There, I’ve just caused you to scramble a vast array of concentration gradients, proteins tumbling around in a merry free-for-all.
You probably haven’t actually, anymore then when you shake your hands vigorously back and forth the germs fly off. The force applied for so small a time is unlikely to have much of an effect on the cells which are dominated by chemical interactions,osmotic pressures,etc. Things don’t scale the way you’d like them to. Your whole argument is just invalid.
Edit to incorporate a point made below: which is good as if you scrambled the proteins in your brain, you’d die.
False analogy; there is a change in medium going from the oiled up dermis to air.
Take a glass of water with a large number of tagged proteins. That is the model of e.g. presynaptic vesicles filled with neurotransmitters, swimming in the cytoplasmic matrix (which is mostly water). A significant amount of them is not attached to anything. I didn’t say the folding structure would be scrambled, I said that the concentration gradients would be influenced, and that the orientation of non-attached proteins would change.
Shake the glass of water. What happens?
Shake the cytoplasmic matrix. What happens? What does such a rearrangement probably entail? That’s right, some change in concentration gradients, and a host of non-attached proteins tumbling around in a merry free-for-all.
Your whole argument is just invalid.
We can arrange to bet on our beliefs about this, say a 4 figure sum going to a charity of the other’s choice, with mutually agreed upon authorities in the field being the arbiters? If so send me a PM, and we can make the result public once we’re done.
EHeller was correct in so far as physical accelerations as occurring in every-day life do not have an effect on proteins and other small cell components which exceeds thermal noise.
I did win the bet since EHeller committed to a statement saying there would be no effect (on at least the order of magnitude of thermal noise) on any component of the cell, and as calculated by a referee, it turns out that larger cell organelles such as mitochondria are affected to such a degree (assuming 0.5g over 10s, 0.5g occurs e.g. when taking a car from 0 to 60mph in 6 seconds, so the 0.5g over 10s would occur for example when taking a car from 0 to 100mph over 10 seconds). Referee statement see here.
The wager goes to Miri, as chosen by Kawoomba, with thanks for all the fish.
I thank EHeller for his professional conduct and his charitable interpretations of my claims, resulting in the, well, result. Had he held me to my initial statements as made, he would have won.
I should have made my point in an entirely different way from the start: Namely, consider you took a psychoactive drug, such as an SSRI. Naturally, all sorts of channel configurations, concentration gradients and the such would be affected. But consider what happens after you stop taking it: you’d regress to some semblance (but not precisely the same state!) of the state you had before.
If someone paid you a large sum of money for taking SSRIs for 1 month, wouldn’t you do so? I probably would. I wouldn’t consider myself to be committing informational suicide, even though even post-SSRI-taking my state would still be different from my state now. That’s my point; many-to-one transformations—variances between the original state and the reconstructed state—don’t need to be functionally significant, and even when they are, it doesn’t follow that we couldn’t consider ourselves to be reconstituted, just as we don’t consider ourselves to be committing identity-suicide when taking SSRIs for a month.
Just to verify- we made the bet and unfortunately I allowed the burden of proof to shift to myself, rather than to Kawoomba, and the statement we used for the bet was effectively “everyday scale accelerations will have an affect on proteins or other biologically important compounds at most an order of magnitude below thermal noise.” This statement is technically not true, because fairly strong (~g), long-time-scale accelerations (10 s of seconds) will have an effect on the largest structures of just-about-thermal-noise (so basically if you get in one of those centrifuge-style-carnival-rides, you can affect your mitochrondia to order thermal noise).
A car doing 0-60 in 6 seconds won’t quite do it, it needs to be 10s of seconds.
Also this should underscore that bets might not be the best way to go about truth seeking :)
Also, to respond to the SSRI point- I doubt Kawoomba would take a large sum of money to take ANY psychoactive drug for 1 month- rather he knows the specific affects of SSRIs. Some changes in brain chemistry can be more important than others.
