Biology

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We have met the cosmic horror, and…

Well, here I go again (on my own, like the song says) writing another blog post.  As for why I am doing so, well, there is surely a set of causes‒potentially tracing all the way back to the Big Bang, or at least the period just during and/or after inflation, assuming that happened, which seems more likely than not‒there may not be any good reason for it.

Oh, of course, I could come up with reasons.  I could “justify” myself.  Indeed, there is reason (har) to think that justification and persuasion to bolster one’s status and identity in a tribe against others with opposed motives may have been one of the driving forces behind the development of the human reasoning capacity.  This is apart from, and perhaps almost orthogonal to, the basic power of reasoning to understand and thus best navigate the territory of reality.

Once it got started, reasoning would have accelerated thanks to biological arms races between those competing for survival and reproduction, and then it would have turned out serendipitously to have been more broadly and powerfully useful than merely for securing status and food and mates.

Imagine if the peacock’s tail had turned out not only to be ostentatious and beautiful and sexy (to peahens, anyway) but tremendously useful and broadly powerful, especially once it reached a certain level.  Imagine if the peacock’s tail had allowed peacocks to build skyscrapers and boats and trains and planes and cars, if peacocks’ tails helped peacocks build a global civilization, quite apart from their ability to secure one’s status and acquire good mates.

That’s quite possibly more or less what happened with human brains.

Of course, like the peacock’s tail, the human brain is not without its drawbacks.  I suspect that things like depression and anxiety, and perhaps even neurodivergence, are simply potential (and statistically inevitable) outcomes for a brain that has grown powerful enough to assess the world deeply and uncover the almost Lovecraftian terror of our tiny little existence when placed against the scope and scale of the cosmos.

I say “Lovecraftian”, but even with Lovecraft, though the beings in the mythos are thoroughly inhuman and incomprehensible‒unsane, as I like to say‒they are still beings.  The true cosmic horror is surely that beings of any kind are almost nonexistent; indeed, to a very good approximation, they are nonexistent.

In some senses, this can at least be morally reassuring.  If we do go and spread out through the universe‒or even just the galaxy or even just our local family of stars‒and there are indeed no other life forms, then at least we need not worry about violating implicit rights.  Uninhabited asteroids (for instance) don’t have goals or wishes and, as far as we can tell, they cannot suffer.

Of course, we may have aesthetic concerns about such things, but aesthetics are not as urgent as ethics.  And, of course, we will still have moral/ethical concerns toward each other; that almost goes without saying.

Whether or not we will exist long enough for the ethics (or lack thereof) of changing the state of uninhabited other places in the galaxy to be pertinent is quite uncertain.  I see nothing in the laws of physics that makes it impossible, so in that sense, I am optimistic.  But I see nothing in the laws of physics, nor more specifically in human nature, that makes it certain or even likely that we will survive to spread out from our native planet to any significant degree.  And I see nothing in the laws of nature that seems to imply that, if we don’t succeed and spread through the cosmos, anyone else will do so, or indeed that anyone else even exists.

Don’t get me wrong; physics clearly and undeniably allows life to exist, and it allows (human-like) intelligence and civilization to exist.  But those are two different scales of allowance.

The molecules and principles of life as we know it, with long-chain molecules capable of carrying information and of replicating themselves, leading to “competition” and “improvement” and increasing complexity and so on, seem so straightforward as to be happening potentially (but far from certainly) in a good many places in the universe.  This is straightforward enough.  The equivalents of viruses and prokaryotes may exist in many regions.  It’s even possible that there may be such life in other places in our solar system (Europa and Enceladus being possible contenders).

But multicellular, “eukaryotic” life, seems likely to be much rarer.  Basic life started on Earth, as far as we can see, very shortly after the Earth formed and cooled enough for complex molecules to endure (nearly 4 billion years ago).  Eukaryotes, especially multicellular ones, didn’t really arrive until about 500 million years ago.  So, seven eighths into the time of life on Earth, it was basically just “bacteria” and some viruses.

Then, for significant, interpersonal, symbolic and technological intelligence to develop took another…well, basically another 500 million years.  And as far as we can tell, it’s only happened once.

That doesn’t give us a good, clear picture of how rare or common such a thing is‒one is a difficult number of experimental subjects from which to draw too many conclusions‒but it’s possible that the existence of technologically intelligent life is so rare as to occur only once per, on average, every chunk of spacetime as large as our visible universe.  It could even be rarer than that.

In an infinite cosmos, of course, even such exceedingly rare events would happen an infinite number of times (so to speak).  But that doesn’t necessarily make things less lonesome.  If you have an infinite number of decks of cards (with no jokers), all thoroughly shuffled together, there are literally just as many Aces of Spades as there are red-suited cards in total (ℵ₀, the “smallest” infinity).  Nevertheless, if you draw cards randomly, you will only get an Ace of Spades one twenty-sixth as often as you will get a red-suited card.

Similarly, there are as many whole multiples of a trillion as there are integers in general (again, ℵ₀), but if you pick a random integer, you’re still only going to pull such a multiple one out of a trillion times (on average).

So, maybe the takeaway is that the real cosmic horror may be that we are the only entities haunting the abyss, and there are no (other) mad idiot gods bubbling away at the center of celestial existence.  Maybe it’s just us.  And if our lights go out, then nobody is home.

It’s worth considering, not least because it has every chance of being true, whether literally or just practically.  For if the nearest other technological life form is in another galactic cluster, for instance, then we are, for all reasonable purposes, alone in the universe.

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A stochastic, elastic, would-be fantastic blog post

Well, here we go again.  It’s Monday, the start of another (standard) work week, though I know that many people operate on other than a Monday through Friday schedule.

For some places of employment, this makes very good sense.  For instance, hospitals must, if they are to be of use, be open basically all day and night, every day and night, and so there must be people working in them at all hours‒because illness and injury do not know anything about arbitrary human schedules.  Indeed, many injuries and illnesses are more likely to happen when people are off work.

