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Comment by ElCheapo | Hacker News Reader

It's so crazy to think that we as humans can look at our lungs and clearly see what's wrong with them and what it would take to solve the problem but we can't simply order our immune cells to deal with the matter consciously and are at the mercy of a system we have a murky relationship with.

Instead, just like CRISPR, we have to find already existing organisms or mechanisms that do something and try to get them inside of us to carry the job

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Giving orders to our immune system so directly would risk bypassing all kinds of subtle interactions that hold the whole system together. It would be like seeing a typo, and dealing with it by ordering that the chunk of the screen containing the typo be carved out.

Order is perhaps a strong word. Suggestion might be more fitting?

In a similar sense I'm a bit troubled by sleep, it is absolutely paramount for your well-being but you only have a very indirect control of it.

Probably because, even though we know what to fix, ordering our immune system to do what we think is right would probably break other things due to the huge complexity our our bodies.

So we have to go "roundabout" ways to tell existing cells what to do, so they can keep doing what they are doing to keep us alive at the same time as they do what we say.

> even though we know what to fix, ordering our immune system to do what we think is right would probably break other things due to the huge complexity our our bodies

When it comes to the decision making of biological systems, I always think about the game Elevator Saga[0], and how "fixing" one level can break all the others. Now think that game with million times the signals/variables/events and so many levels that it feels infinite, and you begin to understand the challenge that our immune system faces. The current solution passes many "levels" (diseases) but not all, and when we make changes, there's no single test-suite that guarantees that we didn't break anything significant.

[0]: https://play.elevatorsaga.com/

This is the same analytical problem with geoengineering climate change mitigations. Unforeseeable consequences while underway and when it stops.

I've thought the exact same thing. One thing I think about a lot is how we're really at a very frustrating transitionary point in history, where we're aware of most of the causes of what is wrong with us, but we don't quite have the facilities to actually address them just yet.

But also that we are actually NOT aware of the causes; a really interesting field these days (imo, as a layperson) is gut biome and its interactions with the rest of the body, and more and more links being found with brain conditions like alzheimer's and co. These are really complicated systems that we still haven't figured out entirely.

I like to think our gut biome is just a natural network of microbes that evolve together to operate this sack of flesh we occupy.

So us assuming we know best about what quantities of which microbes is good for us seems quite hard to believe for me.

I sometimes wonder if there's an evolutionary purpose to our conscious self not being able to control some subconscious and physical processes.

seems like an inherent limitation of an emergent conscious self coming about through evolution

Biological systems have developed for hundreds of millions of years, their complexity is much bigger than anything in the IT realm, which is relatively young.

I don't wonder at all that it is nature that can fight nature better than we can. Nature is by far the biggest and the oldest lab of them all, with an untold count of experiments ran.

> Nature is by far the biggest and the oldest lab of them all, with an untold count of experiments ran.

That's a weak argument. With sound reasoning you can often reduce the solution space dramatically, even before running any experiments at all.

In other words, a single argument can be worth an "untold count of experiments", if you've modeled the problem space well.

In the limit (just to illustrate the point, rare in biological systems), you could derive a solution from its constraints analytically. In which case you need exactly zero experiments.

And even in complex biological systems, it's not like "everything goes", you still don't need to try everything. Informed reasoning helps, relative to "a lab of random mutation experiments". That's why humans have been taking their ecosystems by storm… for better or worse.

Unless of course you consider humans a part of nature (as I do). In which case "nature's lab" includes humans and their science too, and the point becomes tautological.

Articulate planning and reasoning is then just another experiment in nature's lab.

> we can't simply order our immune cells

I tried that, now they're unionising and threatening strike action unless I provide better pay and conditions!

how about how anesthesia works.

How does anesthesia work? What are you referring to exactly?

If you know a way to order yourself into anesthesia I think some kind of million dollar prize is waiting for you

I think hypnosis is sometimes used for anesthesia. So maybe self-hypnosis is also possible.

After a quick look at wikipedia I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hypnosis#Childbirth_anest...

Not sure how solid this is though.

What if you did it and couldn't order yourself out though?

hopefully not, but...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome

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