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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

I work in neurotech and specifically with EEG, some would find it surprising that I 100% agree with this take.

When we understood the world of fluid-dynamics, we looked at the body as blood going through a pump delivering materials (oxygen, minerals, etc) to different parts of the body. We though to ourselves "we know how this works!".

Then we discovered electricity, slapped our collective foreheads and said "oh! It's electrical!" now I get it.

We still don't.

Let's learn what we can from what we can and use this knowledge to our benefit, but let's not assume we understand the underlying mechanisms just because we can find correlations.

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We were not wrong, though. Major functional component of the body is the pump pushing around a fluid that distributes materials around the body. Electricity is another functional layer. And on top of the fluidic layer, it turned out many of the disributed material aren't inert building block, but chemical signals and machines, too.

I think the main error is in people trying to explain a complex machine through one mode of "how it works". The second error is people trying to accuse other people of doing that.

Today, anyone with half a brain and an ounce of interest could look at any of the large machines that operate in their environment - buses, trains, construction equipment - and quickly discover that such machines have fluids being pumped, air being pumped, mechanical linkages and electric circuits used for both power delivery and control, many or all of these things having - at a higher level - feedback loops designed in for autonomous control/self-balancing, and of course there's a whole economic and social layer on top, that's key to explaining why the machine works the way it does.

Why wouldn't it be any different with the human body?

The point is not that these ideas were wrong, but that they were incomplete, yet were assumed to be complete.

Well put!

We’re finding out though that the brain is, yes, a fluid dynamic system, an electromagnetic system (though we know way less about the magnetism that we’d like), AND a mechanical system. Wonder how many more ands we’d have to add by the time we figure it out.

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