Other places of employment, such as restaurants and the like, get most of their business during non-work hours for other people, because people don’t typically do their office work in restaurants.  There is, of course, lunchtime business (sometimes even for meetings), and many places even see breakfast time business, but people are still not usually eating there while working, at least not when they’re on the clock (independent contractors who do distant work notwithstanding).

Of course, banks are the most traditionally nine to five places of business‒thus the traditional and somewhat disparaging reference to “banker’s hours”‒but really, that has never made much sense to me.  People who work need to go to the bank when they are not at work, if they need to go in person, but banks are open (almost solely) during other people’s working hours.

It’s almost as if banks (long before things like Facebook and Twitter) weren’t actually seeing the ordinary users of their services as their customers; they were the product, or at least, they were the source of the product.

The customers’ savings were the source of the money the banks lent out to others, charging interest for the use of other people’s money, and then as often as not (or more) charging the depositors to keep and use their money as well!  What a racket (SMH).  No wonder people don’t trust bankers.

By comparison, raw capitalism‒or at least, any approximation of free market exchange‒is generous and fair.  That’s by comparison only, mind you.  After all, the basic principle, that of providing goods and/or services in exchange for money that can be used to buy other goods and services, is quite logical.

One problem with this is that advantages in business tend to be self-reinforcing, even if the initial advantage happened randomly.  This can be good in limited amounts‒for instance, a successful business that employs many people is best when stable, so people’s lives can be relatively stable.  But past a certain point, i.e., when it becomes a monopoly, or close to it, a business can become ossified, non-reactive to customers and improvements and changing situations, and this can lead to significant inefficiencies that rob everyone (except perhaps a very limited few) of much opportunity and prosperity.

So, fully unrestrained free markets don’t lead only to good things (though they are very good at creating new wealth and products and innovations).  Like most other such natural-selection-style interactions, they can be brutal and cruel and horribly inefficient at times, and can even readily evolve to extinction.

As for the concept of property ownership (i.e., real estate), that’s a deep thing for primates and many other kinds of mammals and even other kinds of vertebrates and even non-vertebrate multicellular life forms.  The tendency to claim and mark and defend territory predates humans by eons, and makes good biological sense.  Ants claim the space of their hills, and will defend their claimed space to the death, though they did not originate it.  Likewise for bees and wasps, and likewise for baboons and gorillas and chimpanzees and naked house apes.

These are not the only examples of this in nature.  Territoriality is almost ubiquitous, at least among creatures for which it can make any sense at all.  Even plants can have a sort of territoriality.

No one keeps their territory in the long run, of course.  That’s partly because someone else always wants any useful territory.  And useless territory is rarely defended, at least for long.

Usefulness, though, is in the eye (or ear or antenna/pheromone receptor or what have you) of the beholder.  Dead trees were useless for a very long time, until finally fungi evolved to be able to break the dead wood down for resources.  And then, eventually, after many millions of years, even the wood that had died and not been broken down by fungi became coal (some of it did, anyway), which became useful in a different way for those aforementioned naked house apes.

But of course, no new coal is being made, and no new coal has been made since those fungi and other organisms finally evolved the ability to break down wood.

Ah, we’re just scratching the surface now of evolutionary economics, aren’t we?  Alas, we’re coming to the end of a reasonably long and reasonably short blog post, that comparatively narrow Venn diagram overlap.  So, I’ll draw to a close for now.  Perhaps I’ll discuss these subjects further at a later date.  Perhaps I’ll veer into other subjects.  I could make predictions, but even I cannot hope to know for sure what I will write in the future.

I hope the future for all of you‒starting immediately after you read this‒has a continuing, indefinite, “goodward” trend.

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A pox upon those who do not learn the history of science and medicine

Well, I’m back to writing on the smartphone today, with mixed feelings.  One of these feelings is the residual soreness in my thumbs, of course, but the day-long break did seem to help a little bit.  Mind you, some of that is probably in my head, for I don’t write on my smartphone on Sundays, and I also don’t write on non-working Saturdays.  So, if resting is enough, I should feel least sore on Mondays following one of my two-day weekends.  If that is the case‒if I am least sore in those instances‒I certainly haven’t noticed.

Actually, if it isn’t the case, I haven’t noticed either, but at least there it would make sense, since there is nothing to notice.  It can be much harder to notice things that are not so than to notice things that are so.  That’s part of why people don’t give credit to vaccination, for instance:  they can’t see the sickness and death that are prevented.  There’s no It’s A Wonderful Life revelation about all the lives that have been saved and‒perhaps more important*‒all the suffering that has been prevented.

There’s a similar, lesser-known preventative effect of proton pump inhibitors (e.g., omeprazole).  These medicines (and their somewhat weaker predecessors, the H2 blockers**) have prevented untold suffering and death related to gastritis and peptic ulcer disease and esophageal cancers, all of which used to be major contributors to premature death, especially in young men (if memory serves).  So, using these medicines is not necessarily an overindulgence in avoiding transient discomfort.  They are very real and powerful preventative interventions‒though, as with all such things, they do have some long term side-effects, and these must always be weighed against the benefits of taking them.

This is one of the reasons that educating people about history is so important.  If one is not aware of just how horrifying and heartbreaking the effects of smallpox were (for instance), one might think that the smallpox vaccine***** was just a sort of convenience, not a response to a low-flying, slow-moving, global catastrophe.

I suppose it was easier for Ben Franklin to recognize that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” because there were far fewer preventable ailments and fewer avoidable disasters back in his day.  Still, he was a very smart person; he might have recognized the nature of such things even if he had lived in our more comfortable times.

It is useful, and it may be more than just useful, for people to learn how things were before the arrival of so many powerful technologies and knowledge and social and biological insights.  For 300,000 years, humans existed without (for instance) the internet, and then, starting around 30 years ago, it was here (and widely available).

But that’s a full generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, despite the fact that by default the world has no internet.  It can be immensely useful for those people to learn about what things were like pre-internet, not only so they can truly appreciate this remarkable phenomenon, but also so they can recognize some of its detriments.

