What I've Been Reading

Unicellular genes that enhance competition and survival are precisely those genes that cause cancer in multicellular organisms. The seed of cancer already exists in every multicellular organism, because it is simply a remnant of our evolutionary past. When the new rule break down, the old unicellular behaviors reassert themselves. The seed of cancer grows, is immortal, moves around, and uses the Warburg effect. This is an ancient tool kit of survival responses. These are the hallmarks of cancer. This is the new invasive species known as cancer. 

The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Dr. Jason Fung.

Dr. Jason's book was published few months after Max passed away but until I read this book, I have no idea that cancer is a unicellular organism that was competing with Max and every one of us who are multicellular organisms. This changes everything I knew about cancer and the treatment options. To be clear, none of the treatments given to Max nor available now are nothing but playing Russian roulette with not only genetics, lifestyle, ecology but against a primordial unicellular organism which is evolved before we did. 

What is Cancer?

The term cancer does not refer to a single disease, but denotes a collection of many different diseases related to certain qualities. Something can be considered cancer when it has the following 8 characteristics:

• Grows
• It sustains proliferative signaling
• It evades growth suppressors
• It resists cell death
• It induces angiogenesis.
• Is Immortal
• It enables replicative immortality
• Moves Around
• It activates invasion and metastasis
• It evades immune destruction
• Uses the Warburg Effect
• It deregulates cellular energetics

Benign cancer shares all the first five characteristics and without the ability to metastasize, cancer is more a nuisance than a serious health concern. 

Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT)

The basic postulates of SMT include: 

1. Cancer is caused by acquiring multiple DNA mutations.
2. These mutations accumulate randomly.
3. The cells in the tumor are all derived from one original clone. 

The somatic mutation theory of carcinogenesis patched together all the disparate know causes of cancer into a coherent, unified theory (mine: very similar to a religious, free-market, or soviet style ideologies).  This paradigm focused research from extrinsic agents (chemicals, radiations, and viruses) onto intrinsic defects (genetic mutations). 

The great contemporary thinker and philosopher Nassim Taleb often uses this allegory of the Procrustean bed to describe how facts are often tortured to fit a certain narrative. The widely and often blindly followed somatic mutation theory of cancer required a Procrustean bed to fit the facts, too. 

Cancer was far, far more different genetically than they were alike since:

• Different types of cancer had different mutations 
• The same type of cancer in different patients had different mutations. 
• The same cancer in the same patient had different mutations in the primary tumor compared to metastatic cancer. 
• The same cancer in the same patient had different mutations in different mutations at different sites of metastasis. 
• The same cancer in the same patients in the same tumor mass had different mutations. 

Cancer was a baffling mishmash of genetic peculiarities that had almost no connection to one another. Genetic mutations were everywhere and nowhere. Some cancers had hundreds of mutations, and others had none at all. The rate of mutations necessary to develop a cancer is much higher than the known rate of mutation in human cells. Normal cells just don't mutate anywhere close to the rate needed to produce cancer. Finally, the genetic mutations were a proximate, rather than a root, cause of cancer. 

Genetic mutations may explain the mechanism of how cancers keep growing, but they do not explain the fundamental question of why these genes mutated. The SMT fails because it is entirely inward-looking, towards our genes, instead of outward-looking, toward the environment. The seed is important, but the soil matters most. 

Cancer is older than humanity

The oncogenes and the tumor suppressor genes discovered so laboriously over the last quarter-century are mutations of normal genes. Every single cell in our body contains the seed of cancer. Why?

Dogs get cancer. Cats get cancer. Rats get cancer. Even the most primitive multicellular organisms develop cancer. In 2014, cancer was discovered in two species of hydra. You may recall from high school biology class that hydra are simple, small aquatic organisms that evolved very early on from single-cell organisms. 

The origins of cancer are found at the origins of all multicellular life itself. This may have seemed obvious to a cancer outsider, but not to an insider with the curse of knowledge. Cancer is very deeply embedded into the way multicellular life is done. 

Cancer is older than humanity. Searching for the answers to cancer's origin among the evolutionarily recent genes of humans is futile. The answers are simply not there. Cancer was something much older and more fundamental to life on earth than humanity. 

