Comparison, Stroke,

Comparison

Got some argument with Verner Vinge, & his "Singularity is coming"
(..wife Joan is the better SF writer - "Eyes of Amber" a classic which probably stimulated interest in Titan)

VV reckons that faster machines will, by 2025?, take off, smarter than humans and ever smarter,

I reckon he's wrong,.... What is an individual?"

..outside of biology, there are no individuals, only stuff.

... Pictures from Venus, Mars, Moon, Titan etc all hava a certain similarity.
A bunch of rocks lying about. For millions of years, maybe....
I maintain that these chunks are not individuals.
Rover drivers gave names to some particular rocks on Mars, so they could talk about them. But they remain chunks.
The names are in the minds of people.

Only biological systems are individuals.

Humans project individuality, personality, onto thunderbolts, and the overall origin of stuff.


Aside: its odd to realise that no new living cell has appeared on Earth for Billions of years.
As far as we know every extant cell results from budding off an existing cell. Same applies to mitochondria and chloroplasts.

For all the claims about DNA, it doesnt make new cells, it merely provides templates for enzymes to extend existing cells, which bud themselves off. DNA does not make life, it just swells it.


Maybe alien cells have arrived from space every 10MY or so, but none have out-competed current life bacteria rule
here.

Faster computers are just that.. faster computers. The energy requirements are arduous . We might simulate a bee or a cockroach, but we currently are way off from powering such mobile gadgets on breadcrumbs or nectar.


Nano tech fans postulate nano-factories. Well,.... show me a normal size factory making, ...say, clothes-pegs, which needs no Human intervention. Not just very little intervention, but none at all. There is No such factory.

It has been said: every factory assumes an entire technological supply and support society.

Only biological systems feel pain, or pleasure.


The deepest operation is comparison.

Krishnamurti understood "I think one of the causes of fear is comparison. You know what `comparison' is? To compare you with somebody else, to compare you with a clever boy, or to compare you with a dull boy, "

comparison is deeper than desire, it is the foundation of desire.
Krishnamurti the deeper mind engineer than Buddha

Joshu said "Who is your neighbour?"
Buddha said "What is desire?"
Krishnamurti said "Can you live a life without comparison?"


The first bacteria with a flagella, had a memory. It would spin and tumble less where the sugars were more concentrated. Memory in time, before comparsison in space. Desire invented simulaneously with memory, comparison and motility.

None of these are inherent in a rock, or a computer. We can simulate desire, with a pleasure/sugar level accumulator possibly, but set the acumulator full and the machine will cease from wandering.

biology grows, swells, buds, grows.

Machines are constructed.

Life longs to reproduce and disperse.

A bee shakes with passion with the memory of a clump of blossoms.

An imitation bee might seek out a neck to sting, but only at the behest of its builder



no fast processor can care. nor desire. Not desire to conquer the world, travel to the ends of the world, dominate, reproduce. Only we can set their desire accumulators, low or high.


A very fast processor would sit idle until told what to calculate.

Higher cognition requires anxiety?
With complicated memory, comes the pressure to attain a better situation, the pressure to do something, anything
"get me out of this place" " a bunch of large social mammals are about to steal my potatoes attack/criticise/evict/ me"
"there must be somewhere better than this"

Can a machine feel anxiety? wold a super-smart machine be super-smart at getting a supply of Xanax?
How to give a box the illusion that its existence is important?
Rather easier to instill in an assemblage of leaky membrane water-based cells, with a billion year pedigree, and loaded with pain receptors.


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Oliver Sacks

Eight days before Christmas Day 2005, neurologist Oliver Sacks — author of Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and other popular collections of case histories — went to the movies. Sitting in the dark theatre, he noticed an incandescent flickering to his left, which he took to be the first signs of a migraine.
The Mind's Eye Oliver Sacks Alfred A. Knopf/Picador: 2010
...
Recently I have noticed flickering patterns in my blind spot. On testing, the blind spot is rather large.
Damn my eyes if I cant lay my hands on a decent ball of opium...
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Stroke
Why dont they name the drug?
Dr Clarkson..U..California, ..Dr Thomas Carmichael, ...mice..re-activated brain neurons responsible for limb function.