Likewise for planes and cars and televisions and even books and agriculture.  What was life like before these things?  What would life be like if they disappeared?  Are their benefits worth their costs?  How can those costs be mitigated, even if they are bearable (for why not make things as net-beneficial as possible?)?

I encourage everyone, myself included, to take these notions seriously, to think about the contrafactual cases, not to accept that things simply are the way they are, because for the most part, historically, they were not that way.  Even humanity itself is a latecomer.

I don’t know how I got onto those subjects, but I guess I’m thinking of health (and particularly of gastric health) more than typically in recent days.  I still don’t feel too well, but that’s nothing unusual for me.  It’s just annoying because it’s a new, or at least atypical, discomfort.

Oh, well.  This brings us back to my point that decreasing/preventing suffering is more important than “saving lives”, since all such saved lives are merely saved for later, if you will.  Death (it seems) cannot be forever avoided, but suffering, in principle, can be eased and even sometimes prevented.  Though, sometimes, the only practical way to stop certain kinds of suffering is to hasten the inevitable other phenomenon.

In any case, I’ll draw at least one instance of your suffering to an end now, by finishing this blog post.  I hope you have a very good day, by any reasonable measure of goodness that you might choose.

*Because death is, as far as anyone can tell, completely inevitable‒it’s a matter of when, not if‒whereas suffering is variable, and boy can it vary, from person to person, from moment to moment, from culture to culture, and so on.

**No, they don’t block molecular hydrogen***, though if one thought that, one could certainly be excused.  Rather, they block the so-called type 2 histamine receptor, the one that responds to stimulus (histamine) by making the stomach secrete more acid.

***Interestingly enough, the proton pump inhibitors do block hydrogen, but it’s not molecular hydrogen, it atomic hydrogen‒or well actually, it’s ionic (cationic, specifically) hydrogen, which is a naked proton, since a hydrogen nucleus is just a proton****, and is the key effective part of essentially all acids, at least regarding their acidity.

****Sorry about all the footnotes within footnotes, but it just occurred to me to wonder what it would be like to make a sample of an acid but with all the ordinary hydrogen atoms replaced with deuterium, so-called heavy hydrogen, which has a neutron in its nucleus as well as a proton.  How would this affect the properties of such an acid?  Of course those properties are almost entirely related to the valence electron or the lack thereof, but when a positive ion of a substance is just a naked nucleus, one cannot completely dismiss the impact of that nucleus’s structure.  So, I would love to see an entirely deuteric acid being put through its paces.  An acid made entirely with tritium (one proton, two neutrons) would be interesting as well, but even in my imagination, that’s asking for a lot of the very tiny amount of tritium in the world.

*****This is the original source of the word “vaccination” since being exposed to Vaccinia (related to cowpox) provided resistance to Variola (smallpox).

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Is it small talk if you discuss the weather despite being alone?

Well, I brought the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday evening, but nevertheless I am writing this post on my smartphone.  Why?  Because the lapcom is more inefficient to get out of my bag and put back in my bag, and the smartphone is much easier to unsheathe and restow‒it just sits in my front pocket when not in use.  I can also use it to check the temperature, which is a bit chilly this morning even here in south Florida.  I’m sure that it’s quite a bit worse for regions north of us that have been hit by the wave of unpleasant recent weather.

I don’t find it unpleasant for it to get a bit cool down here‒55 degrees Fahrenheit* with a bit of overcast and some rain feels like autumn up north where I grew up, and that was always my favorite season.  It’s usually rather easy to adjust by wearing more clothes and moving around a bit if one feels chilly.

On the other hand, there’s not much to do about the heat and humidity other than to stay inside air conditioned buildings.  That isn’t very much fun, unfortunately, especially when one lives in a state that is touted for its beautiful and interesting nature.  After a point, though, one can take off as many clothes as one likes, but one will not get cooler; one will only be at risk for sunburn in rather uncomfortable places.

The worst part, though, is the humidity.  Yes, humans developed in sub-Saharan Africa, so we’re built well for endurance in hot environments (humans have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other animal).  But humidity is another matter.  Humidity is almost like an electronic counter measure to sweat’s ability to cool the body.  Sweat works by evaporative cooling; like blowing on soup, taking away the warmest liquid molecules lowers the average temperature of those remaining, and so on.

But evaporation depends at least partially on the differential in concentration between the liquid and the gas “above” it.  If the air is already saturated (or nearly so) with water vapor, there is going to be significantly less tendency for net evaporation to occur, and thus there will be less cooling.

This is why the reassuring and somewhat comical statement, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat” is actually pertinent and indeed positive.  If the air is dry, and if they have adequate water, humans can tolerate surprisingly intense heat.  But when it’s humid, things don’t work nearly as well.

Also, when it tends to be humid and rainy a lot, one finds fungi and algae and the like growing on almost every immobile surface, as well as on some that are mobile, such as human intertriginous areas.

Anyway, to make a long diatribe slightly longer by summarizing it, I don’t mind cooler weather, but humidity is very annoying when it’s warm.

As for other matters, well, the holiday is over from yesterday, and I did not get to eat any corned beef and cabbage.  That’s a bit disappointing.  The next major holiday (which is coming soon) is the Passover/Easter holiday.  There’s no particular food related to these holidays that I like, though, nor really much of anything else come to think of it.

I did get into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit by drawing a shamrock yesterday, then scanning it and coloring it and fiddling with it a bit between other things at work.  Here, this is how it’s turned out so far:

It’s nothing terribly impressive, but it’s at least one very tiny, mild, creative act.  Not that writing this blog isn’t creative, but it’s not as creative as writing fiction, or not creative in the same way.  And drawing a picture is closer to writing a story than to writing a blog post.  Though I have to admit, at first glance drawing and writing would seem to be somewhat too different to compare.  And yet, I think I’m not the only person who has a deep, intuitive feeling that they are part of a strong, self-similar group.

