No but it is a behaviourally defined disorder like autism. Which means it can and has many different causal patterns behind it.
That is there are many different things that can cause the behaviour.
Anyway on your main point, the definition of all psychiatric disorders has requirements of subjective suffering. So if you don't have subjective suffering you don't have the disorder.
Nothing in particular, based on my understanding CGI a Swedish IT consultant company was hacked, they have contracts for and are the maintainers and developers of a bunch of various government departments IT services.
Many global companies have subsidiaries in the countries they operate in. Aside from many other reasons, it helps make people in those countries think they're local!
The amount of people that seam to react negatively to living brain cells doing the computation is unexpected to me.
I do understand where it comes from to some extent.. some idea that human cells are special i guess, but it seams very naive to me. We spawn, use and kill far more complex AI agents millions if not billions of times every second in this society.
No one gives a shit, as those intelligences are not "real" or whatever.. or they are not "conscious" but conscious is a fictional word without an actual definition. In the end i think it comes down to suffering.
No one knows if some internal part in a LLM is suffering just as no one knows if a cell culture with brain cells like this can suffer.
It's easy to imagine that scaling up a neural network made up of actual human neurons will quickly achieve something resembling "intelligence" and "qualia" since it's made of the same parts that presumably produce those phenomenon in us. The ethical implications are much harder to deny. Though I am sure it could be attributed to some failure of empathy as you've implied.
Perhaps people fear this leads to a future where we have technology that interacts meaningfully with existing wetware (cybernetically enhanced animals, including people).
> It is given as a nasal spray and leaves white blood cells in our lungs – called macrophages – on "amber alert" and ready to jump into action no matter what infection tries to get in.
Right and if that is such a good thing why are those macrophages not always on alert. I smell longterm cancer or similar.
Yeah this is more likely than cancer, and is a potential side effect of anything that stimulates the immune system, including real antigen-carrying vaccines.
I'm less certain, many if not most lung cancers seems to follow chronic inflammation in the lungs.
The classic example is asbestos related mesothelioma. "Frustrated phagocytosis" is the name for the way macrophages become locked in a never ending spiral of eat, die poison loops around the asbestos.
Do we really want macrophages to go into high gear? Will we make sure no one who has it has been exposed every to any asbestos?
What about other triggers of frustrated phagocytosis? People who commute by subway (tiny metal particles).
The point isn't to say that this is a bad idea necessarily but that I'm not sure this sounds so much safer than regular vaccination.
Indeed, I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines. We could probably just inject people with the adjuvants and get the same result.
> I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines.
The target does matter, that is the basis for the whole technology, and the thing most predictive of efficacy.
That's why the flu shots often don't work and the shots for smallpox and measles do, the flu is a more rapidly mutating target.
Going crazy with the adjuvants was popular during the pandemic when it became clear that the virus had mutated (the target protein), but no one wanted to do R&D for a new target.
Counting white blood cells became a proxy for efficacy, and you can manipulate that stat with adjuvants.
The content clearly matters, and efficacy is tracked (this year it was poor because the eventual pandemic flu strain was a H3N2 virus which mutate rapidly)[0]. This was despite WHO updating the recommendations at the last hour in April/May 2025.
But critically this isn't as important as people think. The primary goal of the flu vaccination is of course to temper spread of the main viruses that season. But it's also to build people's immune library of exposure to flu viruses.
Recall that the 1918 "Spanish" flu was so terrible not because it was intrinsically a worse virus but that it was one which many younger generations had not been previously exposed.
COVID has meant that many younger generations again has a much smaller library of past exposure.
This reminds me of an episode in Star Trek: TNG's 2nd season, where Pulaski and Data visit a colony doing genetic engineering experiments on kids which created a super-virus.
>There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.
> Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was undeniably "exciting" but cautioned "we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcome side effects".
> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines.
That we think have no cost. The massive failure rate of drug trials and some famous cases of issues discovered only after wide scale deployment indicates we're not that great at knowing ahead of time.
The body is like legacy spaghetti code written by hundreds of teams of outsourced engineers. It mostly works. Just never remove any commented out lines or it may break.
While possible, there are also many bodily processes that are finely tuned through eons of evolution, and destabilizing pressure leads to disorder. Sometimes it's difficult to know which are which (or at least I don't know).
the most straightforward example off the top of my head would be that hair follicles have no conceivable reason to react to testosterone. removing DHT receptors from them would have no adverse effect whatsoever.
have you read the story of dr. adrian thompson's ai generated fpga ? the story goes that removing seemingly redundant components caused the circuit to fail because of second order effects. for that reason, i try to avoid sweeping statements like 'no effect whatsoever' when it comes to playing god
It's important to note that evolution is not a designer, it's just a string of random mutations over millions of years that mostly work. The human body is remarkably shit at a lot of thing, like not getting heart disease. Most animals don't develop heart disease but we do... oops.
We can also live just fine without an appendix. Literally the only thing the organ can do is suddenly develop a severe infection and kill you without surgery which has only become reliably available in the past 100 years or so. (Blah blah bacterial reservoir or whatever: that's of evidently very low value compared to sudden and painful death)
There's also no reason we shouldn't be immune to funnel web poison: cats make an enzyme which deactivates it, whereas primates don't.