Single-cell organisms differ from multicellular organisms by the following four main characteristics: 

1. They grow
2. They are immortal
3. They move around
4. They use glycolysis (also called the Warburg effect)

These are precisely the characteristics of cancer!

Cancer originates from cells of a multicellular organism, but it behaves precisely as a single-cell organism. This is a spectacular and novel finding. 

The roots of cancer lie in our evolutionary past. Perhaps cancer was not a forward-looking evolutionary process, but a backward-looking one. 

Today's standard cancer treatments resemble ancient existential threats: radiation (pre-ozone layer), poison, and antimetabolites (nutritional challenges, periodic starvation). Unicellular cells are no strangers to these threats and have evolved effective responses to flourish under these precise conditions. 

We've long treated cancer as some kind of random genetic mistake. A mistake that arises in all animals throughout history and evolves independently in millions of people a year? Cancer is hardly a mistake. Cancer is the ultimate survivor. When all else dies, cancer is there because it is the core of the cell that will survive at all costs. Cancer is not random, and it is not stupid. It has developed the tools it needs to survive. 

This model fits the known facts of cancer better than any previous paradigm. Undoubtedly, this will not be the final word on cancer, and it should not be judged as such. Nor are all its suppositions proven facts. There will always be much to learn about cancer, but I believe this new paradigm is a huge and useful step forward, explaining many of cancer's mysteries. 

Nutrition & Cancer: 

Fiber - By comparative study between African (with lots of fiber) and Western diet (little fiber); cancer was not simply a disease of too little fiber, and thus, eating more fiber didn't translate into less cancer. 

Fat - By comparative study between South Pacific Islanders (with lots of fat) and Indian vegetarians (low fat); lowering dietary fat resulted in no measurable protection against cancer. 

Vitamins - When vital nutrients like beta-carotene are available in large doses, cancer cells are highly active and grow like weeds. Same with folic acid (vitamin B9), Vitamin E while Vitamin C, D, and Omega-3 oils were neutral. High-dose vitamins promote cell growth. It is really that simple. 

But diet plays a large role in cancer. 

• Obesity clearly increases the risk of cancer. Obesity also clearly increases the risk of type 2 diabetics. The link - insulin. 
• Avoid - Sugar and refined grains which leads to hyperinsulinemia. 
• Insulin is an important nutrient sensor, signaling the presence of food, but what does that have to do with cancer? Everything! The nutrient sensor insulin is also a highly potent growth factor. 
• Each increase in ten centimeters in height is associated with a 16 percent increase in the risk of cancer. Growth factors increase height. Growth factors also increase cancer risk. 
• The most widely studied natural food for cancer chemoprevention (term used to denote foods, supplements, or drugs that may block progression of cancer) is green tea, which contains high levels of catechins. 

Growth - The common thread that runs through all conditions of increased weight, increased weight, increased eyeball length (myopia), and cancer is that they are all conditions of excessive growth. We often think growth is good, but the truth is that in adults, growth is not necessary or even good. Quite the contrary, growth is bad, sometimes very bad. 

Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) - This was an astonishing revelation for biologists - the equivalent of discovering a new continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Hundreds of years of medical science had somehow missed this fundamental nutrient-sensing pathway that was so essential to life on earth that it had been conserved in animals from yeast all the way to humans. In an evolutionary sense, mTOR is older even than the much better-known sensor insulin. The mTOR pathway is found in virtually all life-forms, rather than just mammals, so the name was changed to a mechanistic target of rapamycin, but it retained its catchy moniker "mTOR". 

AMPK - The nutrient sensors insulin and mTOR respond mainly to dietary intake of carbohydrates and proteins. The nutrient sensor AMPK, however, assesses the overall available cellular energy. 

• Lots of energy stored = low AMPK
• LIttle energy stored = high AMPK
• High AMPK lowers mTOR activity, slowing growth down. AMPK increases the production of new mitochondria, the energy makers in cells, to increase the cell's capacity for burning fat. AMPK also increases autophagy, the important cellular self-cleansing, and the recycling process. 
• Foods and drugs that activate AMPK - Diabetes drug metformin; resveratrol from grapes and red wine; epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) from green tea and chocolate; capsaicin from peppers; turmeric, garlic, and the traditional Chinese medical herb berberine. Calorie restriction also activates AMPK. 

