Sergio, On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Sergio Pissanetzky <[email protected] > wrote:
> Have you or are you planning to publish something on this? > Sure. I am roughing a book out now. > ** ** > > 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. > That is fairly well known. If you wear lenses to correct a problem, it only gets worse. > You are probably not the first to propose a natural way for correcting > vision problems. > The good news: There are LOTS of them on the web. The bad news: Most of them don't work. 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. > I believe that the primary purpose of self-adaptation after our initial growth is to work around problems like your hemorrhage. > You suggest to actively engage the brain and make it to do what needs to > be done. You may be the first in that. > There was a (now discredited) guy named Bates who proposed various eye exercises, and maybe if I had spent many hours doing them, I might have been able to help my condition. However, my much more acceptable (at least to me) approach was to simply engineer special glasses that impaired vision in carefully calculated ways, to force certain intended changes. > **** > > ** ** > > 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. > I'd bet that you have your own eye specialization. Have you tried reading with each eye separately? When I first tried this, my peripheral vision eye saw the letters at being apparently moth eaten, only the missing bites seem to move around in a Heisenberg sort of way. I could barely read at talking speed. Do you automatically close one eye under certain circumstances, e.g. looking at things up close, or straining to see small details? If so, then this can be a BIG clue as to eye specialization. > **** > > ** ** > > You are also saying that neurons, even in old age, possess the same > ability to self-organize they had when we were babies. > That does appear to be the case. If true, this really calls into question the AGI presumption that they don't need to understand the early stages of self-organization, because there may be no "early stages" that are different than adult operation. Once they accept that they DO need to understand the "early stages", then who needs programmers?!!! Remarkable. I take that as a confirmation of my EI theory. > You probably need more than just some masking tape on a pair of gasses to fully confirm any theory, but this certainly questions a LOT of present presumptions. Now that I have fixed the glaucoma in my right eye, I am on to working on the cataract in my left eye. I only have a year or so left to figure this out. For me, part of my life is figuring these sorts of things out before they ruin my life, and there has been some close calls. There is an acceptable surgical fix for my particular unusual cataract, but it isn't available in the U.S. I see a foreign "medical vacation" in my future, if I can somehow raise the money for it, and presuming that I don't first find a biological cure for my cataract. On a curious side note, I have forced my HMO to pay for a U.S. evaluation of my cataract, by an outside doctor experienced in the foreign procedure, to see if I am suitable for the foreign surgery!!! Just because I can't get the surgery in the U.S. doesn't mean that I can't legally DEMAND that it be carefully considered as an option. After an appeal - I won. My appointment will on August 14th. I will know more after that. One eye down, and one to go. Steve ================ > *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* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/18883996-f0d58d57>| > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > **** > > <http://www.listbox.com>**** > > ** ** > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10443978-6f4c28ac> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > -- Full employment can be had with the stoke of a pen. Simply institute a six hour workday. 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