It’s quite curious.  I wonder if such seemingly odd combinations are common among intelligent life forms.  Of course, if this planet is the only place in the universe on which intelligent life exists, then it’s a universal attribute of such life, if we count only creatures that use languages and create and use artifacts.

Well, this has been a weirdly inconstant blog post, especially for a relatively short one.  It’s not just meandering around among topics, it’s ricocheting.  I would prefer to meander; ricocheting seems like it would be very bad for my chronic back and joint pain.

*If it were 55 degrees Celsius, it would not be chilly at all.  Indeed, many people would be dying around here from the heat.  If it were 55 Kelvin, then, yeah, that would definitely be chilly.  Not that anyone would feel it, because we would all be dead if it were that cold.

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And his brain ate into the worms…

Ugh.  Didn’t we just leave this party?  Evidently, we did not leave it precipitously enough, because here we are‒or at least, here I am‒rejoining it in the morning.

It seems like an ill-advised notion, but then again, I’m not sure who specifically advised me, or any of you, to do it.  There probably were a few literal, formal pieces of advice that we all or each received throughout our lives‒advice about getting up early and going to work and striving to fulfill our potential, and how if we didn’t we were somehow letting ourselves and (more importantly) letting everyone else down.

“The early bird gets the worm” is a typical phrase about such ambition and dedication and hard work.  But like many of us, I’ve often thought that worms are overrated.  They’re not rated highly at all, I’ll admit, but nevertheless, I think they are rated too highly.  Evidently‒according to what I have read‒all earthworms in at least the northern part of North America were killed off in the last ice age.  Nevertheless, plants grew and flourished without verminous help in the soil before Europeans accidentally brought their own earthworms here.

Of course, the saying is metaphorical, I know that.  We’re not really advised to seek earthworms early in the day, though perhaps liver flukes and flatworms and tapeworms and roundworms are also considered as among the worms that might be caught.

No, probably not.

But anyway, even though metaphorical, that saying raises higher level questions, such as, “Is the life of a metaphorical early bird worth having?”

Consider what that life entails:  Getting up (early), pecking around on the ground for worms and probably also for various other insects and their larvae and a few arachnids as well*; trying to avoid, in that process, being caught by some predator (such as a house cat); trying to find and attract a mate when the season is right; helping build a nest, if you’re that kind of bird; guarding the eggs and maybe sitting on them yourself, until they hatch; then, feeding and protecting them until they can fly on their own; then repeating these steps until disease or starvation or one of those house cats gets you.

That’s it.  And while there are many embellishments and flourishes and complications in the typical human life cycle, overall it is much the same as that of the bird.  Why would we expect it to be otherwise?

Admittedly, humans (and humanoids) can dream up other things to do, and some of them are more interesting and fulfilling, from their own points of view at least, than the ordinary early bird pattern.  But though, in the long run, humans as a whole may become significant enough to do something truly meaningful on a cosmic scale, almost all of them have no deeper lives than those lived by the early birds.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course.  Taken with the pertinent attitude, such a life can be well lived and fulfilling.  It probably won’t end happily, because it’s not in the nature of life to be happy when ending; there’s just no real evolutionary benefit to having such a tendency.

Still, before imbibing the so-called Kool-Aid™ of the motivational life-messages‒those social moralities that keep us getting up and joining the rat race (to shoehorn in another animal-related metaphor)‒it would probably behoove us to consider whether that is the life we think we want, to ponder if that overall shape and experience are okay with us as the outline of our lives.

If so, there’s nothing wrong with that.  As long as you’re not interfering with other people’s ability to try to live their lives as they try to see fit**, then do what seems best to you.

But it’s useful to think about what might be the overall shape of your life if you continue as you currently are and if that shape will be aesthetically (or otherwise) pleasing to you.  If not, what change might improve that overall shape, trying to take all reasonably plausible inputs and outputs into consideration?

I won’t say that the unexamined life is not worth living, because, if it’s unexamined, how do you know that it’s not worth living?  Huh?  Huh?  Nevertheless, I will say that the unexamined, unconsidered life could be fulfilling only by accident, whereas it may be possible, with deliberation, to steer toward a better one.

Not that I’m a good piece of evidence in favor of this.  I think and overthink to the point that I hate the noise of my own mind, but I haven’t been able to steer myself into an optimal shape***.  But at least I make a lot of “noise” about such things.  That might be worth something.

Anyway, have a good day.  Enjoy your worms or salads or whatever other life forms you kill and consume to remain alive today (I’m assuming you are not a green plant).  Watch out for the Kool-Aid™ and even more so for the cats.

*I am quite sure that, to such a bird, these things taste delicious, so I don’t mean to disparage their diet as unpalatable.  Appetites of various kinds are species specific; what’s appetizing or sexually attractive to, say, a housefly is unlikely to appeal to any psychologically healthy human.  Likewise, the most beautiful human woman ever is not going to do anything for a male tarantula.  He also probably would have no interest in having a bite of her salad.

**This is more difficult to navigate than it may seem at first, because even when one is acting on one’s own, there are always effects at some level, there are always “externalities”, and occasionally these will have an impact on other people‒a foreseeable but perhaps unforeseen impact.  And vice versa.

***Should there be a “yet” at the end of that sentence?  I don’t know; we’ll have to see what happens to me in the future.  We can be reasonably sure, though, that there shouldn’t be a yeti at the end of that sentence, or of any sentence except one that mentions such creatures.

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Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown; Our blogs are ours, their ends none of our own.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 26th of February in 2026, a date that’s only very slightly interesting whether you write it as 2-26-2026 or 26-2-2026.  The fact that you have repeated 2s and repeated 26s is somewhat entertaining, but the zero throws potential symmetries off, making it not nearly as much fun as it could conceivably be.  It’s a shame, really.  I suppose you could write it as 26-02-2026 and rescue a bit of symmetry, but that feels like reaching.  It’s not quite symmetrical anyway, unless one is writing in base-26 or higher.  No, wait, even that wouldn’t work.

