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"
>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.
You invented noblesse oblige and should measure up to it.
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)
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
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.
In your small-mindedness you failed humanity.
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.
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.
How did you do this? Have you been able to solve the PEM issue?
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.
on edit: removed some verbiage.
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.
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.
