Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#41

Post by engineer_22 » Sat, May 23, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #24

Paracompact wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why don’t we have a dedicated organ that can sample blood with laboratory like precision and make anomalies available to the conscious mind beyond whatever faculties we currently have? "My triglycerides are at 220 mg/dL" is not a useful signal to a hominid banging rocks together. Instead, what we got was the budget version, keyed for resolution rather than understanding: thirst (osmolality of plasma fluid), suffoca…

> suffocation (blood acidity induced by excess CO2) Which, being the budget option, has a failure scenario: When low oxygen occurs without high CO2, people feel fine... until it's too late and they fall over, unconscious. This can occur in enclosed spaces like caves where some other gas-mix has excluded the oxygen, or when someone hyperventilates before holding their breath. > This chemoreceptor patent-proposal is ki…

> This can occur in enclosed spaces like caves where some other gas-mix has excluded the oxygen

Maybe this why some people innate fear of caves, primordial adaptation for suffocation avoidance behavior. I don't know, just fun to wonder about things like that

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#42

Post by not_kurt_godel » Sat, May 23, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

Paracompact wrote: post #6

I've been pondering for a while a question that is exceedingly unlikely to ever be answered within my lifetime, because as a prerequisite it assumes a framework strong enough to answer several very hard questions in philosophy, neuroscience, and information theory. And that question is: Is it possible even in principle for a conscious entity to have an instinctual understanding and awareness of every low-level detail…

Not strictly possible per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#43

Post by rramadass » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #36

rramadass wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247031 ;-)

Oh lovely, she’ll absolutely hate that one :-)

Ha, Ha!

Watch all the episodes and you will have ammunition (w.r.t. animal biology/anatomy/physiology) enough for years ;-)

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#44

Post by agumonkey » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

QuercusMax wrote: post #8

Animats wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it possible even in principle for a conscious entity to have an instinctual understanding and awareness of every low-level detail comprising its design? Access is possible, complexity limits what you can do with it. It's like having a JTAG port on a chip with a lot of test access. You can read the state of most of the gates, but now you're overwhelmed with data. Processing that data takes more resources than the…

Kinda like we have sensors all over the place, but the info a lot of them deliver (pain) is pretty vague. And because of how it gets aggregated and delivered to the brain, sometimes you have funny glitches like how I can scratch the inside of my left ear and it makes me cough.

This is what hit the NSA.

I guess evolution beats at the pace of signal to noise ratio

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#45

Post by Shitty-kitty » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

Paracompact wrote: post #18

colbyn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve thought about this. Or at least something like that. When reading dune there’s a class of women who can control their biochemistry in such a way that they can eg prolong lifespan, or anything else within the realm of feasible biochemistry. Here I was like: how does the nervous system function in that way? How could signals from the mind control the behavior of molecules? The mind cannot itself feel pain, similar…

> why don’t we have a dedicated organ that can sample blood with laboratory like precision and make anomalies available to the conscious mind beyond whatever faculties we currently have? "My triglycerides are at 220 mg/dL" is not a useful signal to a hominid banging rocks together. Instead, what we got was the budget version, keyed for resolution rather than understanding: thirst (osmolality of plasma fluid), suffoca…

The brain doesn't directly control a whole lot of basic functions, other then breathing. It is entirely possible to keep a brain-dead person alive using little more than a feeding tube and forcing air into the lungs.

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#46

Post by oh_fiddlesticks » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #21

colbyn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve thought about this. Or at least something like that. When reading dune there’s a class of women who can control their biochemistry in such a way that they can eg prolong lifespan, or anything else within the realm of feasible biochemistry. Here I was like: how does the nervous system function in that way? How could signals from the mind control the behavior of molecules? The mind cannot itself feel pain, similar…

> Although maybe a better question: why don’t we have a dedicated organ that can sample blood with laboratory like precision and make anomalies available to the conscious mind beyond whatever faculties we currently have? Because random mutations and selective pressure has never lead to such a trait that persists in a population.

We've never seen randon mutation and selective pressure ever really build anything, only trigger and exploit existing adaptive rulesets... pushed to extremes mutations may often yield a benefit in a narrow situation but at some greater cost, like throwing the backseats out of your car helps you accelerate faster, but reduces the overall utility and flexibility of the use of the vehicle. Im sure if we started honestly looking at organic systems as the product of thought, it would yield a greater understanding of them that we would be able to leverage in industry.

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#47

Post by Animats » Sat, May 23, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #7

Paracompact wrote: post #6

I've been pondering for a while a question that is exceedingly unlikely to ever be answered within my lifetime, because as a prerequisite it assumes a framework strong enough to answer several very hard questions in philosophy, neuroscience, and information theory. And that question is: Is it possible even in principle for a conscious entity to have an instinctual understanding and awareness of every low-level detail…

> Is it possible even in principle for a conscious entity to have an instinctual understanding and awareness of every low-level detail comprising its design? Access is possible, complexity limits what you can do with it. It's like having a JTAG port on a chip with a lot of test access. You can read the state of most of the gates, but now you're overwhelmed with data. Processing that data takes more resources than the…

Or, in a more modern sense, it would be easy to give an LLM access to its own weights. But it would not be useful.

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#48

Post by Terr_ » Sat, May 23, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

engineer_22 wrote: post #41

Terr_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suffocation (blood acidity induced by excess CO2) Which, being the budget option, has a failure scenario: When low oxygen occurs without high CO2, people feel fine... until it's too late and they fall over, unconscious. This can occur in enclosed spaces like caves where some other gas-mix has excluded the oxygen, or when someone hyperventilates before holding their breath. > This chemoreceptor patent-proposal is ki…

> This can occur in enclosed spaces like caves where some other gas-mix has excluded the oxygen Maybe this why some people innate fear of caves, primordial adaptation for suffocation avoidance behavior. I don't know, just fun to wonder about things like that

I would wager a much-bigger feedback loop involves the other things that would like to live in those caves, and the odds you might get into conflict with their jaws/claws/stingers.

Re: Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)

#49

Post by jimmaswell » Sun, May 24, 2026, 3:40 AM UTC

Paracompact wrote: post #6

I've been pondering for a while a question that is exceedingly unlikely to ever be answered within my lifetime, because as a prerequisite it assumes a framework strong enough to answer several very hard questions in philosophy, neuroscience, and information theory. And that question is: Is it possible even in principle for a conscious entity to have an instinctual understanding and awareness of every low-level detail…

It makes me tangentially think of the speech in Virtue's Last Reward about how it takes a higher intelligence to understand the intricate structures that termites build, ending with a question of what it is that humans are building to be understood by a higher intelligence.