10 ms·

Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or livi

Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally). Going further, a lot of what we do unconciously is just what a virus or something else "did" to survive or spread in the past, and our free will isn't that free... Edit: "did" wasn't meaning that a specific goal was set, for example, but just that the survival rate was better for certain configuration of atoms

hellofunk 8y ago
It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring. Humans have many natural tendencies that are not socially accepted, and better behavior can be learned and tendencies suppressed. Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring. That ability is itself part of the fundamental biological nature of humans, or whatever. The way you phrased it suggests a Cartesian dualistic interpretation.
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    I have heard it frequently mentioned by interesting scientists (most recently, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson) that this ability to live against natural biological tendencies is unique for humans among the rest of the animal kingdom. So while it may be fundamental to humans, it is not apparently fundamental to the general biology of the world, and humans appear to be an interesting exception.
    - lovich 8y ago
      Dogs do it, albeit with human help. Considering that humans that grew up alone, ie. feral, seem to have no self control either I would think that dogs get to count too
      - hellofunk 8y ago
        Can you give an example of dog behavior that does this? I'm curious.
        dfee 8y ago
        Here’s that behavior on display: https://www.reddit.com/r/rarepuppers/comments/9ime34/heckin_gud_girle_resists_temptashun/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rarepuppers/comments/9ime34/heckin_...
        lovich 8y ago
        Not sure why you are being downvoted. This link is one of the recent examples I was thinking of. The dog has been taught to not eat the food even when a human isn't around protecting the food. That requires ignoring one part of its biology for other benefits.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      Color me skeptical of the idea that humans can really go against the grain of their evolved instincts. What seems much more likely is: 1) A large subset of people possess instincts that were successful for reproduction in the ancestral environment, but are no longer so. See also plummeting birth rates despite being at the historical peak in terms of access to resources for the average person (in the developed world, at least). 2) Some people's evolved instincts are to play a long game based on building reputation and then leveraging that reputation over the long term, rather than pursuing immediate wants and desires. Such an instinct will produce a lot of behavior that seems out of line with a naive interpretation of how we "should" be evolved to behave.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life. The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.
  - manmal 8y ago
    Most institutions don’t want to let their clients go—why should AA be any different.
    - dustingetz 8y ago
      i think you have it backwards- institutions that don’t self sustain, don’t survive.
      - wnoise 8y ago
        That's an explanation for the observed phenomenon, not him getting it backwards.
      - manmal 8y ago
        IDK. There’s no shortage of alcoholics, so they could deal with people exiting after 2y or so, without dissolving. Instead, they are like boy/girlscouts for grownups without the age limit.
  - mercer 8y ago
    The more specific statements about addicts become, the more cautious I tend to be. That said, I do at least agree that your quote is rather particular to AA, and not shared by other programs, like SMART. The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous. The way I see it, a less dichotomous perspective such as that of SMART is a better starting point than the 'once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic' approach of AA. And if SMART doesn't work, AA might very well be the only solution left.
- neom 8y ago
  Just read about ibogaine if you'd like to learn about how possible and easy "curing" addiction can be. :)
x220 8y ago
We aren't just a product of that, we are also a product of human sexual selection and epigenetic inheritance of individually acquired traits. Many of your important traits (such as general intelligence) were acquired in part by conscious processes by your ancestors.
- ergothus 8y ago
  That's a bit circular...I may choose to breed with someone, but i do that because I find them attractive (because DNA tells me what is attractive), because my (known in humans to be inaccurate) risk assessment says it is worth it, etc. Plus, of the countless decisions I make every day, almost none of them are conscious. I can retroactively justify them as if they had been, but studies show we are far less conscious thinkers than we think we are. Ultimately, until we resolve the mind-body problem, we cant say that our decisions are based on more than a chaotic soup of interacting proteins and electrical sparks that are only marginally distinct from our environment.
  - milesvp 8y ago
    So, while yes, we have lots of fmri data that suggests our mind makes decisions for us, then convinces us that we made the decision conciously. I suspect it's a mistake to take this to the logical conclusion that we can make no conscious decisions. Even if consciousness is a complete illusion that our mind fabricated for us, we still seem to have some control over our reactions. I say this as someone who is teaching my children better reactions to what life throws at them, and similarly having to mediate my own responses to mistakes they make. Even if all this is happening at the margin, that seems to be enough for us to have some profound differences in how successful we are at navigating life.
