[httrack works wonderfully well for backing up forums]

[also crsociety still wont load on my galaxy s24 or on my arc browser on my macbook]

Maybe, the  Spiritual Machines have always been "aged". Does time really exists? What is a "spirit"? What is a "machine"?

Mr K was featured again on JRE. He takes over 80 pills a day ... and ... here are the results ...

Still, it's getting more crowded/overwhelming and I'm seeing more "dumb posters"/noise. There are 100+ page threads I don't want to click or reply to. So crsociety still occupies a very valuable place. It needs a bit more activity, but invisionforum is just the perfect place to post everything (plus it's an intrinsically better platform)

https://scix2024.eventscribe.net/SearchByExpoCompany.asp?pfp=BrowseByCompany

there are also mit.nano events

I really want to attend ISNR sometime https://boothsquare.com/events/isnr-annual-conference/editions/isnr-annual-conference-2024/979ca44e-ac4f-45c7-bcc0-b69e403e2980/

Have not attended RAADfest..

==

I have attended International Society for Complex Systems 2018, GSA2018 (the one panel on day on aging was worth it because ALL the aging scientists would collect together at the same talk), AGE2019, Montreal 2019, and one GRC2022. Also one University of Washington one (actually two), including one that did a lot of dog aging. AND a Brown University one

Also two Foresight Institute conferences (including the longevity one in 2023) and one A4M. The Foresight ones are soo ideal.

[I often have only attended these conferences once, b/c I like the diversity/novelty but there are diminishing returns to coming to the same one again, given other things one can be doing, and also given that my strength is diversity]

Posted on here: https://www.quora.com/What-bioscience-conferences-have-Quora-members-attended/answer/Alex-K-Chen [but no one is gonna read that anymore]

Here is the trailer:

--Dean

I'd seen some speculation on the list a couple of weeks ago whether or not Paul and Meredith still exist.  I checked: They do.  Their website, livingthecrway.com, is still active; and they're still running their business.  I chatted briefly with Paul.

Well, I'm glad to hear they're still alive.

  --  Saul

I just put a new CGM on today! I'll log various foods and my glucose response to them! First time in (barely) over a year. Original log at rapamycin.news, but invision is a better forum than discourse so I'll post here. Want to do some testing before I get into the new canagliflozin trial

Previous thread here: https://www.rapamycin.news/t/alex-k-chen-metabolic-cgm-progress-my-everything-in-longevity-thread/466

[I will post here now b/c invision board gets less unwieldy with size]

===

Glucose started at 72, 2 hrs after canneli beans w/o protection.

===

I have hibose I need to test (interesting I didn't test for just barely over a year). Also some beans. Need to test beans with both hibose and white kidney bean extract, and *also* beans without any protection.

Then at some point I'm going to test SANDWICHES with hibose and then white kidney bean extract. The kidney bean extract is especially important b/c if I can block glucose increases with that, I don't need to do all the hassle of acarbose. Also, sandwiches with JUST enough acarbose to block the increase (I overdid acarbose every time I used a sandwich in the past, but this also wasted too much acarbose)

also going to test canned tomatoes **and** salsa (probably going to be a high increase, like I got with tomato sauce). These are the foods I omitted last time..

ALSO need to test this on Bush's Blue Zones beans...

[I also need, at some point, apricots/plums/peaches to see if I can reduce them with acarbose, but they're not in-season rn]

I will get 300mg canagliflozin on roughly March 21, and then I'll use it to test if I can use it to block glucose increases from strawberries

=======

At 21:00 I ate Bush's best chickpeas [right after Gochu Curry Kraut, miso, and an entire box of almonds], than 300mg hibose. 30 minutes later, glucose has increased from 80s to 93 (not much). 36 minutes later, it seems to go down again..

Glucose back to 82 at 22:18. Damn

If anything is certain, it's that time is more valuable than ever, and investing in $SMH/$NVDA/$AMD will more than pay off for itself. The time value of money massively increases - it makes less sense to hold savings for >10 year timescales. Use your money to treat yourself more. Get the fastest PC possible, save as much of your content on PC as possible (b/c NVIDIA GPUs allow you to search your entire computer now), use Uber if transfers on public transport wreck your flow.

(it has made me buy more premium foods like what I can get from Cambridge Naturals). It's not worth getting worse-quality (or more microplastic-contaminated) food when you can get better options with minimal time investment (even if the alternatives are costlier). Semaglutide is still important and reduces food costs of more premium food (eg fermented vegetables from Cambridge Naturals)

https://01core.substack.com/ (is in the intersection of all the right spheres)

(also, spend more time in areas where things are being done - eg SF).