I don’t know about what I’m going to write this morning.  That in itself, of course, is nothing unusual.  But I don’t feel that I have much to say about anything at the moment.  I don’t want to get into my depression and ASD and anxiety and chronic pain and insomnia and just general moribund state, because I’m sure no one wants to hear about it anymore, and in any case, there seems to be no way anyone can do anything about it that’s useful, which makes it all the more frustrating.  Writing about it certainly hasn’t cured or even improved my state much, if at all.

Anyway, as I said the other day, you have been put on notice.  Unless you just started reading my blog for the first time yesterday, you’ve no right to act fucking surprised no matter what happens.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.

Now, let’s see, what should I write today?  I could discuss some topics in science, especially physics, though I also have literal, legally recognized expertise in biology, and I know a lot about quite a few other branches of science as well.  This is because I have always been curious about how the world, the universe, actually and literally works on the largest and on the most fundamental scales.

I mean, yes, humans also have their rules and laws and social mores and antisocial morays and all that nonsense, but if you step back even a bit, you can see nearly all human behavior encapsulated by basic primatology.  If you know how the various monkeys and gibbons and gorillas and chimpanzees behave‒especially their commonalities‒human behavior almost always fits right in.  It’s usually not even very atypical.

That doesn’t make the specifics of behavior very easily predictable in any given case, necessarily; then again, we understand an awful lot about the weather and the climate, but the specifics of tomorrow’s weather are tough to predict precisely and accurately, let alone next week’s weather.  Nevertheless, the physics of longer term climate effects of certain kinds of atmospheric gases is almost trivial.

Anyway, humans are too annoying to be very interesting, except in special circumstances.  In this, they are perhaps a bit like cockroaches.  From the point of view of a scientist who studies them, they can be interesting, and from just the right angle and with the right detachment, they can even be beautiful (or some of them can).  But overall, they are merely large masses of highly redundant little skitterers, just doing their shit-eating and reproducing and infesting almost every possible location.

Which type of creature did I mean to describe just now?  See if you can figure it out.

Of course, on closer scales, cognitive neuroscience and neurodevelopment and related stuff, such as “neural” networks, “deep” learning, and other such areas are fascinating.  One thing interesting about them is how all the things that brains and computers and so on are and do are implicit in the laws of physics‒clearly they are some of the things that stuff in the universe can do‒and yet, for all we know, they have only ever happened here, just this once in all the vast and possibly infinite cosmos*.

And for all we can tell, given the human proclivity to plan about 20 Planck units ahead and then after that trust to luck, this could be the only place they occur, and their time will not continue much longer, certainly not on a cosmic scale.

I could be wrong about that…except in the sense that, since I am stating it merely as one of the possibilities, I am not actually wrong at all.  Even if humans do survive into cosmic time scales and become cosmically significant, it will still not be easily debatable that it could have happened that humans would go extinct and would fail to go anywhere but Earth.

Of course, depending on the question of determinism, I suppose one could say that if humans (or their descendants) become cosmically significant then there literally was nothing else that could have happened, at least as seen from outside, at the “end”.

On the other hand, if Everettian quantum mechanics is the best description of the fundamental nature of reality, then in some sense, every quantum possibility actually happens “somewhere” in the universal quantum wave function, though those variations may not include all conceivably possible human outcomes.

Some things that seem as though they should be possible may simply never happen to occur (or occur to happen?) anywhere in the possible states of the universe.  That feels as though it should be unlikely, given how many possible states can be locally evolved in the quantum wave function, but I don’t think we know enough to be sure.

Okay, well, I vaguely hope that this has been mildly interesting and perhaps thought provoking.  It would be enjoyable to get more feedback and thoughts, but I don’t have a very large readership, and only a certain small percentage of people ever seem to interact with written material in any case, so I’m probably lucky to get the feedback that I get.

TTFN

*With the inescapable caveat that, if the universe is spatially and/or temporally infinite, and if as it seems there are only a finite number of differentiable quantum states in any given region of spacetime (the upper limit of which is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of the given region) then every local thing that happens, and all possible variations thereof, “happen” an infinite number of times.  But given that all these regions are more or less absolutely physically distinct and incapable of “communicating” one with another, they can be considered isolated instances in a “multiverse” rather than parts of the same “local universe”.

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May the slope of your pain function always be negative

I’ve been thinking about something I wrote in my blog post yesterday.  I had thrown out the thought, in passing, about how it seemed as though all the things in my life that I still do are not things I necessarily do for joy or out of desire to achieve some goal, but rather they are things which are more painful not to do than to do, and so I do them.

There isn’t really a positive motivation—not the pursuit of happiness or improvement or fulfillment or enrichment.  It’s just that the feeling of stress and tension and anxiety (or whatever) regarding the prospect of, for instance, not going to work rapidly becomes worse than the equivalent feelings about going to work.

That’s not a great state of affairs.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s entirely natural.  I’ve written about this many times, this recognition of the fact that the negative experiences—fear, pain, revulsion, disgust, and so on—are the biologically most important ones.  Creatures that don’t run from danger, that don’t avoid injury, that don’t shy away from potential infection and poison, are far less likely to survive to reproduce than creatures that do those things.

We see clinical examples of people lacking some of these faculties—such as those with congenital insensitivity to pain—and while we might envy them a life without agony, it tends to be quite a short life.  Also, they tend to become immobile and deformed due to damage they do to their joints by not shifting position to improve blood flow.

In case you didn’t know, that’s one of the reasons you can’t stand completely still for very long; it’s not good for you.

But many of us, especially in the modern world, have some things that we do for positive experience.  Some of them are dubious, but food, sex, companionship/conversation, singing, dancing, all that stuff, are positive things.  Unfortunately, positive experience cannot be allowed—by biology—to last too long.

As Yuval Harari noted, a squirrel that got truly lasting satisfaction from eating a nut would be a squirrel that lived a very short—albeit fairly happy—life, and would be unlikely to leave too many offspring.