    - ergothus 8y ago
      > I suspect it's a mistake to take this to the logical conclusion that we can make no conscious decisions. And I don't! I consider it unproven, but a duality option definitely remains an option. Plus, there's always the default excuse that if I assume consciousness is reality when I can't in fact decide, well, then I can't be blamed for coming to that conclusion :) That said, I think we really need to pay attention to how many "conscious" decisions we don't bother to be conscious for. I have a personal theory that consciousness is a state that is generally invoked only when the mind doesn't have a preset behavior - consciousness is invoked to ponder "what if" and decide what to do. Once we have prescribed behavior, consciousness shuts down. Thus, we might be "conscious" for only a few hours or even less in an average day. If so, we CAN be self-aware more often, but it takes effort. Side Note: This theory is based in part on the idea that there's an advantage in minimizing conscious time - be that caloric requirements or an innate danger of being too aware. I've recently read some claims that hurt the caloric argument (brains are high caloric things, but that doesn't mean consciousness requires more calories) but the innate dangers of overthinking remain strong but vague and anecdotal. Finding ways to make and support this theory without lapsing into it being an automatic (and thus not trigging awareness) response gets more tricky each time :)
EGreg 8y ago
Is that like saying “we are nothing but atoms”? I agree that atoms are necessary, but how do we know they are sufficient for consciousness? Can you prove the “nothing but” part?
benmowa 8y ago
Reminds me of one of my favorite books titled: Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes, by Charles Seife One item discussed in the book that we as humans may just be a transport method for the data within DNA to survive time. Because without some replication it would get trapped and cease to exist.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) actually explores the idea that organisms began as DNA replicating 'machines'.
roywiggins 8y ago
All eukaryotic mitochondria probably used to be free-living organisms too.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
We are code. And often buggy code at that. Yet it's the random and imperfections that allow us to - for better or worse - persist.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally). That's our bodies, not us. "Every time I find interesting (and fighting)" that people believe they are nothing but a collection of cells, chemicals and feelings. Most people (outside the audience of the HN perhaps) don't even recognize that the feelings are actually the chemicals and have little to do even with the objective reality, needless to say with their true self. Believing you are your body is almost the same as believing that you are your car or your GitHub account. That's not we, that's our bodies, our "cars" with baggage (memories etc) in them, in our true self "we are all Kosh" © Overwhelming majority of people just live in permanent "rubber hand illusion". Getting rid of the illusion and recalling who you actually are is, however, easy as 1-2-3: 1. get cousciously aware of your emotions and thoughts, distance from them and obseve them 2. turn your inner gaze from them to the direction of where do you feel you observe them from 3. recognize that what you see there (it looks like just nothing, just conscious "empty space") is the actual you and you will never be able to "unsee' that. One doesn't need any kind of religion or spirituality to realize this (although it actually is taught in the Tibetan religious tradition of Dzogchen), it is as simple as realizing the rubber hand is not a part of your body.
- cgio 8y ago
  Are we not a little bit our car and our github account though? Growing up I wondered whether you could peel the banana all the way to its core of nothingness.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    My recommendation is to keep wondering. As for me it took me about 30 years of wondering before I've suddenly found it (by stumbling upon this fairly fun Buddhist monk lecture[1] while being extremely depressed and afraid and searching through YouTube looking for some psychological technique to relieve that). Whatever what I've found is from the philosophic or spiritual point of view, from the pragmatic point of view it seems an extremely powerful key to emotional well-being. AFAIK there is a fair amount of scientific research effort taking place around mindfulness and other Buddhist stuff, perhaps sooner or later this is going to draw some scientific attention too. By the way, it seems at least some scientifically-minded people happen to come to similar ideas occasionally, e.g. I've recently stumbled upon similar concepts in a book by Itzhak Bentov and was delighted by his scientific manner of exploration of the question of "life, universe, and everything". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frQVcizEkmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frQVcizEkmI

hellofunk 8y ago

It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring. Humans have many natural tendencies that are not socially accepted, and better behavior can be learned and tendencies suppressed. Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life.