Autophagy - The word autophagy derives from the Greek word auto, meaning "self" and phagein, meaning "to eat", so it literally means "eating oneself". Autophagy is a regulated, orderly process of degrading cellular components to be recycled into new ones. Autophagy functions as a cellular housekeeper, when mTOR is high, putting the cell into growth mode, so autophagy and mitophagy (the process of removing old and damaged mitochondria) turn off. 

• Nutrient deprivation, especially protein deprivation lowers mTOR and activates autophagy. 

Metastasis:

Cancer cells break off the primary tumor to find more room to grow. This happens early in cancer's course, as the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) consume nutrients rapidly and are very quickly driven by the increased competition for resources. This new environmental stress creates new evolutionary selection pressures. 

Unfortunately, these CTCs find out that the bloodstream is a terribly hostile environment, and most just die. One day, a rare genetic mutant arises that is able to survive both the immune cell attack and the travel through the bloodstream long enough to circulate back to the original tumor site. 

As it returns home, it finds a sanctuary against all the scary things trying to kill it, and it recovers. The tumor has just self-seeded. But this returning cancer is more aggressive and just a tiny bit better able to survive in the bloodstream. This more aggressive variant multiplies within the safety of the primary tumor site. It dominates and outcompetes the incumbent cancer cells. This cycle of tumor self-seeding and metastasis repeats over and over, with cancer continually evolving over time its ability to survive the bloodstream. 

Eventually, a rare genetic mutation allows the cancer cells to reach the new distant shore of the other organs and manage to survive. They might not thrive, but at least they're not dead. This micrometastasis is so small that it is undetectable and may lie dormant for decades. Invasion and metastasis are difficult to skills to master, and most cancers fail. 

Given enough time, Darwinian evolutionary processes select a rare genetic variant to flourish, and the little outpost of metastatic cancer cells grows. Cancer has just become metastatic. This slow process from initial carcinogenesis to metastasis takes decades. 

New Dawn:

The evolutionary/ecologic paradigm recognizes the importance of cell-to-cell interactions and interactions with the environment, making it a far more dynamic, inclusive, and comprehensive theory of cancer. Evolutionary biology links carcinogenesis, progression, and metastasis, whereas genetics considers them all as separate issues. 

This idea is not new; it just needed to be rediscovered. "Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars," wrote cancer researcher D.W. Smithers in 1962. A traffic jam results from the interaction between the car, neighboring cars, and the environment. If you look only at each individual car - Are the brakes working? Was it recently serviced? - you will fail to find the problem. 

Similarly, cancer is not only a genetic disease but also an ecological disease. The environment plays a huge role in determining whether cancer grows. Under certain conditions, such as high insulin levels, cancer will thrive, while under other conditions, it will fail to establish itself. 

Treatments:

Screening

Simply catching more early-stage diseases is not useful by itself. In breast and colorectal cancer, screening reduced late-stage disease but in prostate, esophageal, and pancreatic cancer it has not, and that makes all the difference in the world. 

Many of the early-stage breast cancers are unlikely to ever progress to a dangerous state - as the evolutionary model explains, cancer can be fully contained by the body's own anti-cancer mechanisms. Aggressive treatment of early cancers is simply unnecessary. With toxic treatments such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, the treatment may be worse than the disease. 

Finding and treating cancers that don't need to be treated is not a useful strategy. 

Without good evidence of the benefits of screening, and a better understanding of why it may fail, we must rely on the ancient medical guiding principle of Primum non-nocere, which means, "First, do no harm." 

Dietary Determinants

Autopsy studies find unsuspected prostate cancer in 30 percent of men over the age of fifty, 50 percent by age seventy, and an astounding 80 percent by age ninety. Because the seed of cancer is ever-present in all our cells, an important question is: why don't you get cancer? If it is not a seed problem, then it may be a soil problem. Diet is a hugely important determinant of progression because nutrient availability is inextricably linked to cell growth, particularly for cancer cells. For the most part, dietary prevention of cancer boils down to one key strategy: avoiding diseases of hyperinsulinemia, including obesity and type-2 diabetes.   

