Landmark Study Confirms Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Is 'Unambiguously Biological'

[Hope_eternal]

Many years ago when I had a functional brain, I did a degree in philosophy and I think that much of this psych vs neuro or psychosomatic illness stuff in medicine comes from a misunderstanding of mind vs brain. If you don't have the right conceptual foundation, you don't stand much of a chance of interpreting your data correctly.

I'm trying to read up and write about this too.

Agree. The mind body connection is very complex. I’ve read that we only use about 10% of our brains! That’s fascinating 🤨 I wonder why and what could be possible if we could tap into more of its powers.

 

[Wishful]

We have to be realistic that the mind has a lot of power over the brain which has a lot of power over the chemicals, the muscles, the heart, everything.

It's also true that hardware malfunctions (brain cells not functioning correctly) can have strong and wide-ranging effects on the mind and body, but the mind can't correct those malfunctions (change the rate of a specific protein being produced, replace fatty acids in membranes with different fatty acids, etc).

 

[Booble]

It's also true that hardware malfunctions (brain cells not functioning correctly) can have strong and wide-ranging effects on the mind and body, but the mind can't correct those malfunctions (change the rate of a specific protein being produced, replace fatty acids in membranes with different fatty acids, etc).

That's a good way to look at it. The hardware and the software.

 

[wabi-sabi]

The hardware and the software.

That's the way the functional people look at it, which makes me skeptical of this analogy. They say, your hardware is fine (there's nothing wrong with you, normal test results, etc), but your software is malfunctioning (you're thinking the wrong thoughts, i.e. believing you are sick and if you will just change your thoughts the so-called disease will go away.)

We keep comparing the brain to our most advanced technology. Over the years that's been computers, telephone systems, and hydraulic systems, if memory serves (which it might not!). Brains are much more complicated than anything we have yet invented. Every time we use an analogy we color our understanding of the brain in a different way, that may just be in the analogy and not the brain.

Our conceptual issue is that the brain is clearly made of matter- a chunk of meat in your skull- while the mind feels immaterial. But whether or not the mind is immaterial or not, is something we need to discover. This goes back to Descartes and before. He asked the question how can the soul (which is obviously immaterial) interact with the brain. An immaterial soul can't interact with other physical objects (except in movies like Ghost), so what's the connection with the brain?

When we start using the hardware/software analogy, we still haven't answered Descartes' question. We've couched it in more familiar terms, and that gives us the illusion of understanding. There's all sorts of things embedded in the hardware/software analogy that don't happen in brains. There was no software engineer that wrote a program of me, with a certain function in mind and who is debugging me when I malfunction. You have to really torture the analogy to compare my personality, to a designed product like a smart phone.

We need to remember that computers and neural nets are very, very simplified versions of our brains. Here's another analogy: if a child draws a picture of his favorite ship, we don't point at his drawing and say, "Wow, a blueprint of how the ship should work". That's what the FND people are doing with the hardware/software analogy and the brain. Scientists who use models to study the real world, like building a wave tank to study how rogue waves form and sink ships, try very hard to fit their model to the world. Otherwise it's useless. The don't try to fit the world to the model, as the hardware/software tries to fit the brain to a computer.

 

[wabi-sabi]

Here's a more coherent explanation than mine:
mperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2022/04/whats-wrong-with-computer-analogy.html

 

[Rufous McKinney]

I recall my chinese herbalist made a big deal about the Nun who was studied and in her late 90s, her brain was full of plaques, and she had no Alzheimers what so ever.

Only recently I heard the plaque theory is no longer considered the cause.

They say, your hardware is fine (there's nothing wrong with you, normal test results, etc),

this is of course, because they never ran tests to look at what's wrong with us, they run standard tests which are not what pick up our issues.

And when we get back results that indicate problems, I'm told it's not a Good Enough Problem. OK, I"m a huge mess but it not a problem.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

Here's

link has an issue

 

[wabi-sabi]

Here's the link again:
https://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2022/04/whats-wrong-with-computer-analogy.html

 

[Rufous McKinney]

Seems to me there is no software

electrons and chemical molecules convey information via neurons in our bodies. Those are substances and are made up of matter.

 

[hapl808]

That's the way the functional people look at it, which makes me skeptical of this analogy.

Yeah, on the one hand - sure, why not. But on the other, there's no proof that this is accurate - it's just a helpful analogy that sounds plausible.

But if I say that the brain is a combination of birth astrology and transit astrology - and your birth astrology is fundamentally okay, but illness and trauma is similar to bad transit astrology - do you nod along and go, "Yes, it's exactly like astrology."

