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When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

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Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#161

Post by cyanotic »

Razengan wrote: post #119
scythe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot copy "all" of the information stored in the human body. Briefly, this happens because the physical limitations of information storage require cooling (Landauer's principle) which requires kT×log(2) energy per bit, or about 2.5 zJ at room temperature. The brain's memory capacity is about 2.5 * 10^15 bytes ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor... ), but the amount of information whic…

Copying a disk does in no way require simulating each atom of the disk, though? • We can already clone mammalian bodies. • I'll assume that "growing" an adult human body, with a "blank" or "default" brain, isn't too inconceivable. • Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself. • At the moment of "copying", we figure some way to biologically link the two brains together, and write some biological…

Okay, come on, Razengan. This thought experiment is not a difficult one.

I invent a machine that "scans" your body in such a way that I'm able to create a perfect replica of the state your body was in, nearly to the atom. Molecule, by molecule, the machine can rebuild your body, within a near infinitesimal margin of error.

I put you inside this machine, and scan your replica file, and then I save it to a massive storage device, and, when called upon I can rebuild that version of you whenever I want.

Now, after being successfully scanned, you exit the device. I blow your head off with a shotgun, and your headless corpse slumps on the floor. No witnesses.

Do you really think you'll come back to life, if I print out your replica from the file?

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#162

Post by uzoodoo »

ajnin wrote: post #125
pvg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat."

No. Mirroring the parent would be : "All cats die. Socrates is immortal. Therefore Socrates is not a cat." Which is perfectly valid logic.

More like: "Non-living things don't move. The bus moves. Therefore, the bus is alive."

This is false because there exist things that are non-living but move.

Similarly, the original "not alive" => "doesn't need resources" argument is false because there exist things that are not alive that do need resources (such as buses), and so needing resources does not imply being alive.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#163

Post by ekianjo »

sbilstein wrote: post #136
touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

"Beef brains and veal (juvenile beef) or calf's brains are used in the cuisines of France; Italy; Spain; El Salvador; Mexico, etc. where they are called sesos in Spanish and are eaten in tacos and quesadillas; Pakistan, where they are known in Urdu as Maghaz; Portugal; Indonesia; and in the United States, especially in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Ohio River valley." People do eat cow brains...I have at regular ol' r…

This is true in France, but the practice of doing so is decreasing and considered "old fashioned" especially after CWD.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#164

Post by spangry »

YCode wrote: post #3

I understand prion diseases are rare and it's more likely I'll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept. Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you.

They really are terrifying. It's hard to say exactly why this is so, but I think it has something to do with how they can occur (some protein randomly misfolding) and that they aren't really "alive", in the same sense that viruses and bacteria are.

You can kinda forgive viruses and bacteria: they're just looking to survive and multiply, just like us. In some cases they monopolise so much of their hosts' resources, or some really critical resource, that the host dies. But Prions, uhhhhh.... They're just kinda these unnatural things that go wrong and then kill you in pretty awful ways. Though not because they necessarily need to out-compete you for resources. Indeed, they don't seem to have any innate preference for existing or not existing, or thriving or not thriving. But they kill you anyway....

Also, just to scare you a little more, one of the more popular (perhaps dominant) theories about Alzheimer-family diseases is that they are initially caused by Prions, that migrate into your brain and start forming amaloid plaques, and then it's all down-hill from there.

On the upside, I vaguely remember reading some research on a 'almost ready' drug, initially developed to lessen the negative side-effects of chemo-therapy, that might be effective at stopping the progression of these plaques as they spread throughout the brain. If it actually works, we might have a treatment of AD-family diseases on the market in a year or so (the chemo folks have already gone through the lengthy human safety testing part of the exercise).

Not a cure, but at least it might halt or significantly slow progression of symptoms.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#165

Post by late2part »

Clownshoesms wrote: post #123
justboxing wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…

Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!

I went veg 12 years ago and life has been so much simpler!

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#166

Post by menacingly »

Clownshoesms wrote: post #123
justboxing wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…

Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!

It's easy for conversations like this to unintentionally turn elitist, but that "last bit of cash" is also more accurately depicted as just not throwing away protein.

Pro/Anti-meat aside, there is a huge segment of the population for whom "just eat steaks" is not actionable advice. They've already killed the animal. Why not be efficient?

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#167

Post by jessaustin »

Razengan wrote: post #106
wybiral wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as my copy has my memories up to that point, and the plans I had for the future from there on, it's as good as me. What happens if they don't destroy the original version of you and now two exist...

Although fiction that touches on these issues is my favorite genre (like [0][1][2]), I don't have an answer for that. All I can say is that technology has a way of forcing people to reevaluate their laws, ethics and society, and this will be no different. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiba [1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/272270/ (Tormenet: Tides of Numenera) [2] http://store.steampowered.com/app/282140/ (S…

A short story in this vein that I really like is "Fat Farm" by Orson Scott Card. The copied dude looks wistfully after his copy who just walked out the door, and asks "Now what?" The answer is not pleasant.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#168

Post by rsync »

ethomson wrote: post #14
fourstar wrote: post #10

Can you be tested for prion disease?

Indeed, you can. What you cannot do, however, is remain alive to get the results.

"Indeed, you can. What you cannot do, however, is remain alive to get the results."

If we're broadening our minds to all possibilities, it's worth pointing out that you can expose a third party to your as-yet-unconfirmed prion disease and then destructively test them, which would then allow you to test yourself while remaining alive.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#169

Post by WalterBright »

snowwrestler wrote: post #55
Razengan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you. Unless you had a mind backup and a second body ready. Which, I think, all medicine ultimately aims, should aim, for; Why bother learning how to repair the single same body over and over (which won't help in unexpected catastrophic failures aka fatal accidents anyway) when you can just grow and jump into a new one?

While we have thousands of years of cultural belief that mind and body are distinct, I'm not aware of any scientific evidence for that. And there is a lot of evidence that the mind is directly dependent on the state of the body--change the body (drugs, injury, etc) and inevitably the state of mind changes too. So I don't know of any reason to think that it's even possible to separate a mind from a body, let alone mov…

I'm not sure I'd even want to exist inside a computer. Much of the pleasure in life is having a body.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#170

Post by tonmoy »

Clownshoesms wrote: post #123
justboxing wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…

Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!

Isn't it better that the animals are being efficiently utilized preventing the need for killing more animals. I
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