development and repair

I cut my finger a few days ago. It stopped bleeding, but the next day I bumped it on something and it bled some more.

I was thinking about how it heals. There are some mechanisms that detect injury and deploy repair processes. But it never goes back exactly to how it was before the injury.

Scar tissue is an obvious example, but I wonder if this is pervasive, essentially because there are different mechanisms for healing than for development.

I wonder if it's difficult for evolution to find healing mechanisms that exactly replicate development mechanisms. If they only approximate, then over time your body (originally patterned through development to function well) is gradually replaced by structures that are trying imperfectly to replicate the original ones.

Could species with low senescence be the ones that keep re-using their developmental mechanisms?

Would that also mean that solving ageing could be nearly impossible because we'd have to design repair mechanisms that perfectly match all the developmental mechanisms?

great filter

1) you could say intelligence means being able to give yourself what you want.

2) giving yourself what you want often isn't good for you. food makes you fat, youtube videos make you conservative or liberal.

3) does this explain why we don't see intelligent life anywhere in the universe?

there are feedback mechanisms to defend against getting fat, like dieting. but could it be that as our ability to give ourselves what we want in many domains accelerates, it overpowers those mechanisms. is this what inevitably kills any intelligent species?

ps. this is steve's idea

hot-cold cycles

one other connection clicked with me this weekend. maybe it's pretty obvious, but i never noticed it before. in some spiritual practices there's a concept of alternating between:
1) forcing yourself to focus (which is in a way kind of unnatural), and
2) allowing yourself to not focus.
like, tibetan buddhism calls it "intensifying" and "easing up".

meanwhile, i've been kind of obsessed with the tradeoff between "accepting yourself" and "challenging yourself". challenging myself is like: i try to find what i'm afraid of, and force myself to let it happen. that helps me get past some of my fears, even though i always dread doing it. but, accepting myself is that i don't have to do that all the time, i can just rest and accept that i have fears and that they're causing problems for myself and other people.

i think that tradeoff (challenging vs accepting) has been interesting to me because i've never been able to find any kind of conceptual framework to get underneath those concepts. it seems like there's value in being kind to yourself, but also value in challenging yourself, even though they're almost opposite.

anyway, the question is: could the rhythm of challenging and accepting be the same as the heating and cooling cycles that seem to be necessary for life?

GANs, arms races, and self-consciousness

in evolution, there are always arms races between competing organisms. each organism has to form a model of the other one, in order to somehow outsmart it. that forces you to keep coming up with novel, creative solutions, because you have to do something that the other guy currently doesn't have a model of. this is similar to the idea of generative adversarial networks.

i wonder if what happened that made humans special, is that that process got condensed to happen inside a single organism. at some point, like ~70,000 years ago maybe, social interactions became the dominant factor in our fitness. so we developed the ability to model other people's minds incredibly well (people have argued this is why we have big brains).

but the unforeseen consequence was that you effectively have multiple minds running inside a single brain, and they're evaluating each other. maybe this sometimes feels like self-consciousness, although i think the feeling we usually call "self-consciousness" is just a subset of this.

that's like a high-bandwidth (since it's inside a single brain) version of the GANs or arms-race phenomenon that's happened throughout evolution. these models of other people's minds are constantly providing error signals (probably all the time, including during sleep) that are updating your "own" mind. that could be what drives us to have such rich minds.

http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/#/president-trump

even if i concentrate on trying to be aware of my own bias, it's still hard to avoid a gut reaction of disagreeing with the conservative posts.

what if we think of this as a psychology experiment that reveals our own bias to us?

for example, no matter how many times you see your own (retinal) blind spot, you don't start to think that there's actually a hole in the world; you accept that it's just an artifact of your perception.

likewise, imagine if you're presented with conservative news stories, and you feel yourself disagreeing with them, but you simultaneously recognize that that disagreement is just a quirky psychological artifact... (or vice versa if you're a conservative)