Ketones

When fat is metabolized for energy, molecules called ketone bodies are produced, which cancer cells have difficulty using. By simulating the breakdown of muscle protein, amino acids are delivered to the liver and converted to glucose, which cancer cells love. So, while weight loss may be a useful strategy to prevent the progression of cancer, cancer cachexia (a phenomenon of unintentional weight loss in patients with advanced disease), once advanced, limits the effect of diet on cancer treatment. Reducing glucose in an attempt to "starve" cancer is only modestly hopeful because advanced cancer can break down other tissues to free the glucose it needs. Dietary therapy must likely be combined with other treatments to be effective at this stage.

Fasting & Cancer:

• Intermittent fasting is a promising nutritional approach for cancer prevention, as it protects against many risk factors such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and inflammation. 
• Fasting simultaneously reduces all human nutrient sensors, most of the growth pathways, and also increases autophagy and mitoghagy. 
• Fasting during chemotherapy may also reduce the side effects of treatment while increasing efficacy. Fasting protects the normal cells by putting them into a quiescent state, or maintenance mode, which may help mitigate chemotherapy side effects of hair loss and nausea. Cancer cells do not enjoy this protective state because their genetic programming puts them into continuous growth mode. 

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy has several inherent advantages over conventional treatments. 

• The boosted immune system is a dynamic system that can better keep pace with cancer's moves. The immune system can adjust and evolve alongside the cancer. 
• Immune system has a memory, so it may prevent recurrence. 
• Immunotherapy has fewer side effects than standard chemotherapies because the immune system is a targeted treatment. 
• Immunotherapy is a systemic treatment, which is crucial because cancer is a systemic disease. Metastasis occurs early in the disease process, so a systemic therapy can treat potential micrometastases throughout the body. The immune system can lock on and destroy cancer cells and does not need to be manually targeted in the same way as local treatments like surgery and radiation. The systemic nature of treatment also means that immunotherapy may be effective even very late in the disease process, after the cancer has metastasized. 

Condorcet's Jury Theorem

Condorcet's jury theorem is a political science theorem about the relative probability of a given group of individuals arriving at a correct decision. The theorem was first expressed by the Marquis de Condorcet in his 1785 work Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions.

The assumptions of the simplest version of the theorem are that a group wishes to reach a decision by majority vote. One of the two outcomes of the vote is correct, and each voter has an independent probability p of voting for the correct decision. The theorem asks how many voters we should include in the group. The result depends on whether p is greater than or less than 1/2:

• If p is greater than 1/2 (each voter is more likely to vote correctly), then adding more voters increases the probability that the majority decision is correct. In the limit, the probability that the majority votes correctly approaches 1 as the number of voters increases.
• On the other hand, if p is less than 1/2 (each voter is more likely to vote incorrectly), then adding more voters makes things worse: the optimal jury consists of a single voter.

- That's from Wikipedia

In other words, the wisdom of crowds depends on each individual sapiens' "enhanced" wisdom. If most people are knowledgeable, then the crowd's wisdom works, but if most people are leading just a "busy" self-centered life or worse biased view of the world, then the wisdom of the crowd goes down the drain. 

This has huge consequences on democracy, the free market, and yeah, civilization as we know. 

I rest my case.  It's amazing how we made it this far. 

Misguided Moral Enthusiasm + Selective Knowledge = Unleashing Evil + Terror

Karl Popper's 1942 book,  Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge has "few"  timely insights for myself and for the rest of my fellow sapiens who like to nurture Adam Smith's famous impartial spectator inside them. 

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.

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The main troubles of our time--and I do not deny that we live in troubled times--are not due to our moral wickedness, but, on the contrary, to our often misguided moral enthusiasm: to our anxiety to better the world we live in. Our wars are fundamentally religious wars; they are wars between competing theories of how to establish a better world. And our moral enthusiasm is often misguided because we fail to realize that our moral principles, which are sure to be over-simple, are often difficult to apply to the complex human and political situations to which we feel bound to apply them.