Paul Christiano says that interest rates may massively rise as the time value of money goes way up.  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ngpC5PFAgxHJMhicM/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or-1

Spend more time around people who are *living for the age of AI* (eg people AROUND AI), rather than who are still trapped by pre-AGI structures (like school)

Oh, and this makes $5000 for 200billion exosomes WAY more worth it (see my grg.org thread). 10 billion umbilical exosomes is *nothing*

Past regrets/social messes matter way less and will be more of a rounding error in the long-run/final computation

Many people in EA/AI-adjacent spheres are staring to care way less about longevity b/c "we all die as one or we all live as one" [either aligned AGI is achieved or unaligned AGI kills us all - all within ~20 years]. It's still important, however, to reduce aging rate (b/c total human compute depends on minimizing aging/pollution rate for a maximally faithful computation *and* for properly integrating with BCI). BCI/implants work *best* in a minimally-aged body (side effects/pain/inflammation are *all* worse in more-aged organisms)

To achieve enlightenment, do whatever it takes to make up for your shitty memory (this is why slowing your aging rate still matters). Making up for your shitty memory is maximally important for achieving alignment. Make all the Pareto-efficient improvements you can (get the cleanest+most searchable diet/input stream that you can - money matters less than ever). Nearcyan knows ALL the longevity hacks and has possibly THE most important Twitter ever.

Retro.bio people are cooler than all the other longevity people, spend more time with them. I was a reprogramming skeptic too, but then a recent tweet shows that OSKM *can* improve mid-life longevity.

Get someone like Anton Kulaga/Newton Winter to stash all rapamycin.news + crsociety.org content into their longevity LLM

Context/taste uniquely matter, esp as more gets automated by AI. AI still cannot automate all of human context. In this weird world, context/taste still more than make up for +2SD deficits in 20-year-old-normalized-fluid-intelligence/conscientiousness. Charles Liang of SMCI gets special moat privilege just for his early friendship with Jensen Huang, even if Charles Liang might not be **the** most innovative CEO at this stage.

Develop predictive analytics of what is "timeless" rather than the intermediate computations/pre-AGI "high scores" that don't matter.

Due to uncertainties around AGI alignment, everything must be treated with an even more extreme sense of urgency (this does not need to stress you out - b/c of this you can also afford to spend *more* on the near-term)

If you constantly feel misunderstood and hate putting any time into formatting, this matters less b/c AI can rephrase/format all your ideas for you. If you are quantity-over-quality, AI may rearrange all the good stuff in forms other people can take in

And pls always remember that Vincent Weisser is on *everyone's good side* and is the most outsider-friendly and most loveable person in longevity. If it becomes necessary for people in longevity who hate each other to un-hate each other, it will probably be through him... In any case, Sam Altman said "AI will be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it becomes superhuman on other outcomes" so AI may finally persuade the haters to unhate. If anyone in longevity has the kindness of Christ, it's Vincent Weisser.

x'posted in Zuzalu and Vitalia telegram channels - we need a commonlounge for longevity X AI discussion and one does not yet exist. The Longevity Biotech Fellowship slack does not work for long-form content that's searchable/accessible by all]

Joao Pedro de MagalhaesJoao Pedro de Magalhaes • 1st • 1st Professor, University of Birmingham | Researcher | Entrepreneur | Public SpeakerProfessor, University of Birmingham | Researcher | Entrepreneur | Public Speaker

https://archive.ph/Vqyaw

"more is different"

post-von neumann architectures...

Sruthi @ retro wrote a paper..

https://epochai.org/data/epochdb/table

Papers

https://www.aging-us.com/article/205604/text

this paper on Sholl intersection analysis of Cypin (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2015.00285/full )

and cypin has differential effects on long vs short axons [this is impt for precision]

The entropic heart: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.07.566008v1

By BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY AUGUST 14, 2022

Scientists have developed a new conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view.

According to the theory, all that’s needed to solve the hard problem of consciousness is to change our assumptions about it. When we realize that consciousness is a physical, relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves.

How do 3 pounds of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images, and a detailed inner world?

The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled people for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, with the ability to sense, feel, and think. In contrast to being under anesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we’re awake we don’t “live in the dark” — we experience the world and ourselves. However, it remains a mystery how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible.

 

According to Dr. Nir Lahav, a physicist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “This is quite a mystery since it seems that our conscious experience cannot arise from the brain, and in fact, cannot arise from any physical process.” As bizarre as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity.