danharaj 8y ago
> It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring. That ability is itself part of the fundamental biological nature of humans, or whatever. The way you phrased it suggests a Cartesian dualistic interpretation.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  I have heard it frequently mentioned by interesting scientists (most recently, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson) that this ability to live against natural biological tendencies is unique for humans among the rest of the animal kingdom. So while it may be fundamental to humans, it is not apparently fundamental to the general biology of the world, and humans appear to be an interesting exception.
  - lovich 8y ago
    Dogs do it, albeit with human help. Considering that humans that grew up alone, ie. feral, seem to have no self control either I would think that dogs get to count too
    - hellofunk 8y ago
      Can you give an example of dog behavior that does this? I'm curious.
      - dfee 8y ago
        Here’s that behavior on display: https://www.reddit.com/r/rarepuppers/comments/9ime34/heckin_gud_girle_resists_temptashun/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rarepuppers/comments/9ime34/heckin_...
        lovich 8y ago
        Not sure why you are being downvoted. This link is one of the recent examples I was thinking of. The dog has been taught to not eat the food even when a human isn't around protecting the food. That requires ignoring one part of its biology for other benefits.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    Color me skeptical of the idea that humans can really go against the grain of their evolved instincts. What seems much more likely is: 1) A large subset of people possess instincts that were successful for reproduction in the ancestral environment, but are no longer so. See also plummeting birth rates despite being at the historical peak in terms of access to resources for the average person (in the developed world, at least). 2) Some people's evolved instincts are to play a long game based on building reputation and then leveraging that reputation over the long term, rather than pursuing immediate wants and desires. Such an instinct will produce a lot of behavior that seems out of line with a naive interpretation of how we "should" be evolved to behave.
coldtea 8y ago
>Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life. The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.
- manmal 8y ago
  Most institutions don’t want to let their clients go—why should AA be any different.
  - dustingetz 8y ago
    i think you have it backwards- institutions that don’t self sustain, don’t survive.
    - wnoise 8y ago
      That's an explanation for the observed phenomenon, not him getting it backwards.
    - manmal 8y ago
      IDK. There’s no shortage of alcoholics, so they could deal with people exiting after 2y or so, without dissolving. Instead, they are like boy/girlscouts for grownups without the age limit.
- mercer 8y ago
  The more specific statements about addicts become, the more cautious I tend to be. That said, I do at least agree that your quote is rather particular to AA, and not shared by other programs, like SMART. The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous. The way I see it, a less dichotomous perspective such as that of SMART is a better starting point than the 'once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic' approach of AA. And if SMART doesn't work, AA might very well be the only solution left.
neom 8y ago
Just read about ibogaine if you'd like to learn about how possible and easy "curing" addiction can be. :)

x220 8y ago

We aren't just a product of that, we are also a product of human sexual selection and epigenetic inheritance of individually acquired traits. Many of your important traits (such as general intelligence) were acquired in part by conscious processes by your ancestors.