There is currently only one approved drug for stroke patients, but it needs to be administered a maximum of four hours after a stroke, and only restores 10-15% of function.
[cannabis works if smoked within 20 minutes]

NZ Centre for Brain Research's professor Alan Barber..
... could potentially work best if given several weeks later.
Nov. 11 issue ..Nature ....
..Carmichael. "We found that blocking tonic inhibition too early could produce cell death, but by delaying treatment to three days after stroke, it promoted functional recovery..
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some random searches:
Reducing excessive GABA-mediated tonic inhibition promotes functional recovery after stroke

benzodiazepine inverse agonist specific for ?5-subunit-containing extrasynaptic GABAA receptors at a delay after stroke.
what is this?? Anti-Valium???
...
"Ro15-4513 has the opposite effect, producing anxiety"
..................
Chronic ethanol treatment..in rats, produced an increase in the specific binding of ethanol antagonist [3H]RO15-4513 in rat brain cerebral cortex and cerebellum, but not in hippocampus and striatum. ..due to an increase in the number of receptor sites...on the oligomeric GABA receptor complex ..
[I dont trust anxiety research on lab rats.. they are all crazy from living alone in plastic apartments/tubs. for instance: lab rats dont like ganga]
.............
This is not it???
S-roscovitine—a potential neuroprotectant for stroke

Heather Wood
Abstract A drug that targets cell cycle proteins could protect the brain from injury after stroke, .. France by Serge Timsit

..................
nature
Nature
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springerlink
rat recognition??
I couldnt work out if the anxious rats recognised strange young, and ignored them, or the converse???
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DMCM (methyl-6,7-dimethoxy-4-ethyl-beta-carboline-3-carboxylate) .. acts as an inverse agonist of benzodiazepine receptors, meaning that it causes the opposite effects to the benzodiazepine class of drugs. ...is used in scientific research to induce anxiety [...
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New Zealand medicines regulators .. a cannabis-based spray.. multiple sclerosis (MS) ..... GW Pharmaceuticals.

...THC and CBD, and is the first..derived from whole plant ..

..Sativex ..positive decisions in the UK, Spain and Canada,..

.. 2008 approval.. for three patients, ..

..had to have either nausea, anorexia and wasting .. or chronic pain for which other pain relief treatments were unsuited, .. MS, stroke, cancer, spinal cord injury..

..the previous.. government.."sufficient evidence of safety and efficacy of cannabis ..

..costs of $150 to $300 weekly if it was not subsidised by Pharmac.

..obstacles growing their own, illicit, drug: his home had been burgled 20 times by thieves trying to remove plants.

Sativex may produce side-effects "interpreted as a euphoria..

co
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Peaky Oil
For all those Mayors salivatng over new motorways:
parliament

There is a risk that the world economy may be at the start of a cycle of supply crunches leading to price spikes and recessions, followed by recoveries leading to supply crunches.

[this link appeared in ASPO peakoil
.................
The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska ... 896 mbbl of such oil are in the reserve, .. 90 % less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels.

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aljazeera
Who is Dilma Rousseff?
In her teens she was jailed and tortured during the military dictatorship for her participation in a Marxist group
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Face
University of Manchester have developed software for mobile phones that can track your facial features in real-time. Eventually it will be able to tell who the user is, where they are looking and even how they are feeling.
manchester
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Permafrost
soils that have remained frozen for tens of thousands of years, .. In Yakutsk, the permafrost is between 250 and 350 metres ..Elsewhere in the Sakha Republic, the permafrost reaches a depth of 1300 metres. It would take hundreds of years of steadily increasing temperatures for the ground here to thaw out completely
...
Permafrost takes up more than two-thirds of the country
...
ten million square kilometres, the bulk of the land east of the Urals.
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The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.

--St. Augustine

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nieces
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phys
: How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist
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ZZ's national police force .. first-ever drive to recruit officers from among the settlers.
...studies include seven months in a seminary in a small extremist settlement, Elisha, deep in the West Bank. Although all the settlements are illegal under international law, Elisha is one of dozens of wildcat settlements also illegal under Israeli law.
jkcook
[ZZ = Zionist Zealots]
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Combining green tea polyphenols and a form of vitamin D called alfacalcidol may boost bone structure and strength, according to a new study in mice.
nutraingredients
nutrition
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..in addition to heart health benefits, beetroot juice could improve blood flow to the brain and therefore join the fight against dementia.

.. Nitric Oxide: Biology and Chemistry, scientists at Wake Forest U. ..
.. drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure,..
Beetroot is a high-nitrate food and because in the body nitrate turns to nitrite, which has been found to help open blood vessels and improve blood flow, the scientists decided to study its impact on blood flow to the brain....
nutraingredients
nutrition
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