Comments by "Mighty One" (@mightyone3737) on "Today I Found Out"
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I'm going to make this concept a bit different to explain why I don't think they qualify as life forms. Say an implant was developed that could more or less hijack parts of your brain and influence your behavior, such that you now mostly want to make more identical high tech implants and implant them in other people. Is this machine alive? No, the human being is though. That's what a virus does to a cell, it's not a whole lot more complicated I think. Virus' are completely inert pieces of information that happen to fit into our cells and as prions show, just fitting in can cause immense problems, the data itself is almost meaningless (just like the pile of viral genetic info we each carry). I think you could also compare a virus to a book, a book can convert someone to another viewpoint, even make them spread the same information, but the book isn't alive, and nobody sane would say it is, even if it's author was alive. Data/information (IE a virus) isn't alive, but it can have huge ramifications anyways, and I don't see what other discipline you could use to study virus' than biology. I think it's worth noting we mostly study the affects of a virus, not so much it's physical shell, it being far too small, and usually hard to damage while in a host. I think the fact that they have limited/no biological process' also leads me to question whether they qualify as alive, no metabolism of any kind is a deal breaker for me, let alone having individual cell division. It doesn't eat, or change/age, it only will literally decay away/be destroyed, and you could remove all but the genetic information and likely allow it to function fully as a virus, most of the material is there to protect it/get it into a cell.
But seriously, if you consider virus' alive, I think you have to accept that machines can be an artificial form of life and adjust your world view accordingly. I actually think a machine could be much closer to life, despite having no biological processes, at least it'd have processes.
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'The brain is resilient...' actually means 'We don't really understand how some people recover from some injuries, or how some people can continue to function at all', because the brain, like most of our systems, is designed to have fail-safes for when things go awry. In the brain's case, it's other parts of the brain that try to do work that another part is designed to do, with varying levels of success. My grandfather had a farm accident that put a metal spike through the side of his head, an event he arguably completely recovered from, though he couldn't handle cold very well after, due to the metal plates presumably. I guess it's like how if you lose your favoured hand, you'd eventually get quite good at using your other one, until you became about as good with it. That's also rewiring your brain, and it's probably part of why athletes and musicians have cognitive advantages, they are usually much more ambidextrous than an average person. More wiring in the brain is a function of more areas being used to seeing use, and your brain using itself in a way that isn't intuitive, like using your 'off' hand in precise tasks. More complex is better than bigger, when it comes to brains, but you usually enlarge the parts you use, while the neglected portions will tend to atrophy, just like muscles (only considerably worse for you!).
In regards to the premise, I assumed this would mostly be about physical force, and the high likelihood of concussions (almost guaranteed if you are knocked out), which are often bad things to have long term, more so if you have multiple ones. Using drugs to knock yourself out is usually not without side effects either, especially if it happens very often. Using something highly addictive acutely to aide surgery is very different than using it chronically to get a buzz... I would expect any lesser opiate would be almost unnoticed for an experienced fentanyl user for example, though if a drug worked completely differently (ignored that part of the brain) it could still knock you out fine. Having read about the difficulties people had with early analgesics, I think I'd prefer to have not numbed too much of my brain to too many substances.
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Watching this after having taken classes on Roman life and history in uni, and later read the Lives of the Twelve Caesars, leaves little doubt that while the poor were generally expected to be morally upright, the elites could get away with quite a bit. We also learned in Ancient Greek Athletics 201 (more or less, it was an 8:30 class that had many shots of naked men, just ugh) that the pederasty thing is partially a misunderstanding, sometimes men would put their penis between the thighs rather than actually do anal sex, such that anal sex was 'relatively rare' according to my prof, as it was seen as demeaning (for obvious reasons I suppose), thigh sex was seen as reasonable though. Again though, wtf moron would try to have thigh sex with a relatively lean boy rather than a woman that has actual thighs??? I will admit I have a fondness for 'classical civ', but they did some odd stuff. I also read the OG Thieves' World stuff, which starts out as a very old city, and eventually becomes a later medieval one, though it's worth noting the Romans, if not interrupted, would have done shocking things scientifically in another century or two, there was the odd thing that was really advanced, even if the average Joe's life wasn't especially impressive (there was a lot of concrete that needed to be agitated, which IMHO sounds like a sadistic job, not quite salt mine, but pretty damn close).
Now I want to play Civ 1 again, not sure if I'd go Roman or Greek, Greek is probably better, Alexander isn't a chump, even if he's not Genghis Khan.
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This kind of weirdness reminds me of when I was learning about cold working of metals... apparently distortion itself can convert austenite to martensite, which is pretty bizarre, but the mere existence of 'retained austenite' might be the clue... this occurs when the material cools in such a way that there isn't enough energy left to convert the austenite to martensite, even though the metal 'should' have made martensite, as it's the lower energy state: you need to have energy for something to actually 'freeze'. It would be like if you could somehow cooled a sample so fast that some of it wouldn't have enough energy to actually freeze, even though 'in theory', the phase diagram would suggest you'd have no liquid in those conditions. Thus, I'm guessing this effect requires very specific conditions to actually be observed, suggesting that in most situations the effect isn't very big/strong.
Obvious point is obvious, but you can re-use the same container for the hot and cold trials. You don't need to do all your trials at once in separate containers, we can make sure the conditions are otherwise identical in an expensive enough experiment. Also, I suspect you could, with enough expense, easily get a container to a high enough precision that there aren't especially good nucleation sites... if we could build the Large Hadron Collider, that level of precision sounds laughable. Establishing exactly how this works could be relevant for study of outer space, where extreme temperatures/conditions compared to Earth are very common.
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