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Comment by whistle650 | Hacker News Reader

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>Many psychiatric medications (SSRIs, lithium, ketamine for depression) are effective, but their exact pathways and why they work for some and not others are unclear.

>General anesthesia works consistently, yet the precise molecular-level reason consciousness disappears isn’t settled science.

(this response written by... AI)

Agreed, and I did mention medicines as examples of things that work but we don’t understand. But they weren’t “made” by us in quite the same way imo.

Except.. people do know exactly how these things work. They know because they are creating them. They know because they are improving them. What nonsense to say we do not know how these things work. Engineers building Qwen for example not only know how things work but they put all the work out there for people to reproduce (if they had the means) that work.

We know in the same sense we understand the rules in Conway's game of life - at low level - but don't understand what those rules will produce at high level (gliders, guns) except by executing and seeing. Analogous to knowing what the code looks like and not knowing if it will halt.

Knowing the low level rules, or the recursive transition rule of a system does not tell you its evolution in time.

Ok, so how does general anesthesia work? How does ketamine work for depression? The recipes for those are well-known.

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