Hmm, for sufficiently large values of ‘large sum of money’, as long as the drug was randomly (not maliciously) chosen from a pool of FDA-approved psychoactive drugs, I would. Wouldn’t you, for one trillion dollars? If so, we’re just haggling about price.
The original example used 0.5g, just to give an impression that would be on the scale of going 0-60 in 6 seconds, for 10 seconds just keep up the acceleration for 4 seconds longer.
Also, given “one magnitude less than thermal noise” (as in the statement), apparently normal rollercoasters are, after all, sufficient to affect even smaller structures such as lysosomes at >58 (fifty-eight) nm, see this amendment.
We can arrange to bet on our beliefs about this, say a 4 figure sum going to a charity of the other’s choice, with mutually agreed upon authorities in the field being the arbiters? If so send me a PM, and we can make the result public once we’re done.
To be clear, you want to bet that shaking your head side-to-side vigorously causes the same qualitative type of changes to protein concentrations along cell membranes as introducing a large concentration of toxic cryoprotectants?
I want to emphasize along cell membranes, as I believe those are the concentrations kalla was referring to, its where the information will be lost, and is why I referred to osmotic pressure and chemical interactions being very dominant, and such forces are not present in your glass of water analogy (other than shaking the glass will NOT cause the proteins to precipitate out), so I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing.
To be clear, you want to bet that shaking your head side-to-side vigorously causes the same qualitative type of changes to protein concentrations along cell membranes as introducing a large concentration of toxic cryoprotectants?
...
No, I am not saying that shaking your head will rupture many of your phospholipid bilayers and in effect kill you.
Glad we could clear that up.
(What I am saying is “after the damage (e.g. cell membranes) has been repaired, certain information was not recoverable” not being a death knell for cryonics, since we accept a considerable margin of error concerning e.g. specific neurotransmitter vesicle locations in daily life without considering ourselves a different person just because we’ve effected a host of changes in distributions and arrangements. An example other than shaking your head, which also strongly affects cross-membrane distributions: SSRIs)
I agree that bioactive drugs will have effects on distributions, as thats what they exist for, they also cause (sometimes mild, sometimes extreme) personality changes. What I’m interested in is how wrong can we get things and still have a “working” brain.
I’m not sure Kawoomba would really like brains to be scrambled by head shaking. I expect that all else being equal he would prefer as little disruption as possible.
You probably haven’t actually, anymore then when you shake your hands vigorously back and forth the germs fly off. The force applied for so small a time is unlikely to have much of an effect on the cells which are dominated by chemical interactions,osmotic pressures,etc. Things don’t scale the way you’d like them to. Your whole argument is just invalid.
Edit to incorporate a point made below: which is good as if you scrambled the proteins in your brain, you’d die.
False analogy; there is a change in medium going from the oiled up dermis to air.
Take a glass of water with a large number of tagged proteins. That is the model of e.g. presynaptic vesicles filled with neurotransmitters, swimming in the cytoplasmic matrix (which is mostly water). A significant amount of them is not attached to anything. I didn’t say the folding structure would be scrambled, I said that the concentration gradients would be influenced, and that the orientation of non-attached proteins would change.
Shake the glass of water. What happens?
Shake the cytoplasmic matrix. What happens? What does such a rearrangement probably entail? That’s right, some change in concentration gradients, and a host of non-attached proteins tumbling around in a merry free-for-all.
We can arrange to bet on our beliefs about this, say a 4 figure sum going to a charity of the other’s choice, with mutually agreed upon authorities in the field being the arbiters? If so send me a PM, and we can make the result public once we’re done.
Postmortem for the bet:
EHeller was correct in so far as physical accelerations as occurring in every-day life do not have an effect on proteins and other small cell components which exceeds thermal noise.
I did win the bet since EHeller committed to a statement saying there would be no effect (on at least the order of magnitude of thermal noise) on any component of the cell, and as calculated by a referee, it turns out that larger cell organelles such as mitochondria are affected to such a degree (assuming 0.5g over 10s, 0.5g occurs e.g. when taking a car from 0 to 60mph in 6 seconds, so the 0.5g over 10s would occur for example when taking a car from 0 to 100mph over 10 seconds). Referee statement see here.