These are heuristics because we don't really understand what's happening, so we try to put it in a form we can wrap our heads around and helps explain things. Which is the L2 cache and which is the memory that on-die? Is one corrupt and one still working? Or does the analogy break down at some point?

These are very rudimentary metaphors, because we don't understand the brain, neurotransmitter function, depression, TBI, neurons, plasticity, etc. We're just grasping and trying to figure out what's going on. Our understanding is not that much better than it was 50 years ago, despite all our technological advances. Treatment for depression, TBI, MECFS, schizophrenia, etc - isn't that fundamentally different.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

Here's the link again:

interesting web site........

I'm entirely unable to make sense out of much of any of that, at the moment.

 

[wabi-sabi]

I'm entirely unable to make sense out of much of any of that, at the moment.

Yup, you have to be having a good brain day to understand philosophy, and I'm not today. She's really writing about mental health stigma, not FNDs, but I think what she's saying still applies.

 

[hapl808]

Also, it's fascinating to me that LLMs appear from the outside to be so close to human cognition. I think very few people thought that mathematical back propagation and token prediction would end up with a machine you can have a conversation with and theorize about the universe - and the few who thought that possible were viewed as crazies. There was a belief that LLMs were limited to producing convincing sounding gibberish, yet around GPT3 that was obviously not the case.

How is it doing that? I find that the less people understand them, the more they think it's easy to explain.

 

[wabi-sabi]

How is it doing that? I find that the less people understand them, the more they think it's easy to explain.

For sure! I have no idea how my computer works, let alone a neural net or an AI.

But I do know that if your don't know how your model works, you aren't going to be able to use it to understand what you are modeling.

 

[Booble]

That's the way the functional people look at it, which makes me skeptical of this analogy. They say, your hardware is fine (there's nothing wrong with you, normal test results, etc), but your software is malfunctioning (you're thinking the wrong thoughts, i.e. believing you are sick and if you will just change your thoughts the so-called disease will go away.)

We keep comparing the brain to our most advanced technology. Over the years that's been computers, telephone systems, and hydraulic systems, if memory serves (which it might not!). Brains are much more complicated than anything we have yet invented. Every time we use an analogy we color our understanding of the brain in a different way, that may just be in the analogy and not the brain.

Our conceptual issue is that the brain is clearly made of matter- a chunk of meat in your skull- while the mind feels immaterial. But whether or not the mind is immaterial or not, is something we need to discover. This goes back to Descartes and before. He asked the question how can the soul (which is obviously immaterial) interact with the brain. An immaterial soul can't interact with other physical objects (except in movies like Ghost), so what's the connection with the brain?

When we start using the hardware/software analogy, we still haven't answered Descartes' question. We've couched it in more familiar terms, and that gives us the illusion of understanding. There's all sorts of things embedded in the hardware/software analogy that don't happen in brains. There was no software engineer that wrote a program of me, with a certain function in mind and who is debugging me when I malfunction. You have to really torture the analogy to compare my personality, to a designed product like a smart phone.

We need to remember that computers and neural nets are very, very simplified versions of our brains. Here's another analogy: if a child draws a picture of his favorite ship, we don't point at his drawing and say, "Wow, a blueprint of how the ship should work". That's what the FND people are doing with the hardware/software analogy and the brain. Scientists who use models to study the real world, like building a wave tank to study how rogue waves form and sink ships, try very hard to fit their model to the world. Otherwise it's useless. The don't try to fit the world to the model, as the hardware/software tries to fit the brain to a computer.

All good points!
Maybe the hardware/software analogy can get a little closer if we include the Operating System that is in between the hardware and the software.

 

[wabi-sabi]

Maybe the hardware/software analogy can get a little closer if we include the Operating System that is in between the hardware and the software.

No, I think we should scrap that analogy altogether for brains.

It comes with too many assumptions about computers that just don't fit brains. The biggest problem is that all mental stuff is at the nitty gritty bottom, a brain effect. Our minds arise from our brains. Our brains create our minds. Software doesn't arise from hardware. It's an (almost) completely separate thing. You can buy a program and run it on any computer (as long as you sort out that PC vs Mac thing, which also doesn't apply to humans). That means the one big thing that we really, really want to know- how the brain creates the mind- is the part the computer hardware/software analogy gets wrong. The hardware in a computer does not create the software.

