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I love these kinds of deep dives. If intelligence is happening at this scale, it suggests that "mind" might be the substrate of reality rather than just a byproduct of biology.
I have always been fascinated by Christopher Alexander's arguments that life is a property that can be measured for a given space, that rather than being an impossible philosophical question life and intelligence are a product of particular architectures that can be organically enhanced with the addition of other nuanced structures.
To see life and intelligence this way is so much more exciting to me than any chemist's binary definition of life they would employ by severing each constituent element into smaller and smaller pieces until it can be sufficiently interrogated and dissected to subdue and encapsulate the essence of life as if it were no more than a fraudently magic trickster presence to be caught and jailed within the known and exploitable.
No, the magic of life and intelligence is an analog not digital value and it inherently resides in summation, it can never be found within the individual elements.
“If we are to use the theory of centers – and the concept of life – as the basis of all architecture, it would be reassuring to know that wholeness, together with the properties which bring centers to life, is a necessary feature of material reality, not merely a psychological aspect of things which arises during perception of works of art.
… According to a ‘cognitive’ interpretation, the centers could merely exist in the mind’s eye … and the fifteen properties … could also exist merely as artifacts of cognition …
… I shall argue that nature too is understandable in terms of wholeness … I shall try to show that the structure of centers I call wholeness goes deeper than mere cognition, is linked to the functional and practical behavior of the natural world … and is as much at the foundation of physics and biology as it is of architecture.
https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/03/24/christopher-alexander-the-fifteen-properties-in-nature/
For example, opioids like morphine provide effective relief from chronic pain, but people quickly develop tolerance to such drugs and the only option is to increase the dose, which can lead to addiction and, later on, withdrawal risks.
This is not even how opioids lead to addiction. They are antagonists of endorphin receptors. On another note, AFAIK tolerance and addictiveness are separate aspects of psychoactive substances, not causally related as implied by the article.
It makes me wonder, in the aftermath of an opioid epidemic created by corporate greed, why some people would try to "fix opioids" in that regard.
well the free half was interesting :)