Chapter Zero :: Introduction to introduction
To study the human body is to study biology.
The trillions of unreasonably smart creatures that live inside us.
We are made of tiny selfish cells that only care for their own, individual well being.
You and me are smartest, the most convenient structure of the largest and strongest coalitions of cells that make us, given the immediate environment of each.
Given the immediate environment of each, being together forming some tissue, which connects with more tissue, which makes an organ, which connects with more organs, which make a human is the best the majority of each of them can do. So they do it.
But cells are made of trillions of unreasonably sophisticated biochemical structures, that only care about reaching low energy and high stability.
Trillions of back and forth reactions, each for a specific, understandable reason, we think. Each molecule, each reaction makes sense individually. Those reactions create waterborne macromolecules, which create structures like sugar and DNA and membranes, which create cells.
To study biology is to study chemistry.
But why tiny atoms and molecules 'care' about anything? What does energy and stability mean anyway? What is a driving force? where they come from? What about all the space, time and energy matter exists in? What about fundamental existences we cannot measure or comprehend?
To study chemistry is to study physics.
And... to study physics is too fucking difficult. We don't know way too much to wait for all XX the answers we need to make cool stuff. XXX
So we compromise.
We get as far as we can with applied physics.
Then we get to chemistry and biology, which are to physics what engineering is to science.
We accept well established patterns we can't dig deeper into. We call them facts, laws of nature, and we start weaving knowledge on those hopefully robust structures.
Some of that knowledge feels fishy, like idea of emergence. Emergence is when a large number of stupid things shows unexpected sophistication.
Cells work with instructions from their DNA, skills of their available machinery, and events from their immediate environment. That's how every single cell lives its life.
No cell can have thoughts, no two, five, ten cells are cognizant. What about a billion of the right shape of cells that grew together? Hell yea! That's me! Where, when, how thinking starts? [[ show pictures of embryo ]]
Thinking is an emergent property. So is intelligence, awareness, friction, statistics. But do those even exist? This is an opinion piece. My opinion is we don't know enough physics to tell if emergence is a legitimate theory, or just a tag we put to.
Emergence is one of the reasons seasoned scientists believe in gods. That is, swapping something you don't understand with something else you don't understand but at least you like. That sounds satisfying, but then you quit acknowledging that future science can clarify and explain so much more than we know now, that it's too early to tell what it can not possibly explain. And that's sad.
So with that introduction, let's give two fishy but useful foundations of biology.
1. Imagine chilling in an empty room, when suddenly its walls starting shrinking into a cylinder around you. Your most comfortable position will be standing with your legs and arms together. You don't have much choice anyway. Now the walls move far again, but the ceiling starts lowering until you can only lay either facing the floor or the ceiling. Once again, you regain plenty of space so there's plenty of comfortable positions, actually the most comfortable is to change position from time to time. Here's three good friends in the room! You'll most probably be near each other, but not all the time. Make the room freezing cold and you all together hug in a corner, make the room steaming hot and you move apart. Reset the room with a couple you hate and you avoid them while they stay together avoiding you.
Congratulations, you just empathized with an atom.
Here's the first law of life!
Atoms always seek comfort in their given environment. Comfort for an atom means low energy. To lower their energy, atoms usually form molecules to share high energy burdens with other atoms, but it all depends to their environment. Molecule configurations are often so stable that it's useful to treat them as own entities, instead of groups of atoms.
Molecules always seek comfort in their given environment. Comfort for a molecule means low energy. To lower their energy, molecules give or receive electrons, or atoms, or cluster together, or chance their shape, or break apart, it's complicated but we are working on it.
2. Four billion years of evolution have made biology out of chemistry, and grew biology smarter. Biology is so smart that it can foresee! Today, biomolecules know that if they increase their energy the right way, they will later lose more energy, and they are smart and skilled enough to do so. That's probably happened the Darwinian way. A lucky few complex, energy-expensive structures made at random, stuck around and grew fancier over 3.5 billions of years on earth. Complex molecules, aka macromolecules with a work-now, get paid later capacity spent energy when they had it to force simple molecules to new macromolecules. Fast forward to your mama who's now getting a pension she was paying for 35 years. Smart proteins, smart bacteria, smart fish, smart mamacitas, smart cities.
Chapter 1 :: The nervous system
Nervous system
The nervous system is the superfast way to transfer information in the body.