The wager goes to Miri, as chosen by Kawoomba, with thanks for all the fish.
I thank EHeller for his professional conduct and his charitable interpretations of my claims, resulting in the, well, result. Had he held me to my initial statements as made, he would have won.
I should have made my point in an entirely different way from the start: Namely, consider you took a psychoactive drug, such as an SSRI. Naturally, all sorts of channel configurations, concentration gradients and the such would be affected. But consider what happens after you stop taking it: you’d regress to some semblance (but not precisely the same state!) of the state you had before.
If someone paid you a large sum of money for taking SSRIs for 1 month, wouldn’t you do so? I probably would. I wouldn’t consider myself to be committing informational suicide, even though even post-SSRI-taking my state would still be different from my state now. That’s my point; many-to-one transformations—variances between the original state and the reconstructed state—don’t need to be functionally significant, and even when they are, it doesn’t follow that we couldn’t consider ourselves to be reconstituted, just as we don’t consider ourselves to be committing identity-suicide when taking SSRIs for a month.
Just to verify- we made the bet and unfortunately I allowed the burden of proof to shift to myself, rather than to Kawoomba, and the statement we used for the bet was effectively “everyday scale accelerations will have an affect on proteins or other biologically important compounds at most an order of magnitude below thermal noise.” This statement is technically not true, because fairly strong (~g), long-time-scale accelerations (10 s of seconds) will have an effect on the largest structures of just-about-thermal-noise (so basically if you get in one of those centrifuge-style-carnival-rides, you can affect your mitochrondia to order thermal noise).
A car doing 0-60 in 6 seconds won’t quite do it, it needs to be 10s of seconds.
Also this should underscore that bets might not be the best way to go about truth seeking :)
Also, to respond to the SSRI point- I doubt Kawoomba would take a large sum of money to take ANY psychoactive drug for 1 month- rather he knows the specific affects of SSRIs. Some changes in brain chemistry can be more important than others.
Hmm, for sufficiently large values of ‘large sum of money’, as long as the drug was randomly (not maliciously) chosen from a pool of FDA-approved psychoactive drugs, I would. Wouldn’t you, for one trillion dollars? If so, we’re just haggling about price.
The original example used 0.5g, just to give an impression that would be on the scale of going 0-60 in 6 seconds, for 10 seconds just keep up the acceleration for 4 seconds longer.
Also, given “one magnitude less than thermal noise” (as in the statement), apparently normal rollercoasters are, after all, sufficient to affect even smaller structures such as lysosomes at >58 (fifty-eight) nm, see this amendment.
To be clear, you want to bet that shaking your head side-to-side vigorously causes the same qualitative type of changes to protein concentrations along cell membranes as introducing a large concentration of toxic cryoprotectants?
I want to emphasize along cell membranes, as I believe those are the concentrations kalla was referring to, its where the information will be lost, and is why I referred to osmotic pressure and chemical interactions being very dominant, and such forces are not present in your glass of water analogy (other than shaking the glass will NOT cause the proteins to precipitate out), so I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing.
...
No, I am not saying that shaking your head will rupture many of your phospholipid bilayers and in effect kill you.
Glad we could clear that up.
(What I am saying is “after the damage (e.g. cell membranes) has been repaired, certain information was not recoverable” not being a death knell for cryonics, since we accept a considerable margin of error concerning e.g. specific neurotransmitter vesicle locations in daily life without considering ourselves a different person just because we’ve effected a host of changes in distributions and arrangements. An example other than shaking your head, which also strongly affects cross-membrane distributions: SSRIs)
I agree that bioactive drugs will have effects on distributions, as thats what they exist for, they also cause (sometimes mild, sometimes extreme) personality changes. What I’m interested in is how wrong can we get things and still have a “working” brain.
I’m not sure Kawoomba would really like brains to be scrambled by head shaking. I expect that all else being equal he would prefer as little disruption as possible.