I doubt you can cure these diseases, you can perhaps prevent them, but to cure would mean removing their effects, and if you could remove their effects and say, bring a seriously deteriorated Von Neumann back to his previous mental heights it seems like you should be able to make anyone the equal of Von Neumann - which I agree would be a great thing to be able to do but seems to be a much further along than the words cure or prevent would indicate.
> I agree would be a great thing to be able to do but seems to be a much further along than the words cure or prevent would indicate.
If the words "cure" or "prevent" don't indicate that, why did you bring it up? :)
I think this is being needlessly pedantic. Keeping in mind that one of HN's guidelines is to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of a comment, I think we can assume that GP meant, essentially, "learn enough about these diseases so as to detect and prevent them from causing irreparable damage"
sorry but the strongest plausible interpretation of the word cure is obviously not "prevent", it is to undo the damage.
>If the words "cure" or "prevent" don't indicate that, why did you bring it up? :)
the strongest plausible interpretation of my comment would be I brought it up for the reason I said - that if you could cure the disease you would have to be able to give anyone the capabilities the disease destroyed (because these diseases seem to destroy parts of the brain so even if you "brought back" the brain it would be a different brain with different data in it)- and that, although I did not state it, I felt that the original poster had not considered this when they expressed a wish to cure.
on edit: obviously if you have experienced minor damage you can get back to what you were before because the brain has a lot of redundancies and it can recover if decline is halted, but if you have experienced major damage you're probably not getting back and asking for a cure there seems unlikely to work.
The "disease" we're talking about here is death. Von Neumann was losing his mental capacity because he was dying. I know some in the silicon valley set think that "curing" death is both feasible and desirable but I disagree on both points.
A voice from outside SV (mine): We can extend life and prevent disease in animals and should do the same in human beings. As much as the West has exclusive access to biomedical R&D, it's an ethical imperative for the West to pursue this goal on behalf of humanity as a whole.
You invented noblesse oblige and should measure up to it.
no death is just part of life, there's no life without death.
the disease would be alzheimer, and curing it would mean probably preventing it / being able to edit the genome to nullify whatever gen is making it come up in the first place (if its genetic)
Yeah tbh english isn't my first language, and I meant more into -finding the causes- and eradicating alzheimer, aka preventing it, much like we have done with polio, or whatever.
Not really curing people already in advanced state of the maladie...
anyways, they're not mutually exclusive, but enhanching life should preceed ending it in the order of priorities imho
With all due respect, you didn't even try at anything resembling full effort.
There are 2, maybe 3 societies in the world, which have (or had) the capacity to try implementing a serious R&D effort to prevent the diseases of aging. The effort has been meager so far, and ultimately, compared to other major R&D directions (no, I'm not talking about AI, AI is fine), it's a testament to how much we value ourselves and our loved ones.
As an adult who already lost a few of my relatives, and will probably lose a few more: if we truly loved them, we'd have put at least 10% of GDP into eventually curing all degenerative diseases, while implementing a simple scalable cryopreservation infrastructure for those who won't be there in time.
It could be done, The West and Asia could achieve this. But didn't, due to all too well known web of aversion & coping mechanisms.
>With all due respect, you didn't even try at anything resembling full effort. There are 2, maybe 3 societies in the world, which have (or had) the capacity to try implementing a serious R&D effort to prevent the diseases of aging.
exactly who do you think I am? It sounds like you think I am some sort of avatar of one of these societies, and for some reason I am here posting on HN.
>while implementing a simple scalable cryopreservation infrastructure for those who won't be there in time.
ok, well as long as its simple.
>In your small-mindedness you failed humanity.
okey-dokey, well I can definitely see you are going through something right now, hope you get better.
since these diseases destroy parts of the brain not just inhibit the functioning of the brain you would need to add an enhancement and not remove an inhibitor to bring back lost functionality.
Depends very much on the disease, for my specific type of brain fog from dysautonomia (via ME/CFS and hEDS) it may feel like a gradual and permanent degradation but it is largely completely reversible and when you know what you're doing it's actually pretty easy to do so. This is only known by a very small minority of doctors so the chance a specific patient meets such a doctor is incredibly low which is why most people still think it's some great big mystery. I was able to remove the inhibitor and bounce back better than ever. I think the brain fog in my case was caused by excess IL-1B pro-inflammatory cytokines and directly targeting that with medication did result in the brain fog near permanently lifting.
It’s also likely that even if the degradation is permanent it is also likely multifaceted and one of those facets is likely to be treatable such that the impact of the degradation could be greatly reduced. I think it’s incumbent on us to try as much as possible even in the seemingly lost causes because learnings from such attempts could yield insights for those who are not lost causes.