Not only that, but the nervous system allows a cell to ask help from something much larger, smarter, and faraway than it's meek neighbor cells.
if I am a skin cell feeling uncomfortable, I can't move, I'm stuck packed around other skin cells, but I can implicitly ask a bunch of muscle cells to move me away! I will signal a stress signal XXX (secrete) and an immediate Neighbor, a pain receptor will be , fuck , we are in trouble, fire to the spinal chord, and within XX milliseconds the neurons will have asked the muscles to move the hand away.
Good luck trying to move your arm from a flame only using chemical messengers pumped in your blood
The neurons are electric cables, cables which include their own battery, their source of power
And the signal each neuron gives when bothered, when triggered, is 'hey'
That's it! No nuance, no sophistication, just 'hey'
Let's talk electronics for a minute. A switch can be only on or off. If you connect a bunch of switches whose on/off state depends on other switches, whose on/off state depends on some external stimuli, like the press of a button, or an amount of light, then you have a small electronic device.
If you connect enough on/off switches that depend on each other, and connect them with a bunch of stupid buttons, and a bunch of stupid lights and a bunch of stupid electromagnets, and let them use stupid electric power, you have the miracle of your smartphone!
The intelligence of your smartphone is made of trillions of trillions of on/off combinations, binary signals. None of the microcomponents of your smartphone is smarter than an on/off switch.
The intelligence of your whole body is made of microprocesses more complicated than a circuit's on/off microstates. For example, chemical reactions and equilibria
But, the complexity of your nervous system is all about bunches of neurons being either silent or saying 'hey'. That is bunches of neurons not firing or firing. That's similar type of complexity to a binary electronic device.
Our nervous system is smart not because neurons are smart, but because they are plenty,
...and fast.
----
Let's go back to that stressed skin cell.
Remember, individual cells are selfish. They only care for their immediate well being and proliferationXX?.
The skin cell is alive because it grew to be a skin cell, and it will stay alive if it acts like a good skin cell. Good skin cells secrete XXX when stressed. The neigbor skin cell has receptors for XXX, and happens to be neigbor to a bunch of pain receptors, so when it senses the stress of the neighbor it sXX the pain receptor___
...finish that example and get more technical with how firing (rate) works,,,, give example of led brightness, still on off, but rate,,,
To study the human body is to study biology.
The trillions of unreasonably smart creatures that live inside us.
We are made of tiny selfish cells that only care for their own, individual well being.
You and me are smartest, the most convenient structure of the largest and strongest coalitions of cells that make us, given the immediate environment of each.
Given the immediate environment of each, being together forming some tissue, which connects with more tissue, which makes an organ, which connects with more organs, which make a human is the best the majority of each of them can do. So they do it.
But cells are made of trillions of unreasonably sophisticated biochemical structures, that only care about reaching low energy and high stability.
Trillions of back and forth reactions, each for a specific, understandable reason, we think. Each molecule, each reaction makes sense individually. Those reactions create waterborne macromolecules, which create structures like sugar and DNA and membranes, which create cells.
To study biology is to study chemistry.
But why tiny atoms and molecules 'care' about anything? What does energy and stability mean anyway? What is a driving force? where they come from? What about all the space, time and energy matter exists in? What about fundamental existences we cannot measure or comprehend?
To study chemistry is to study physics.
And... to study physics is too fucking difficult. We don't know way too much to wait for all XX the answers we need to make cool stuff. XXX
So we compromise.
We get as far as we can with applied physics.
Then we get to chemistry and biology, which are to physics what engineering is to science.
We accept well established patterns we can't dig deeper into. We call them facts, laws of nature, and we start weaving knowledge on those hopefully robust structures.
Some of that knowledge feels fishy, like idea of emergence. Emergence is when a large number of stupid things shows unexpected sophistication.
Cells work with instructions from their DNA, skills of their available machinery, and events from their immediate environment. That's how every single cell lives its life.
No cell can have thoughts, no two, five, ten cells are cognizant. What about a billion of the right shape of cells that grew together? Hell yea! That's me! Where, when, how thinking starts? [[ show pictures of embryo ]]
Thinking is an emergent property. So is intelligence, awareness, friction, statistics. But do those even exist? This is an opinion piece. My opinion is we don't know enough physics to tell if emergence is a legitimate theory, or just a tag we put to.
