Is Health Research Taking the Wrong Path?

C

Creekside

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I was thinking about advances offered by new knowledge and techniques, such as providing a stool sample and the AI prescribing specific probiotic and phagocyte strains and supporting diet. Given the complexity of the body, keeping all those individual mechanisms working and interacting properly, maybe it would be simpler to figure out what the brain needs to function properly (blood substitute, nutrients, etc) and stick us in artificial bodies. There are some complexities, such as chemical or nerve signals that the brain expects to receive, but you'd trim off all sorts of other subsystems that are just providing support. Instead of treating lower back pain and arthritis, just replace artificial parts when necessary. Want to view deep-sea fish or soar in the stratosphere? Just swap bodies (or remote link).

So, at present, which seems the more difficult task: figuring out all the ways our bodies can go wrong, or how to keep a brain functioning artificially and connect to the outside world?
 
In my opinion health research is on the wrong path because so much of it seems to be an attempt to make money. Instead of inventing some expensive new technology, we should focus more on ways to improve health that cost nothing or very little and can be broadly applied.

We already know that a healthy diet is the best way to treat dysbiosis, and it has so many other benefits. But often the focus is on creating a profitable product instead of figuring out how to best treat dysbiosis through diet at little or no additional cost.
 
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Brains in artificial bodies offers some major advantages, especially for those of us with failing bodies. Hoopoe points out a downside, if it's done by the same profit-driven ethics. Subscription services to a monopoly? Poor customer support? The equivalent of Windows OS? Spam and hacking? Oh well, the same applies to medical services for our organic bodies. The answer to those problems is political, not science&technology.
 
The real problem I see is that our lives are all about imperfection and we value them because of their transience and imperfection. That sounds crazy maybe but people tend to value something they call 'free will'. Analysis of how free will might work suggest that it is the flip side of imperfection or incompleteness. A complete and perfect deciding machine would always choose the same way - it would be totally predictable. It could not have free will.

Similarly we value roses because we know they will fade. We value a summer evening because the sun will set and it will dissolve away, maybe never with another chance to enjoy the same company.

If we were all fitted in to perfect bodies like the creatures inside Daleks why would one fall in love with one of them?

But more seriously, I think the chances of fitting brains into artificial bodies is actually orders of magnitude more difficult than solving diseases. It very likely comes up against some of these problems the AI people are already y looking at - that when a problem gets complicated beyond a certain level there is no possibility of solving it in the life of the universe. Disease, on the other hand, get solved fairly regularly.

I am with Hoopoe. The reason we have not solved ME/CFS is, one way or another, because research has been hijacked by money and politics. ME/CFS is one of the hardest diseases to crack but we haven't even cracked some easier ones because nobody is motivated and if the motivation had been there, very likely some leads would have come up on ME/CFS in the process.
 
We don't even need to crack ME/CFS to alleviate a lot of the suffering. We could do it right now with the knowledge we have.

It's not happening due to mental rigidity (fixed ideas about how things should be done) and patients being perceived as people with low value.

In my opinion something like 50% of the suffering is created by the wrong response by sociey to ME/CFS. We can't treat the illness for now but society's responses can change.
 
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Jonathan Edwards said:
But more seriously, I think the chances of fitting brains into artificial bodies is actually orders of magnitude more difficult than solving diseases.
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I'm not convinced of that. The biological support needed for the brain may be fairly simple. The human body has all those interacting subsystems for supporting the support systems, which are in turn supported by other levels of support systems. The complexity of the human body is therefore much higher than the complexity of just brain support. Connections for input/output might be fairly simple too, since the brain is adaptive. Yes we solve diseases frequently, but there are lots that we haven't solved, and given the complexity of the body, there will be plenty more diseases to recognize. How many new diseases will appear due to micro and nanoplastics, or other nanoparticle products or pollution? Then there are new mutations causing new diseases. You can postulate AI advanced enough to understand and devise a treatment for a new disease in days rather than decades, but that same AI could probably devise artificial brain support even faster.

Jonathan Edwards said:
A complete and perfect deciding machine would always choose the same way - it would be totally predictable. It could not have free will.
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The brain would remain imperfect. My suggestion was just to trade the imperfect supporting systems for more reliable ones. If toe-stubs and runny noses turned out to be important for emotional health, creativity, or whatever, that randomness could be generated artificially, and even create more individuality. Of course, it could also be abused, with the ruling class directly influencing brains (You are thirsty for a Coke!), but again, that's a political problem, not a health one.