It’s a ridiculous conflation to suggest that the inability to take a regular person and give them Von Neumann intelligence means that we can’t help Von Neumann stuffing an ailment even if a component of that ailment is clearly permanent.
I’ve not been able to solve the PEM issue, I think PEM is like an nut allergy and desensitization can be done with very very very small doses of exercise and a glacially slow build up of tolerance. My attempts at this has not worked but it appears to have worked for others that I know.
>Depends very much on the disease, for my specific type of brain fog from dysautonomia (via ME/CFS and hEDS)
sorry, I thought we were talking about Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's was what was mentioned in the post I responded to but now I see it is in fact every ailment that affects the brain, and not just Alzheimer's.
>It’s also likely that even if the degradation is permanent it is also likely multifaceted and one of those facets is likely to be treatable such that the impact of the degradation could be greatly reduced.
this might be what was meant here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277444 - when I said that the brain has a lot of redundancies and of course caught and stopped early enough then it wouldn't be such a big problem
but hey, what do I know, I didn't even know what we were talking about evidently, thanks for correcting me.
>It’s a ridiculous conflation to suggest that the inability to take a regular person and give them Von Neumann intelligence means that we can’t help Von Neumann stuffing an ailment even if a component of that ailment is clearly permanent.
OK well I guess I am taking a more stringent meaning of cure than you are, you are taking the relieve meaning, which is of course to help, but I am taking the revert meaning. I believe mine is a pretty common meaning, at least in the vernacular. I mean when they say we cure cancer they don't mean it will make the pain less intense and maybe you can live twice as long as otherwise.
Certainly I believe the pains and problems of a disease can be relieved, but in the case of Alzheimer's (sorry for going back to the disease I was discussing since you have informed me I was not discussing that but since I was, actually, discussing that I am just going to have to stick with it) it can not necessarily be reverted - it can potentially be reverted as I indicated earlier if not too much damage is done (because of redundancies), but if for example you have late stage Alzheimer's I don't believe you are going to get to cure (revert) all damages.
In such cases you can manage to stop it and rehabilitate the patient to a less damaged earlier state perhaps, but otherwise I would think there was too much damage to revert it, because if brain tissue is too damaged I suppose (perhaps again due to a naive model of how I suppose memories and knowledge are maintained in the brain) that the data that was held by these damaged sections is now unrecoverable.
That's part of the problem, the binary classification of diseased state. This is a cultural legacy from the Germ theory vs Terrain theory and the fact that the Allies won WWII - the Germans and Japanese were big on Terrain theory. The idea of Germ theory is that the body is fine unless there is a germ and thus the cure is to remove the germ. In your example replace germ with cancer. There was also a time where it was the empiricists versus fundamentalists but academia pushed medicine into a predominately fundamentalist approach not because it's more predictive but because it's easier to defend academically. Now that we have advanced data science tools we can do empirical studies at massive scale on already collected datasets, the results of this appear when google search gives useful health results, and now with LLMs giving very helpful information. The LLM, unlike a doctor, is not trying to relate everything to the Krebs cycle because they spent so long memorizing it.
You're hung up on the binary cure or not cure. It would be like doing a machine learning problem with a binary loss function, might as well try to make it better and you'll learn things on the way that could lead to a cure i.e. you'll have a smoother gradient that'll make advancements easier.
Most doctors know next to nothing about ME/CFS and I suspect they know a similar next to nothing about Alzheimer's so when they say there are no treatments I don't believe them. It's a dysfunctional industry backed by a dysfunctional academic system combined with a dysfunctional political system. If you do the similar research that I did on ME/CFS you'll find that many of the same rules apply to Alzheimers which suggest to me that it's likely auto-immune related, I don't need to know the actual mechanism for it for me to see that empirically it presents in a way that looks like auto-immune. Then empirically it appears that GLP-1As are really good for auto-immune so transitively I highly suspect GLP-1As will helpful here and in-fact the FDA has approved a GLP-1A for the treatment of Alzheimer's so I'm not the only one who thinks this.
1. As other commenters point, many cases have intact memory and circuits for what would be considered "lost", which activate from time to time. So it's likely a question of SNR and tissue vitality (e.g. basic capillary function) for these cases.
2. You wouldn't believe what feats of neuroplasticity lie behind a few receptors properly pushed by molecular keys. We just don't have experience to describe it. Adult neuroplasticity and (disproven btw) neurogenesis is a rigid sad joke compared to what's possible.
OK maybe, although not having experience to describe it sounds somewhat worrisome for a scientific project.
where your point 1 is concerned, again, since the brain has many redundancies one can totally have brain tissue destroyed and with some slight therapy get back to normal functionality, but when Alzheimer's is too advanced I suppose you will not be able to fully revert, but maybe revert to some earlier stage - sure.