Emergence is one of the reasons seasoned scientists believe in gods. That is, swapping something you don't understand with something else you don't understand but at least you like. That sounds satisfying, but then you quit acknowledging that future science can clarify and explain so much more than we know now, that it's too early to tell what it can not possibly explain. And that's sad.
So with that introduction, let's give two fishy but useful foundations of biology.
1. Imagine chilling in an empty room, when suddenly its walls starting shrinking into a cylinder around you. Your most comfortable position will be standing with your legs and arms together. You don't have much choice anyway. Now the walls move far again, but the ceiling starts lowering until you can only lay either facing the floor or the ceiling. Once again, you regain plenty of space so there's plenty of comfortable positions, actually the most comfortable is to change position from time to time. Here's three good friends in the room! You'll most probably be near each other, but not all the time. Make the room freezing cold and you all together hug in a corner, make the room steaming hot and you move apart. Reset the room with a couple you hate and you avoid them while they stay together avoiding you.
Congratulations, you just empathized with an atom.
Here's the first law of life!
Atoms always seek comfort in their given environment. Comfort for an atom means low energy. To lower their energy, atoms usually form molecules to share high energy burdens with other atoms, but it all depends to their environment. Molecule configurations are often so stable that it's useful to treat them as own entities, instead of groups of atoms.
Molecules always seek comfort in their given environment. Comfort for a molecule means low energy. To lower their energy, molecules give or receive electrons, or atoms, or cluster together, or chance their shape, or break apart, it's complicated but we are working on it.
2. Four billion years of evolution have made biology out of chemistry, and grew biology smarter. Biology is so smart that it can foresee! Today, biomolecules know that if they increase their energy the right way, they will later lose more energy, and they are smart and skilled enough to do so. That's probably happened the Darwinian way. A lucky few complex, energy-expensive structures made at random, stuck around and grew fancier over 3.5 billions of years on earth. Complex molecules, aka macromolecules with a work-now, get paid later capacity spent energy when they had it to force simple molecules to new macromolecules. Fast forward to your mama who's now getting a pension she was paying for 35 years. Smart proteins, smart bacteria, smart fish, smart mamacitas, smart cities.
Chapter 1 :: The nervous system
Nervous system
The nervous system is the superfast way to transfer information in the body.
Not only that, but the nervous system allows a cell to ask help from something much larger, smarter, and faraway than it's meek neighbor cells.
if I am a skin cell feeling uncomfortable, I can't move, I'm stuck packed around other skin cells, but I can implicitly ask a bunch of muscle cells to move me away! I will signal a stress signal XXX (secrete) and an immediate Neighbor, a pain receptor will be , fuck , we are in trouble, fire to the spinal chord, and within XX milliseconds the neurons will have asked the muscles to move the hand away.
Good luck trying to move your arm from a flame only using chemical messengers pumped in your blood
The neurons are electric cables, cables which include their own battery, their source of power
And the signal each neuron gives when bothered, when triggered, is 'hey'
That's it! No nuance, no sophistication, just 'hey'
Let's talk electronics for a minute. A switch can be only on or off. If you connect a bunch of switches whose on/off state depends on other switches, whose on/off state depends on some external stimuli, like the press of a button, or an amount of light, then you have a small electronic device.
If you connect enough on/off switches that depend on each other, and connect them with a bunch of stupid buttons, and a bunch of stupid lights and a bunch of stupid electromagnets, and let them use stupid electric power, you have the miracle of your smartphone!
The intelligence of your smartphone is made of trillions of trillions of on/off combinations, binary signals. None of the microcomponents of your smartphone is smarter than an on/off switch.
The intelligence of your whole body is made of microprocesses more complicated than a circuit's on/off microstates. For example, chemical reactions and equilibria
But, the complexity of your nervous system is all about bunches of neurons being either silent or saying 'hey'. That is bunches of neurons not firing or firing. That's similar type of complexity to a binary electronic device.
Our nervous system is smart not because neurons are smart, but because they are plenty,
...and fast.
----
Let's go back to that stressed skin cell.
Remember, individual cells are selfish. They only care for their immediate well being and proliferationXX?.
The skin cell is alive because it grew to be a skin cell, and it will stay alive if it acts like a good skin cell. Good skin cells secrete XXX when stressed. The neigbor skin cell has receptors for XXX, and happens to be neigbor to a bunch of pain receptors, so when it senses the stress of the neighbor it sXX the pain receptor___
...finish that example and get more technical with how firing (rate) works,,,, give example of led brightness, still on off, but rate,,,
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