“Think about it this way,” says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, “when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That’s why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.” Because of this, we can’t reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel, and think to any brain activity. We can only find correlations to these experiences.

After more than 100 years of neuroscience, we have very strong evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities.  So how is it possible that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity?

This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it. Even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, still there is no satisfactory theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.

In the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh recently published a new physical theory that claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way. According to the researchers, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. In the paper, the authors developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view. According to Dr. Lahav, the lead author of the paper, “consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena.”

In order to understand how relativity dissolves the hard problem, think about a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. First, let’s choose two observers, Alice and Bob. Bob is on a train that moves with constant velocity and Alice watches him from the platform. There is no absolute physical answer to the question “what is the velocity of Bob?” The answer is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. From Bob’s frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and Alice, with the rest of the world, is moving backward. But from Alice’s frame of reference, Bob is the one that’s moving and she is stationary. They have opposite measurements, yet both of them are correct, just from different frames of reference.

We find the same situation in the case of consciousness because, according to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon. Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames of reference. Bob will measure that he has conscious experience, but Alice just has brain activity with no sign of the actual conscious experience. On the other hand, Alice will measure that she is the one that has consciousness and Bob has just neural activity with no clue of its conscious experience.

Just as in the case of velocity, although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, but from different cognitive frames of reference. As a result, because of the relativistic point of view, there is no problem with the fact that we measure different properties from different frames of reference. The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we’re measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.

According to the new theory, the brain doesn’t create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement. In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference, although these frames measure the same phenomenon.

For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice’s brain in the lab while she’s feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference.

For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate that causes brain activity – the neurons. Consequently, in his cognitive frame Alice has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself.

However, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kinds of measurements. She doesn’t use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations to other neural representations.

This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does and, as a result, this kind of direct measurement manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience. As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience.

Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob’s neural activity could be changed to be like the dynamics of Alice’s neural activity, then both will be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have the exact same conscious experience as the other.

Now Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness. The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.

Reference: “A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness” by Nir Lahav and Zachariah A. Neemeh, 12 May 2022, Frontiers in Psychology.
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704270

Hi,

I understand, here's your text with minimal adjustments for clarity and readability:

I think today mentioned @mccoy plant chompers in another topic, but I think he deserves a place of his own to ask this question. What do you think about him and his research + approach?

I like the way he uses studies, books, and common sense spiced with great humor to talk about interesting topics like longevity, the Mediterranean diet, veganism, and others.

This particular video series I found very entertaining - I think he doesn't "like" the carnivore movement. I also think it's something you need to fight against to reduce the harm in some youth today (in Germany it feels like every 3rd fitness guy is on carnivore right now...).

Best,
cTpa

Quote

I find it deeply distressing that we’ve gotten to a point dishonesty in science is normalized to an extent that nobody is shocked when a tenured @Harvard professor falsely proclaims in a press release that a product he is selling to pet owners has “reversed aging in dogs”. To me, this is the textbook definition of snake oil salesman.

Matt Kaeberlein, University of Washington

Still lives independently and has no problem with daily living tasks, drves his car.

Doesn't exercise, never did, though is "active". No special diet, eats whatever he wants. Drinks Ovaltine daily. Smoked for 20 years until 70. Drank a lot of milk as a young man. 

It's all about the genes, folks. A male supercentenarian is very rare. And here we have one with indifferent diet, former 20-year smoker, who never exercised. Would you pick him as a candidate for a supercentenarian? The man is in excellent health, never any health problems. Yet folks like Peter Attia go to extravagant lengths to implement "science based" (he's an MD!) heathy lifestyles and exercises maniacly... yet has had multiple surgeries already and he's not even 60. You wanna bet Attia - or any of the other prominent health nuts - will last anywhere near 110?

Like I always say, it's all about your genes. No matter what you do, you have very little control over your health and longevity, regardless of what the health gurus claim. OK, now I have to go exercise - which I hate and only do, because of the alleged health benefits. I hope I can live in relatively good health until my 80's before I croak.

I don't trust fibers because MORE gets into the vegetables

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HHDK44Y/ref=sspa_mw_detail_6?ie=UTF8&psc=1&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9kZXRhaWwp13NParams&th=1

It's nice that this uses cotton but it's unclear if they put problematic additives into the cotton.. cotton microfibers might shed more than MPs do... [they DO in masks...]

And what about limited amount of time? 

Below shows nutrient destruction but this concerns me 1/100th as much as the AGE/ALE stuff

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722699/#:~:text=In conclusion%2C the current study,the loss of total carotenoids.