ergothus 8y ago
That's a bit circular...I may choose to breed with someone, but i do that because I find them attractive (because DNA tells me what is attractive), because my (known in humans to be inaccurate) risk assessment says it is worth it, etc. Plus, of the countless decisions I make every day, almost none of them are conscious. I can retroactively justify them as if they had been, but studies show we are far less conscious thinkers than we think we are. Ultimately, until we resolve the mind-body problem, we cant say that our decisions are based on more than a chaotic soup of interacting proteins and electrical sparks that are only marginally distinct from our environment.
- milesvp 8y ago
  So, while yes, we have lots of fmri data that suggests our mind makes decisions for us, then convinces us that we made the decision conciously. I suspect it's a mistake to take this to the logical conclusion that we can make no conscious decisions. Even if consciousness is a complete illusion that our mind fabricated for us, we still seem to have some control over our reactions. I say this as someone who is teaching my children better reactions to what life throws at them, and similarly having to mediate my own responses to mistakes they make. Even if all this is happening at the margin, that seems to be enough for us to have some profound differences in how successful we are at navigating life.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    > I suspect it's a mistake to take this to the logical conclusion that we can make no conscious decisions. And I don't! I consider it unproven, but a duality option definitely remains an option. Plus, there's always the default excuse that if I assume consciousness is reality when I can't in fact decide, well, then I can't be blamed for coming to that conclusion :) That said, I think we really need to pay attention to how many "conscious" decisions we don't bother to be conscious for. I have a personal theory that consciousness is a state that is generally invoked only when the mind doesn't have a preset behavior - consciousness is invoked to ponder "what if" and decide what to do. Once we have prescribed behavior, consciousness shuts down. Thus, we might be "conscious" for only a few hours or even less in an average day. If so, we CAN be self-aware more often, but it takes effort. Side Note: This theory is based in part on the idea that there's an advantage in minimizing conscious time - be that caloric requirements or an innate danger of being too aware. I've recently read some claims that hurt the caloric argument (brains are high caloric things, but that doesn't mean consciousness requires more calories) but the innate dangers of overthinking remain strong but vague and anecdotal. Finding ways to make and support this theory without lapsing into it being an automatic (and thus not trigging awareness) response gets more tricky each time :)

EGreg 8y ago

Is that like saying “we are nothing but atoms”? I agree that atoms are necessary, but how do we know they are sufficient for consciousness? Can you prove the “nothing but” part?

benmowa 8y ago

Reminds me of one of my favorite books titled: Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes, by Charles Seife One item discussed in the book that we as humans may just be a transport method for the data within DNA to survive time. Because without some replication it would get trapped and cease to exist.

paulryanrogers 8y ago
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) actually explores the idea that organisms began as DNA replicating 'machines'.

roywiggins 8y ago

All eukaryotic mitochondria probably used to be free-living organisms too.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

We are code. And often buggy code at that. Yet it's the random and imperfections that allow us to - for better or worse - persist.

qwerty456127 8y ago

> Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally). That's our bodies, not us. "Every time I find interesting (and fighting)" that people believe they are nothing but a collection of cells, chemicals and feelings. Most people (outside the audience of the HN perhaps) don't even recognize that the feelings are actually the chemicals and have little to do even with the objective reality, needless to say with their true self. Believing you are your body is almost the same as believing that you are your car or your GitHub account. That's not we, that's our bodies, our "cars" with baggage (memories etc) in them, in our true self "we are all Kosh" © Overwhelming majority of people just live in permanent "rubber hand illusion". Getting rid of the illusion and recalling who you actually are is, however, easy as 1-2-3: 1. get cousciously aware of your emotions and thoughts, distance from them and obseve them 2. turn your inner gaze from them to the direction of where do you feel you observe them from 3. recognize that what you see there (it looks like just nothing, just conscious "empty space") is the actual you and you will never be able to "unsee' that. One doesn't need any kind of religion or spirituality to realize this (although it actually is taught in the Tibetan religious tradition of Dzogchen), it is as simple as realizing the rubber hand is not a part of your body.

cgio 8y ago
Are we not a little bit our car and our github account though? Growing up I wondered whether you could peel the banana all the way to its core of nothingness.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  My recommendation is to keep wondering. As for me it took me about 30 years of wondering before I've suddenly found it (by stumbling upon this fairly fun Buddhist monk lecture[1] while being extremely depressed and afraid and searching through YouTube looking for some psychological technique to relieve that). Whatever what I've found is from the philosophic or spiritual point of view, from the pragmatic point of view it seems an extremely powerful key to emotional well-being. AFAIK there is a fair amount of scientific research effort taking place around mindfulness and other Buddhist stuff, perhaps sooner or later this is going to draw some scientific attention too. By the way, it seems at least some scientifically-minded people happen to come to similar ideas occasionally, e.g. I've recently stumbled upon similar concepts in a book by Itzhak Bentov and was delighted by his scientific manner of exploration of the question of "life, universe, and everything". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frQVcizEkmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frQVcizEkmI