Maybe this is what happens to some drug addicts.  Maybe they really do get satisfaction or at least pleasure from drugs—and maybe that is what ends up destroying them.  At some level, that’s not truly in question, is it?  People who are addicted to drugs forego other pleasures and other positive things, but perhaps more importantly, they fail to avoid many sources of pain and fear and injury.

The reality is probably a bit of an amalgam, I suppose.  I would not say it’s a quantum superposition, though, except in the sense that everything is a quantum superposition (or, rather, a whole bunch of them).

This is one situation in which I think I’m right and Roger Penrose is wrong—a bold claim, but I think a fair one—in that I see no reason to suspect that the nature of consciousness either requires or even allows quantum processes, other than in the trivial sense that everything* involves quantum processes.  But there’s no reason seriously to think that (for instance) neurotubules can even sustain a quantum superposition internally, let alone that such a process can somehow affect the other processes of the neuron, many of which are well understood and show no sign of input from weird states of neurotubules, which act mainly structurally in neurons.

If deep learning systems—LLMs and the like—have demonstrated anything, it’s that intuitive thought** does not require anything magical, but rather can be a product of carefully curated, pruned, and adjusted networks of individual data processing units, feeding backward and forward and sideways in specific (but not necessarily preplanned or even well understood) ways.  No quantum magic or neurological voodoo need be involved.

I think too many people, even really smart people like Penrose, really want human intelligence to be something “special”, to be something that cannot be achieved except within human heads, and maybe in the heads of similar creatures.  Surely (they seem to believe) the human mind must have some pseudo-divine spark.  Otherwise, we oh-so-clever humans are just…just creatures in the world, evolved organisms, mortal and evanescent like everyone and everything else.

Which, of course, all the evidence and reasoning seems to suggest is the case.

Maybe, deep down, there isn’t much more to life than trying to choose the path from moment to moment that steers you toward the least “painful” thing you can find.

Please note, I’m not speaking here about some metaphorical continuum, some number line that points toward pleasure in one direction and pain in the other.  That’s at best a toy model.  In the actual body, in the actual nervous system, pain and fear and pleasure and motivation are literally separate systems, though clearly they interact.  Pleasure is not merely the absence of pain, nor is pain merely the absence of pleasure.  Even peripherally, the nerves that carry painful sensations (which include itching, as I noted yesterday!) use different paths and different neurotransmitters than the ones that deal in pleasure and positive sensation.

Within the brain, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (for instances) are separate structures—and more importantly, they perform different functions.  There’s nothing magical about their locations in the brain or the particular neurotransmitters they use.  Those things are accidents of evolutionary past.

There’s nothing inherently stimulating about epinephrine, and there’s nothing inherently soothing about endorphins or oxytocin, and there’s nothing inherently motivating or joyful about dopamine and serotonin.  They are all just molecular keys that have been forged to open specific “locks” or activate (or inactivate) specific processes in parts of other nerve cells (and some other types of cells).  It’s the process that does the work, Neo, not the neurotransmitter.

This brings up a slight pet peeve I have about people discussing “dopamine seeking” (often when talking about ADHD).  I know, the professionals probably use this as a mere shorthand, but that can be misleading to the relatively numerous nonprofessionals in the world.  The brain is not just a chemical vat.  Depression and the like are not just “chemical imbalances” in some ongoing multi-level redux reaction or something, they are malfunctions of complicated processes.  Improving them should be at least as involved as training an AI to recognize cat faces, wouldn’t you think?

But one can do the latter without really knowing the specifics of what is going on in the system.  It’s just sometimes difficult, and the things you think you need to train toward or with often end up giving you what you didn’t really want, or at least what you didn’t expect.

Maybe this is part of why mindfulness is useful (it’s not the only part).  With mindfulness, one actually engages in internal monitoring, not so much of the mechanical processes happening—no amount of mere meditation can reveal the structure of a neuron—but of the higher-scale, “emergent” processes happening, and one can learn from them and be better aware.  This can be an end in and of itself, of course.  But it can also at least sometimes help people decrease the amount of suffering they experience in their lives.

Speaking of that, I hope that reading this post has been at least slightly less painful for you than not reading it would have been.  Writing it has been less painful than I imagine not writing it would have been.  That doesn’t help my other chronic pain, of course, which continues to act up.

*With the possible exception of gravity.

**I.e., nonlinear processing and pattern recognition, the kind many people including Penrose think cannot be explained by ordinary computation, a la Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, etc.

 

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Happy Valentine’s Day, you filthy animals.

Well, guess what.  It’s Saturday now, and I’m writing a blog post, which can only mean that I am working today.  At the last minute, the schedule of the office was changed and now we’re working.  And we’re supposedly going to be doing this now every other (meaning alternating ones) Saturday.  But, of course, I worked last Saturday.  And who knows how things will change in the future?  I’m pretty sure not even the boss knows, because he changes the specifics somewhat irregularly, though there are always colorably reasonable purposes behind such changes.

I suppose I could merely have said, “No, I’m not coming in this weekend.  I worked last weekend, I had to walk to the bank after work and I caused my knees and my pain in general to flare up badly, and that problem continues.  I need a fucking break.”  But, of course, I’m not really built quite that way.  I have been too strongly trained to operate on the approach that to shirk going to work is to be a jerk*.

So, here I am, at the office, and it’s the middle of the night.  That’s right, when it got to be time to leave, I was in too much pain to want to ride the train‒it’s not comfortable to sit in, and I usually have to go to the upper levels to find a seat, which is a little exacerbating and occasionally exasperating‒and I didn’t want to pay to Uber back to the house like I did on Monday and then Thursday for the above reasons, so…I stayed here in the office overnight.

I’m tired of being in pain, I can tell you that.  I wish it were the sort of thing one could simply “get used to”, but biology does not tend to select for creatures that can get used to and ignore pain.  That would defeat the whole usefulness of pain.  Make no mistake:  like fire alarms, pain was and is (and probably always will be) terribly useful.  And “terribly” has more than one legitimate meaning here.

