Steve,
Any thoughts? Tons of them! Can't even organize them properly. Steve, you don't know what you have found, correction you know very well what you have found, you are one of the very very few people who really understand how self-organization works. When I started reading I first thought of reminding you that emergent structures, for example in the brain are very sensitive to the information that the brain is receiving (butterfly effect), which is a theoretival prediction, but you not only know that from observation but you are even using it for practical purposes. And successfull purposes. Have you or are you planning to publish something on this? Your thoughts are oriented to aging, and rigthfully so. But in vision alone there are so many applications. You are basically saying that corrective lenses in some cases may worsen the problem. You are probably not the first to propose a natural way for correcting vision problems. A few years ago I had an hemorrage in one of my retinas. It healed, but it left a dark spot in my field of vision. The eye doctor shook me to the bones when he said "don't worry, your brain will find its way around it." It did. The spot is still there - I can find it by focusing my attention - but I don't notice it at all. But this is passive. You suggest to actively engage the brain and make it to do what needs to be done. You may be the first in that. Maybe you can correct stereoscopic problems in peripheral vision. As I age, changes in my eyes have affected my ability to perceive the correct position of objects I am not looking at. My cup of tea is on the table and when I try to grab the sugar farther away I hit the cup and the tea goes airborne. You are also saying that neurons, even in old age, possess the same ability to self-organize they had when we were babies. Remarkable. I take that as a confirmation of my EI theory. Sergio From: Steve Richfield [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, July 27, 2012 1:08 PM To: AGI Subject: [agi] Lessons for AGI from the first glaucoma reversal I have just performed apparently the first ever reversal of a glaucoma blind spot. Aside from the medical implications, there is "crossover" to AGI, uploading/downloading, and other non-medical areas of interest. The fundamental problem in glaucoma appears to be hyper-development - that things self-organize to approximately what we expect - and then keep right on developing to the point of self-destruction. As I look around, there are other areas of aging that could easily be explained in terms of hyper-development. It is unclear to me whether hyper-development is some sort of impassible barrier, or just some more "programming" is needed for the next phases of our lives. What apparently happened in my own eyes is that they first developed normally. However, my right eye had slightly sharper vision due to an "insignificant" flaw in the lens of my left eye, so my right eye eventually "took over" detail vision, leaving my left eye to "take over" most of the peripheral vision, at least the part that was visible to my left eye. While even now with a cataract my left eye still has 20-30 vision, I could barely read with it. My right eye had become blind to the left, because that part of the field was being "handled" by my left eye. The only barely noticeable effect of all this was that when examining fine details, I often habitually closed my left eye. In short, this hyper-development was working GREAT and probably improved my overall vision - except for one "little" detail: With part of the peripheral field being abandoned in my right eye, my right-side optic nerve was shrinking, and the circulation within my right eye was diminishing because there was little need to feed neurons that weren't doing anything. Eventually, the pressure in my right eye could have pushed the shrinking optic nerve out through the hole it now passes through, destroying its connections to the retina, and I could have gone completely blind in my right eye. The "fix" was simple. For a while each day, I wore special glasses that impaired my vision in ways that forced a return to more normal operation. These glasses slightly blurred my right eye, forcing my left eye to see any fine details, and they impaired the peripheral vision in my left eye, forcing my right eye to turn those idle neurons back on in order to see to the left. Masking tape on the left lens was adjusted until success was achieved. As hoped for, the thickness of my right retina has been increasing, now having gained ~4 microns on average. It still needs to gain another ~19 microns to match my healthier left eye. This gain is believed to be mostly in additional circulation. Other apparent areas of hyper-development come in gradually trading memories for understanding - until there are few if any memories left in the very old. Our skin keeps on developing wrinkles as needed to relieve stresses. Even our noses just keep on growing, a little like Pinocchio's. Living forever would seem to not only involve limitless mental resources, but also some triage to eliminate parts that are no longer worth their overhead - by some presently unknown measure. Complexity incurs propagation losses, miss-identification errors, reliance on obsolete dependencies, etc. I have been researching aging-related problems for myself and other cooperative "victims", and have found that things like destructive habits, superstitious learning in our central metabolic control systems, and hyper-development are what actually disables and kills older people, at least the people I know, and not the shopping list of things for which Aubrey de Grey is now calling for research. Note that these are "soft" problems in that they are easily correctable without "magic potions". It appears that decades of additional lifespan may be available via these "soft" methods. Aubrey's list may yet become a guiding light, but not before these other problems are tackled, as the vast majority of people are now being disabled and killed for some really easy to fix reasons that are NOT on Aubrey's present list. Any thoughts? Steve AGI | <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/18883996-f0d58d57> | <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; ad2> Modify Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