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And it implies that if we respect truth, we must search for it by persistently searching for our errors: by indefatigable rational criticism, and self-criticism.

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The method of learning by trial and error—of learning from our mistakes—seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science.

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I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still 'un-analysed' and crying aloud for treatment.

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The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which 'verified' the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation--which revealed the class bias of the paper--and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their 'clinical observations'. As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. 'Because of my thousandfold experience,' he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: 'And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.

On The Importance Of Sadness

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

- George Orwell, 1984

Evolution has given us numerous emotions in our emotional toolkit so that we surface the right ones as and when needed in our life's journey. We must learn to ignore most of what society preaches since society is designed to overfit on mindless happiness. Let's embrace what nature has given us. 

This is not just abstract philosophy but using correct emotions at the right times helps us change our mind and body to become a better living being. In this case, poet Rainer explains how sadness works its magic:

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? … Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

[…]

Almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, — is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.

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We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside

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If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened … if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet (via brainpickings)

Should I Consider A Second Dog?

Daniel Lavery makes a compelling case!

In case of second dog, one resigns as coach-minder-supervisor-sole-proprietor and enters into a franchisee agreement with the first dog. Second dog raises interesting possibilities on the subjects of dominionism, animality, non-human interests, duty-towards-self, duty-towards-unself, duty-towards-other-selves, domesticity, structure, order of precedence, and where should second dog sleep (on the bed, with the first dog, and with you, over a special blanket, so your blanket remains cleaner). Sleep in a big bed with your dogs, near a roaring fire tended high by the servants of your body and your fiefdom, and see to it that the rushes in the feasting-hall are replaced daily with fresh hay.

It is not good that a dog should be alone. To solve the problem of dog, one must consider second dog. With second dog, there is a possibility of direct dog-to-dog relation, without human mediation; alien delights await. Two dogs can make a decision in concert, confer in committee, register robust disapproval, deliver admonishments, incite and invite gamesomeness, and develop new types of language, all while you, the proprietor of two dogs, need think of nothing, become a dog owner emeritus, allowing your deputy manager to interpret and maintain your interests on the trading floor. Also, you will have two dogs to look at, with your two eyes. You can look at them both. There are two dogs to look at now. Objects which could once be only investigated, gnawed, and discarded are now ripe for conflict, pressing, pulling, entautening, contest, evasion. Notice your dog notice your dog. Endless recursions of looking, with introduction of second dog, dog-as-mirror and dog-as-mirrored. Dog, seconded.

 

Playing Frisbee Rough!

Neo is getting good at playing frisbee but he is rough; talk about elegance!

Octopus On Ecstasy And 2021 Oscar Winner

My Octopus Teacher won the best documentary Oscar this year. 

If you haven't watched it yet, please do so. 

Next, I am not thrilled by this ecstasy experiment on Octopus; some insights from the brilliant Octopus mind: 

They were given a high dose of MDMA first by dissolving it into the water, but they didn’t like it. The study author, Gul Dolen, put it like this:

“They really didn’t like it. They looked like they were freaked out. They were just taking these postures of super hypervigilance. They would sit in the corner of the tank and stare at everything.”

Not a great start for the study or the octopuses. They were grumpy before the drugs and now they were freaked out, too. But things got better.

When they were given lower doses, more the kind of dose that you or I might take if we were to ever do that kind of thing, something else happened. Something both strange, and exactly what you might expect. As Dolen says:

“After MDMA, they were essentially hugging… really just much more relaxed in posture, and using a lot more of their body to interact with the other octopus.”

Just like high humans at a festival, they were hugging. But there’s more. The once-grumpy, antisocial octopuses now “Somersaulted through the water as though they were dancing.” Somehow, as far as surface behaviour goes, MDMA seems to affect octopuses in the same ways as us.

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So What Did We Learn?