The trouble is that in the modern world, we suffer from and yet survive injuries and disorders that would almost never have been survived by our ancestors, and we can live on with the consequences of these injuries and illnesses for decades, but our nervous systems don’t have any clear function that suppresses or diminishes pain after a while.  There’s no selection pressure favoring such a thing.  Even for our ancestors who might have survived to have chronic pain, that problem tended to develop after peak reproductive years had already passed, and so evolution literally could not and cannot detect the issue.

Indeed, it’s just barely conceivable, though by no means demonstrated, that it might be good for male humans who have injuries that hamper them to feel the pain worsen, to have it lead to them removing themselves from the population in one way or another.  When they can no longer be physical providers, in order to increase the share of resources for their offspring and their other kin, they can kill themselves, directly or indirectly, giving the genes they share with close relatives that harbor that tendency a selective advantage.  This is hypothetical, bordering on speculative, but it might make some sense.

This could also be related to female humans being better suited to endure long-term pain than males, since matrilineal support among human tribes is common***, but that’s getting ever more speculative.

Don’t get me wrong; the ideas are plausible.  But it’s just when one’s ideas are strongly plausible‒but not specifically tested or backed by clear and specific evidence‒that one must be especially harsh and strict with oneself.  It’s comparatively simple, and psychologically rewarding, to come up with plausible and logical hypotheses, but even if one is very smart, most of one’s hypotheses are going to be incorrect.  Whether you’re more Popperian or more Bayesian, the crucial usefulness of testing a hypothesis to try to refute it or to see how your credences shift is inescapable.

This mildly interesting digression doesn’t change the fact that I am in searing pain lately, and it doesn’t seem to diminish much for long.  I’m already prone to dysthymia/chronic depression (veering into the acute stage frequently) and anxiety with at least some obsessive compulsive patterns, all of it occurring in a nervous system that is…atypical from the start.

I hate the world.  I hate my body.  I hate the twisted mockery my life has become.  I hate large parts of my mind (but not all of it).  I hate being around people.  I hate being alone.  I really just ought to stop the whole fucking ride and get off.  I just need to work up the nerve and the commitment.  I’m getting there, believe me.

Anyway, I hope you’re having just a lovely Valentine’s Day.

*And to rhyme all the time is to act like a slime and be covered with grime**.

**I know, none of that makes sense.  It’s not really meant to make sense.  I just accidentally did some internal rhyming in a sentence and that stimulated me to do more of it.

***There are good biological reasons for this as well.  Mothers, and therefore maternal grandmothers, all know whether a child is their child or not, so it’s easier to know that it’s a good idea to spend effort and resources on those descendants.  Males, in general, can not be as certain.

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Who’s hogging all the ground?

It’s Monday, and I think it’s Groundhog* Day in the US, but I may be misremembering that.  It’s never been a holiday to which I’ve paid much attention.  The notion of the groundhog seeing its shadow and that leading to six more weeks of winter is one of those rare superstitions that I don’t think anyone I’ve met actually takes seriously.

I was awake almost the entire night last night.  It’s very frustrating.  On Friday nights (when I don’t work on Saturday) I tend to sedate myself rather thoroughly, though I use only legal, OTC methods.  To a slightly lesser degree, I also do so on Saturday nights, though I have to make sure I get up to do my laundry on Sunday morning.

But then, on Sunday nights‒and to some degree every other weeknight‒I have a terrible time getting to sleep and then staying asleep.  And then my brain becomes ever more frazzled and worn down, even after a relatively restful weekend, at the very beginning of the week, and it rarely improves as the days pass through the weeks.

Of course, my rest isn’t helped by the fact that I’m continuing through a flare-up of my chronic pain.  That’s probably not helped by the unusually cold weather in south Florida; it went down to 33 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday night and about 35 last night.  That’s as chilly as it’s been since I’ve lived down here.  I know, though, that cold weather is not the main culprit behind my pain flare-ups, because they happen at least as often during the middle of the summer, when it is neither cold nor dry.

Also, my chronic pain problem only began after I was living in Florida.  Before coming here, New York City was the warmest place I had lived, but I never developed any chronic pain problems up there.  Of course, I’m older than I used to be, which is what happens when you haven’t died yet.  But that didn’t happen all at once, whereas my chronic pain sort of did‒and not terribly long after I had moved to Florida.  So, the problem is basically internal, a neuromusculoskeletal kind of thingy.  I suppose perhaps changes of pressure might affect it, but temperature doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.

Anyway, sorry, I know that must be tremendously boring.  Believe me, I get quite bored of being in pain, which has been ongoing for more than twenty years, with no days off, not even major holidays.  It gets very, very old.  It certainly contributed to the downfall of the life I had tried to build and to the wreckage in which I now live.  And it’s damnably hard to build anything back up, literally or figuratively, when one is in pain.

So, yeah, a lot of things that stir my ambition‒and ambition has always been a noteworthy part of my character‒get left behind at least partly because I just can’t keep doing things when I’m in pain.  I don’t know if that’s because biology has programmed us not to want to do things that are associated with pain (and most everything in my life is so associated now) or just because dealing with the pain wears out one’s willpower, in a sort of “learned helplessness” situation.  Probably, both aspects are involved, and there are likely to be others as well.

Okay, I know, this is still boring, isn’t it?  Sorry.  I would love to say insightful things or pose interesting questions or make serious comments about various things happening in the world.  But, alas, I am rather overdone.  The more I try to explore what’s happening in my life and mind, the more I have trouble finding much that’s positive.

I am surely an emotional drain on those near me; at the very least, I know that I am unpleasant to be around.  At least I’m not so unkind as to be willing to continue to inflict myself upon others when I know that I am almost always a net negative.

I’m really very worn out, in more than one sense.  And I don’t see much to which to look forward in the world.  Humanity in general is becoming even more disappointing than I expected it to be, which is saying something.  That’s not to say they don’t have their good aspects and individuals, just as I think most of the rest of the “natural world” is no more beautiful or inspiring or beneficent than humans are.

