-finally-have-evidenc...
In some old Western movie -- as in The Wild West with cowboys -- there was a Samurai character who claimed to sleep while they marched somewhere.
I have no idea how to look up a citation supporting the idea that this was a real phenomenon, but I did find this article that I kind of skimmed and I don't think it says anything on the topic I want a citation for and additional googling gets me absolutely nothing of value:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160506-the-japanese-art...
I won't swear that I was "truly" asleep, but I have no memory of the last three miles of that run, nor of climbing into the fartsack.
I suspect it would feel something like daydreaming or regular dreaming, or experiencing a serious mental disorder.[1][2]
[1]https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319846#The-seat-of...
[2]https://www.mdlinx.com/article/what-are-lucid-dreams-and-are...
As someone who's severely sleep-deprived, can you please share more / share a source? Thanks in advance
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=why+we+sleep&ia=web
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/sleep-loss-encourages-spread-to...
https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/risk-factors-an...
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/sleep-d...