Aside from the obvious — octopuses love to hug on ecstasy too — it’s pretty useful for biologists to know. Because the creatures are so old and predate us by so long, it can give an indication of when some brain systems evolved. Basically, we probably picked up the brain system affected by the MDMA from our animal ancestors rather than it developing in humans as we evolved. It was there before us.

It also shows that basic brain chemistry plays a big role in our social psychology, whereas previously it was thought that complex brain systems were responsible.

More specifically, the study concluded a couple of bits for the people here for the science and not the high octopus:

• “Sociality is widespread across the animal kingdom.”
• “Serotonin is an evolutionarily ancient molecule.”
• “Neurotransmitter’s prosocial functions may be conserved across evolution.”

There’s plenty more if you wish to read the full study, here.

But to summarise, octopuses on ecstasy behave exactly as you would expect: they dance and hug each other. 

Project CETI - Using AI To Decipher Whale Language

They live in matriarchal and multicultural societies and share dialects and strong multigenerational family bonds Sperm whales have the largest brains of any species and have higher-level functions such conscious thought and future planning, as well as speech and feelings of compassion, love, suffering and intuition. Their vocalizations, among the loudest animal sounds on the planet, have a Morse code-like structure that shares the hallmarks of a highly-evolved language.

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Project CETI, a nonprofit organization and interdisciplinary initative that aims to apply advanced machine learning and state-of-the art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales. Founded and led by a team of scientists, CETI is bringing together leading cryptographers, roboticists, linguists, AI experts, technologists and marine scientists to connect to a fellow mammal with the largest brain: the sperm whale.

Over the next five years, CETI  listen deeply to sperm whale communication, interpret their voices, and then attempt to communicate back. Through an understanding of a non-human species and showing the power of collaborative research, CETI aspires to deepen our relationship with life on earth.

- Project CETI 

These are one of those few rare moments in my life when I salute and bow to my fellow sapiens. 

Thank you!

Pleasures Of Bird Watching On A Beautiful Spring Morning

 Fluffy & Garph!

Why I Don't Read Anything On Consciousness & Inside Of Neurons - An Interesting Idea Of All Sciences

I don't remember exactly when but around a couple of years before Max was diagnosed with cancer; I decided to stop reading anything related to consciousness. I didn't care if it was written by a "wise" philosopher centuries ago or a paper published on nature by a "brilliant" neuroscientist two days ago. 

I understood it was a pointless quest and a complete waste of time.  The only upside - it's the pinnacle of virtue signaling to sound and look smart. I decided to even throw away the books I had on consciousness. Throw away to recycle the paper and not donate the books so that it doesn't corrupt minds. 

But why? 

For starters, we don't know how and where the memory is formed and stored. We don't know if that question is even correct. 

Imagine Sapiens roaming in savanna who are yet to invent the rudimentary wheel and we are debating now their thoughts on driverless cars and lithium-powered automobiles.  Our understanding of the basics and fundamentals of how memories are formed and stored (leave alone consciousness) is worse than that. 

If you don't believe me, please search for "Blue Brain Project" on this blog or save some time and read this insightful interview with neuroscientist Randy Gallistel:

How does the “ferret experiment” work, what were the results, and why are the results significant?

The ferret-experiment shows that the measuring of—and then storage of—a maximally-simple experiential-fact (the duration of the interval between two simple events) occurs within a single huge cell (neuron) in the cerebellum. It also shows that subsequent single-spike input to this cell triggers the reading-out of this memory into a simple behavior: an appropriately-timed blink.

The blink occurs in response to a simple stimulus (a touch on the paw) that warns of a soon-to-occur threat to the eye (a shock to the skin near the eye). The interval-duration between the warning-signal and the shock itself has been stored in the engram inside this huge cell in the cerebellum—as a result, the brain can time the blink so that the eye is closed (hence protected) at the moment when the predicted threat occurs.

Johansson has also identified the first molecular stage in a sequence of molecular events inside this huge neuron. Somewhere in that sequence is the molecular substance that encodes the duration of that interval. It performs the same function as the memory-registers in a conventional computer.