I’m very discouraged.  I suppose the only good thing about my chronic depression is that it would probably need to improve (perhaps due to antidepressants) for me to be able to find the energy to kill myself.  This may seem ironic, even contradictory, but it is a recognized phenomenon.

All right, that’s enough.  It’s time I stopped inflicting myself on all of you, at least for the today.  I hope you all have good days (or a good day overall).  You’ve earned it by reading through my dreck.

*I always thought of it as “Groundhog‘s Day”, but apparently it is not a possessive.

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That was a weird tangent dot com?

Well, it’s Friday, the 30th of January.  We’re almost done with the first month of the year (2026).  Has it been an auspicious month?  Has it been inauspicious?  I suppose the answer to such questions will vary from person to person depending upon how their personal month has gone.  And I suppose that points toward the notion that actual auspices are certainly not any kind of reliable indicator of how the future might go, at least not without great care to separate true patterns from false ones.

On the other hand, it’s not entirely mad to try to draw some potential conclusions about the near future from what’s happening in the present and what has happened in the recent past.  That’s one of the useful skills that’s available to minds that have the capacity to note patterns‒one can try to anticipate the future based on patterns one has noticed over time, and potentially, one can try thereby to avoid outcomes that are undesirable.

Of course, humans do tend to notice patterns that aren’t actually there a lot more than ones that really are there*.  This is usually‒probably‒related to the notion of the differential detriments of different types of errors:  It’s usually more useful to see potential threats that aren’t there than it is not to see potential threats that are there.

I think anyone who stops to think about such things will recognize that the first type of organism will be somewhat more likely to live long enough to reproduce than the second type, though they may be much less comfortable and content in the meantime.  Jumping at shadows can certainly be maladaptive, and too much of it can have a net negative effect on general outcomes, but not jumping at hyenas and lions (for instance) tends to be a very short-lived habit.

This goes back to my frequent talking point that fear, the ability (and it is an ability) to become alarmed and unhappy but energized and driven to fight or flee is going to be present in nearly every lifeform capable of movement over time.  Variations who feel less fear, or none, will not tend to reproduce as much because they are more likely to be killed in any given finite stretch of time, so whatever genetic makeup they have that leads them to lack a fear response, or to be prone to lack it, will not tend to propagate down the generations.

“Genetic makeup”, the term I used in that last sentence (go look, it’s there), made me think of a possible future technology in which people use some CRISPR-style techniques to achieve the effects that hitherto require the use of cosmetics.  They could insert genes into the cells of their cheeks, for instance, to lead them to have more pinkish pigment, or perhaps to make local blood vessels dilate for a nice blushing look, instead of having to use rouge (which is what I think the stuff is called that one applies to make one’s cheeks look pinker).  Or one could generate actual pigments in the cells of one’s upper eyelids, or increase the thickness of one’s eyelashes, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, doing this might entail risks.  Presumably, altering the genes of a given population of cells, even at the local level, could increase the risk of developing cancers, because one cannot perfectly control where genes will insert (at least not so far), and there will always be a chance of mucking up genes that regulate cell division rates.

Once one cell becomes more rapidly reproducing than its companion cells, it will tend to overpower them, in numbers anyway, over time***.  And with rapid and persistently higher rates of reproduction, there come more chances for new mutations to happen.  Those mutations that kill their cells obviously just go away more or less immediately.  Even the ones that revert their cells’ division rates back to “normal” will be quickly locally overwhelmed by the faster growing ones.  But a mutation that encourages even faster division/reproduction will quickly take hold as the dominant cell type, ceteris paribus.

And then, of course, this even more rapidly dividing population of cells will have that many more chances to develop mutations.  And so, down the line, given the billions of cells present in just one’s face, we find the chance for skin cancers to develop, once a cell line becomes so prone to reproduce itself that it cannot be constrained by any local hormonal or immune processes.

That was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  Although, frankly, I could change the title of my blog from “robertelessar.com” to “thatwasaweirdtangent.com” and it would not be inappropriate.

I’ll finish up today with just some basic housekeeping style stuff:

I will probably not work tomorrow, so I will probably not be writing a blog post.  But if I do write one, it will show up here.  I will certainly not be sleeping in the office tonight, but I did sleep here last night.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise, and after work I went to the train station but the train was badly crowded and there were no relatively comfortable seats available, so I gave up and trudged back to the office.

I just felt worn out, and I feared that if I did go back to the house, I might not come to the office today.  And today is payday, of course, and Sunday is the first of a new month, so rent is due (Wouldn’t it be nice if rent was dew?  Maybe not if you lived in the Atacama Desert.  Though a little dew might be very strong currency there, come to think of it, relative to most of the rest of the world). 

Hopefully today will be a better day than yesterday with respect to pain.  So far, at least, it doesn’t feel any worse.  The hard office floor can help a bit sometimes with my back pain.  That makes a certain amount of sense, or at least it may do so.  After all, our ancestral environment did not include mattresses.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, that’s my life.  I mean that seriously.  That’s pretty much all there is to my life:  Getting up and getting to work (while writing a blog post), doing office stuff while dealing with noise and people and tinnitus, not getting long enough breaks because people seem incapable of watching the time, being the last to leave the office, commuting back to the house, trying to get at least a bit of sleep, and then repeating.  There appears to be nothing more than that coming my way until I’m dead.  Which, I think you might be able to understand, becomes more attractive and less frightening as the tedious, exhausted, and painful days go by.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  As for me, I hope at least to be able to sedate myself enough to have a longer-than-usual sleep tonight.  It’s not ideal (pharmacologically induced sleep being generally and significantly less beneficial than natural sleep), but it’s what I have to use.

*Think of the constellations**.

**Won’t someone please think of the constellations!?!?

***It’s like the difference between exponential functions. ab will grow much more rapidly**** when b is 3, for instance, than when b is 2 or 1.5 or 1.1, and so on.

****Stop looking at the negative side of the number line, dammit.  Just stipulate that a is always a positive number.  Or make the function the absolute value of ab, in other words, |ab|.