From the viewpoint of the world, humans are self-reproducing molecules with complex support systems, and their whole point of existence is to bring the total energy of the world to a lower state.
 
I don't know why they stopped the research into naked brains, usually levitating, that was being promoted in poster and documentary form in the 50s.

Obviously there would be issues with reproduction, but I'm sure any research facility that could figure out how to make levitating naked brains that can survive in a world with cats in could address that as a sub project, if funding was available.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
If you are happy to be supported in a vat and talk to people via them analysing your MRI scans that's fine, but for any quality of life I think we are talking seriously impossible.
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Why through MRI? There are plenty of developments in artificial eyes, ears, and limbs. The brain has I/O ports and the ability to adapt to to what's connected to them. There's no reason why senses and limb control can't be superior via artificial equipment. Brains could probably adapt to multiple eyes and different inputs (seeing sounds, radio waves, etc). Colonists inside Europa would have bodies optimized for activities in a vast, dark under-ice environment. Humans could even colonize Jupiter. Maybe with the right bodies, it would be an exciting and beautiful world to live in.

Artificial connections to the brain are, AFAIK, a solved problem. Reliable and superior (and size and cost) are just a matter of refinement of technology. There are already people self-experimenting with body modification (I forget the term they use), so that's going to happen.

A brain in a box would lose some pleasures, such as enjoying food, but that's just pleasure provided via natural I/O connections, and there's no reason why they couldn't be replaced by superior pleasurable inputs. Addictions to such inputs would be a problem to be faced.

Artificial vision superior to natural eyes is pretty much guaranteed in the not-too-distant future. I think that will be solved before all the eye diseases and injuries can be solved. Likewise, artificial limbs, with superior comfort and capabilities might be possible before bone and joint and blood vessel problems can be solved by medical research. The former problem is just a matter of refinement of technology, while the latter has to deal with interactions with other biological systems and still-unknown interactions. Inject the latest "knee cartilage stem cell treatment" and 20 years later find out that it's causing spleen cancer or whatever. The body simply presents too much complexity to model completely.

Which will come first: restoring full function after spinal damage, or connecting to the spinal nerves directly for I/O to artificial limbs complete with senses?

I think this is a question that someone should investigated properly, doing all the number-crunching for rates of advances in medicine vs artificial support, including rates of successes per dollar invested. It's too complex and too important to just make assumptions, such as "a brain in box can only interact via MRI scans".
 
I came across this article ( https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/10/241023130903.htm ) about the decision to eat being controlled by an unexpectedly simple neural circuit; they say just three neurons. Controlling those neurons in mice switches eating on and off. I can imagine future humans having some number of neural functions they can control directly. Pull up a menu, set "sleep" to start at 9 PM and wake at 5 AM, and no fuss about falling asleep or waking before 5. Set your eating times. Maybe set your taste preferences, so you actually enjoy vegetables. Is this possibility any worse than having an artificial body? Actually, you can have both. Yes, abuses of this system are possible, since any tool can be abused.

Just more to think about ... unless you click on "stop thinking about this topic" from your self-control menu. ;)
 
Surely if people, the majority of people, could control when they slept then that's the entire shopping TV market decimated, due to people not thinking what a wonderful idea something is at 4am?

As for controlling when, what, or even if, people eat, then that's 80% of the western food manufacturing industry decimated, as well as the diet/exercise/gym industries.

If people could control, easily, with no effort, such base needs as food and sleep, then the world economy would probably collapse, as it's currently based on people not being able to.

(All numbers, all one of them, may well be entirely made up)
 
Drastic changes yes. Life does change. Just think of how smartphones has changed society in just a few years. AI and robotics will create major changes too. Some careers will become obsolete over the space of just a few years. However, that's just a change in speed, as buggy-whip manufacturers would attest. Change happens. Is a world where people live in artificial bodies and interact through new senses and controls (ie. controlling systems in a factory directly, as if they were limbs) and maybe control our desires and moods directly going to be worse than our present? I think it will just be different. We could avoid some unpleasantness (medical and psychological failings) and add some new ones (criminal AIs changing your settings).

I read a lot of SF, but I can't recall any stories that predicted our present society. We'll just have to see what the future brings.
 
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