Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

sciencedaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 229 posts

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#191

Post by cgio »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #186
woliveirajr wrote: post #2

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…

> 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 audienc…

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.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#192

Post by x220 »

toasterlovin wrote: post #176
x220 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Genetic inheritance via epigenetic pathways is extremely rare and basically irrelevant. It explains essentially 0% of the evolved traits that you see in humans and other complex organisms. I would like a source to read more about this. I don't distrust you. I'm genuinely interested in reading more about this. >And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors I think…

> I would like a source to read more about this. I don't distrust you. I'm genuinely interested in reading more about this. Sorry, I don't have a source. Epigenetic changes in somatic cells (all the cells in your body except for your sperm or egg cells) are common and necessary for the differentiation that takes place as cells divide and multiply to create a growing organism. But epigenetic inheritance is rare, becau…

Thanks for the info!

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#193

Post by ianmcgowan »

mythrwy wrote: post #75
lisper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently? Interestingly, my belief in the illusory nature of free will has had a huge impact on my life. I'm a much more laid-back person than I used to be. I don't stress out so much over making mistakes. It has also helped me in a lot of practical aspects of my life. For example, it has helped me…

Dockerized micro-services for the self!

It's a throwaway comment, but perhaps (as with most problems of philosophy) the problem is really semantic? What does "will" really mean, in free will? It imagines a little person sitting in my head piloting my body. It seems equally plausible that there is no central "me", I'm just a competing mess of programs running in my brain (at varying levels of abstraction), with the gut biome being the BIOS. There may be a hypervisor in there somewhere, but that's the most you can hope for in terms of rational direction. Everything runs in parallel, and the part I think of as "me" rationalizes decisions after the fact.

Horizontal gene transfer? A literal virus that changes who you are. It's interesting to think that by going paleo or vegan you can perhaps become another "person"...

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#194

Post by Reelin »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #186
woliveirajr wrote: post #2

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…

> 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 audienc…

You're a substance dualist, then?

The obvious opposing view to what you've just expressed would be that you are your body, and that what you just described as your true self is merely one part of you introspecting about another part of you.

And of course, as far as I'm aware science can say nothing convincing about all of this at present so it's purely an exercise in philosophy and logic.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#195

Post by leetcrew »

Someguywhatever wrote: post #148
coldtea wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power. Very magnanimous of them. But why would a rehabilitation program have a notion "of a higher power", and especially it's own notion of it?

Probably because it helps people? If it is useful in helping people to not harm themselves and others then I don't see anything wrong with that.

> If it is useful in helping people to not harm themselves and others

this is a big if. the way AA is structured (they don't themselves collect any statistics about efficacy whatsoever) makes it extremely difficult to draw any conclusions about how helpful it is.

as other people have said, AA essentially provides free group therapy, which is likely to be at least slightly helpful. i'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest that the 12 steps or higher power aspect yield any benefits over generic group drug counseling.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#198

Post by Ygg2 »

ajuc wrote: post #63
Ygg2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no difference in behavior that depends on existence of free will. Ah, but you are forgetting a major part of how brain works. Brain models both our own and others behavior. If your brain knows you don't have free will and I don't have free will, it will not fault me for not having a thing I am supposed to not be having. If it doesn't have free will, brain can assign a response, but not blame. You can't have…

> If your brain knows you don't have free will and I don't have free will, it will not fault me for not having a thing I am supposed to not be having. Punishment decreases the odds of repeated offence. It doesn't matter if it's because you have free will, or simply because you learnt not to do that because your internal neural network were taught not to do that or it hurts. I'm pretty sure I can make a simulation wit…

> Punishment decreases the odds of repeated offence.

So does running away. However, the issue here is existence of blame.

> I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.

Yeah, but you can't model belief without knowing what believing in something entails. Same thing with my example. You model behavior of others based on your experience. You think others have free will because you believe you do. Or not.

My own position is that while free will might or might not be illusion, it's a useful one. Like justice, mercy or love - that sort of thing.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#200

Post by _flbt »

dang wrote: post #131
lisper wrote: post #6

I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066758 and marked it off-topic.

Serious question - what does detaching a thread in HN do? Because I still see it show up in the main comment section.
Post reply on HN