Let's look at a really old fashioned computer to see the issue better- a jacquard loom. The hardware is the loom. The software is the card you put into the loom- a punch card like the really old computers used. No weaver working this loom would think that the loom had created the punch card. If anything is this analogy would fit the mind, it would be the cloth that came out of the loom.

The issue that's so hard to grasp is the physical vs non-physical problem of minds and brains. But remember, that's the problem we are trying to sort out. Is the mind physical or non-physical? If we say the mind is like modern software, that means we have already decided, before we even think it through, that the mind is non-physical. But if we remember that software can be physical-punch cards, then we have another perspective to think about. Maybe the mind is physical. Either way, we have to figure out which it is before deciding on an appropriate analogy. If we choose the analogy before we figure out the thing we want to know, then we have answered the question without being aware we have answered the question.

Dialogue
Person 1 "My mind is like a baseball"'
Person 2 "Uh.. OK. Does that mean your mind is round and covered in stitches?"
Person 1 "Yes!"
Person 2 "Wait.. you really think your mind is round and covered in stitches? Why?"
Person 1 "Because that's what baseballs are like! And my mind is like a baseball!"
Person 2 "But how do you know your mind is round?"
Person 1" I've seen lots and lots of baseballs. I'm a baseball expert and every last one is round with stitching."
Person 2 "I've seen baseballs too, but how do you know your mind is like one?"
Person 1 "Because the mind is like a baseball."
Person 2 "Yes, I am seeing the circularity."

If we decide ahead of time we don't get anywhere. If we decide the mind is immaterial then it just must be like software. Why? Because software is an immaterial instruction that runs on hardware. But if we haven't already decided the mind is immaterial, what might we see?

 

[hapl808]

Software doesn't arise from hardware. It's an (almost) completely separate thing. You can buy a program and run it on any computer (as long as you sort out that PC vs Mac thing, which also doesn't apply to humans). That means the one big thing that we really, really want to know- how the brain creates the mind- is the part the computer hardware/software analogy gets wrong. The hardware in a computer does not create the software.

Yeah, all of this is a good point and highlights some of the many issues with this broken analogy.

If we choose the analogy before we figure out the thing we want to know, then we have answered the question without being aware we have answered the question.

And a perfect explanation (better than I came up with) on why it's important not to use these analogies.

You can't make an appropriate analogy to explain something, until you actually understand the thing you're trying to explain. Otherwise you're just guessing at stuff, which is what we're doing. A rough untested hypothesis is not the same thing as a real explanation or reason.

 

[wabi-sabi]

And a perfect explanation (better than I came up with) on why it's important not to use these analogies.

I was hoping this explanation made sense. It's something you learn in basic philosophy class. Do not reason from an analogy. You can use them as teaching tools. But you'd better understand the difference between ship, a model of the ship, and a blueprint of the ship.

 

[hapl808]

I was hoping this explanation made sense. It's something you learn in basic philosophy class. Do not reason from an analogy. You can use them as teaching tools. But you'd better understand the difference between ship, a model of the ship, and a blueprint of the ship.

It's very good. As I haven't studied much philosophy, I hadn't come across that specific explanation - but it highlights my issues. I love analogies to explain things - when I understand what I'm explaining.

But in medicine, I see people use analogies all the time that are actually just rough hypotheses, but they're presented as genuine explanations. That's a whole different thing - and like you said, they're answering a question without realizing they're doing it, and without the proof that it's right.

 

[Wishful]

When we start using the hardware/software analogy, we still haven't answered Descartes' question.

There's no point in asking that question until there's proof--or even plausible evidence--that there is such a thing as a "soul".

Software doesn't arise from hardware. It's an (almost) completely separate thing. You can buy a program and run it on any computer

False. In neural networks, you don't load programs, you let the hardware train from inputs, so the "software" does arise from hardware. If you train two networks with the same set of inputs, hardware variations could lead to completely different connections and weights, forming two different "personalities" so to speak, which will respond to new inputs differently. If you started with two identical networks, but a cosmic ray flipped one bit in one network, you might end up with quite different final networks.

Human brains can't be perfectly modeled (yet), but that doesn't mean that imperfect models or analogies can't have value. Human minds depend on human brain cells, and if you change the operating characteristics of those cells, you will change the mind (thoughts, perceptions, etc) too. If ME changes the operating characteristics of some brain cells, the subject might experience pain sensations, or oversensitivity to inputs, or lethargy and brainfog. That software or neural networks depends on the underlying hardware is a valid result of even a simplistic computer model. Can you argue that the mind is completely unaffected by the hardware? Mind-altering drugs (which change the operating characteristics of cells) is counterevidence.