Biological molecules are tiny interconnected machines. Johansson identified the first in a sequence of these machines. The sequence must lead to the engram. Fredrik Johansson has done for molecular biologists what Ariadne did for Theseus when she handed him the ball-of-thread. Theseus used the ball-of-thread to find his way through the labyrinth to the Minotaur and back out again.

Each neuron contains billions of (almost) incomprehensibly-tiny molecular machines. Molecular biologists have developed an astonishing array of techniques for visualizing/manipulating the actions of these little machines. These techniques will allow molecular biologists to follow the machines inside this huge neuron to the engram—to the tiny machine that encodes the experience-gleaned facts so that these learned/remembered facts can inform later behavior. 

How hard has it been to shine the spotlight on the ferret-experiment?

Very hard.

What explains the difficulty?

The difficulty is due to the mental energy required to climb out of intuitive Aristotelian energy-pits. The current approach to the engram is founded on an intuition that dates back to Aristotle.

The intuition is that memory consists of associations—conductive connections—between primitive sensations (color, texture, shape, smell, etc.). This intuition was the foundation of behaviorist psychology, which dominated theory/experiment in psychology during the first half of the previous century. The associative theory of learning is still widely taught in introductory psychology courses/textbooks. And it’s been given new life by the grossly-misleading hype surrounding deep learning.

Neuroscientists embrace Aristotle’s theory. But the most basic fact about memory is that memory is full of learned facts (time, distance, duration, probability, numerosity) that are unrelated to simple sensory-experience. And Aristotle’s theory makes no attempt to explain this basic fact.

This Aristotelian theory directs neuroscientific experiment/theorizing about learning/memory. It would be a far-reaching transformation to abandon this theory and instead focus on how brains encode maximally-simple abstract facts.

In the history of most sciences (physics, chemistry, physiology), the most important stage was when scientists finally abandoned the intuitive-but-useless conceptions that Aristotle left us with. Aristotle’s highly-intuitive natural science became the foundation of medieval philosophy/science. (There was no distinction between philosophy and “natural science” in the Middle Ages.)

In the early history of almost all sciences, it’s striking how difficult it was for thinkers to abandon these intuitively-appealing concepts in favor of much less-intuitive conceptions. Consider caloric theory.

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But what exactly is so hard to understand?

Mainstream brain-scientists have no idea how brains could store a number, retrieve that number and other relevant numbers, operate on pairs of number arithmetically, and return the results to memory. That whole way of thinking (the computational theory of mind) is not part of their conception regarding how the brain works.

And a memory-code is not part of their conception either. It’s like how biochemists had no conception of a code that was realized in molecular structure until the revelation from Watson, Crick, and Franklin.

We know the first step on the way to the actual storage-site of the number, but how hard will it be to follow the “ball of thread” to the storage-site? 

Molecular biologists have repeatedly accomplished astonishing things. So I think they can do it. I judge that it can be done with the tools molecular biologists already have.

It won’t be easy. It could take 10 years—maybe 20—once molecular biologists really start to work on it.

What do we know about the storage-site itself and about the mechanism that allows the number to be transmitted to—and retrieved from—that storage-site? 

Nothing.

Are both the storage-site and the mechanism equally mysterious? 

Yes.

Is the idea that every neuron in the human brain has a storage-site, or just some of them? 

Every neuron.

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Would mainstream neuroscientists raise their eyebrows at the idea that numbers are somehow stored inside cells and retrieved from inside cells? 

Most of them would think it’s about the craziest, stupidest, and most implausible idea they ever heard suggested.

Despite the fact that they all know that the polynucleotides that are abundant inside every cell can store huge amounts of information at negligible energetic cost. They know that. But they don’t think that it’s relevant to thinking about how the brain works.

Not a few neuroscientists think that the scientific concept of information is irrelevant to neuroscience. This school of thought thinks that the concept of information has no useful role to play in understanding how brains do what they do.

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The public would like to think that scientists look at data and take data seriously. What do brain-scientists say when you show them this data? It’s disturbing to think that they refuse to look at data, since data is supposed to be what science is all about. 

Scientists are human. Like all humans, they’re prisoners of preconceptions. When a preconception takes strong hold, it becomes almost unshakable. Max Planck is often quoted as saying: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”