There is also no reason our eyes can’t see in the dark because cats can and no reason to not to lay eggs because that’s more practical and way less dangerous (and probably painful) than giving birth directly. Also too bad that we haven’t multiple hearts for redundancy.
I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra.
- If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture
- That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material.
- Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial ≈ 3.15 kJ
10% of that is 315 J per gram
The result is that:
The amount of radiation energy available is 4 orders of magnitude too small
to power even a 10% growth boost.
Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.
The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.
They don't eat the radioactive material and make it not radioactive.
[Assuming they use the radiation to get energy [1].] They just wait patiently until the radioactive atoms decay and emit radiation, like a gamma ray, and then absorb the gamma ray and use the energy. The half life of the radioactive material does not change.
[1] I still doubt this claim, but let's go along assuming the best case.
Consider when organisms must pass, that these ancient fungi likely still consume the host... Thus, on a 8000 year timescale most fungi doesn't necessarily need to pursue food that naturally dies in around a century.
Yeasts are already sharing your body along with numerous other organisms that are often harmless or even beneficial. Best not think about it too much if you are uncomfortable with seeing yourself as a mini ecosystem. =3
rivals the aspen grove "Pando" as the known organism with the highest living biomass and perhaps rivalled by a colony of Posidonia australis on the Australian seabed that measures 200 square kilometres (edited)
I'm trying to work out how the fungus evolves to grow its food source by causing radioactivity increase?
It can concentrate radionuclides, but the step function after inducing some criticality is likely to cause reproductive difficulty (stopping fungus evolution).
Plus: heavy metals combined with organics have a tendency towards being nasty poisonous
I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.
I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.
But as they say, writing is hard. :)
My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.
I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)
Also, doesn't matter if it's been done before either. Lots of very popular books are quite similar to books published before them. Sci-Fi is not immune.
There's all sorts of memes about SciFi films that borrowed ideas and motifs from earlier works... but often when you did, it comes out that the earlier works also borrowed those pieces.
I had a similar thought, ideas are cheap. Loads of people are like "I have this GREAT idea for an app, I just need a developer to build it!"... as if the idea on its own has value.
Unfortunately and / or fortunately thanks to AI tech, anyone with an idea can now throw it at an AI and see it materialise.
I'm not sure where you're going with this, but since they have actually researched how it grows, I think it's more likely your calculations/assumptions are incomplete.
For example:
> Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial
based on what?
Edit: Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.
Don't do this, and don't then share the resulting numbers as fact publicly without disclosing you just asked a chatbot to make up something reasonable sounding.
If the chatbot refers to a source, read the source yourself and confirm it didn't make it up. If the chatbot did not refer to a source, you cannot be sure it didn't make something up.
The property measured in the source you linked, "enthalpy of formation", is not the same as the energy required to grow 1g of biomatter. One clue of this is that the number in the paper is negative, which would be very strange in the context you requested (but not in the context of the paper). For the curious: "A negative enthalpy of formation indicates that a compound is more stable than its constituent elements, as the process of forming it from the elements releases energy"
You're feeding yourself (and others) potentially inaccurate information due to overconfidence in the abilities of LLMs.
> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?
They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and combined it into 1 gram of water. But the fungi takes in water from the environment to grow, it does not make it's own water from pure hydrogen, and it certainly does not generate any free energy from growing larger. With some margin for error in my understanding, since I'm not a chemist (but neither are you, and neither is the chatbot).
> It was really just food for thought.
It was more poison than food, since you just parroted randomly generated misinformation from the chatbot and passed it of as authentic insight.
Um right did not think of that, if you burn a organism you get to core components but the organism was not originally made of the core components.
The core idea was not generated from a chat bot. Neither was the article i gave (that was my own googling).
The core idea (that there is a requirement and a availability of energy that may differ) was generated from my brain not that i personally think the origin of an idea matters to its value.
General rule of thumb: If you're going to ask an LLM and then make a post based on that, simply don't post it. If we wanted a randomly generated take on this, we would just ask an LLM ourselves.
Another hypothesis to test would be if the radiation is being used as a catalyst somehow.
E.g. Could be denaturing something else, unlocking a previously inaccessible energy source. Possibly some radiochemistry creating a new food source for the fungus too.
I also did some back of the envelope calculations. Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law). Now, the radiation from the elephant foot has decreased significantly. I couldn't find a recent estimate, but I would expect it to be at least 100 times lower. So at 100 meters from the elephant foot, the radiation level is a billion times lower than what you get from the sun. There's no way any organism can "feed" on that.
> Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law).
No, the elephants foot isn’t a point source at its surface.
To use an extreme example going from 1m away from the sun to 100m away from the sun doesn’t result in a 10,000x drop off in energy density. Instead the exponential drop-off occurs relative to the center of the sun because energy is coming from any point on the surface visible to that location. A similar principle applies with the elephants foot, though the geometry is more complicated.
I treated the elephant foot as a point source. It’s a back of the envelope calculation. Maybe I’m off by a factor of 10, but I’m not off by a factor of one million.
I mean if your benchmark was “at the time of the accident” then you’re off by more than a factor of a million. The often quoted 80 to 100 grays per hour was eight months after formation and it had gotten way less radioactive by then. Decay heat which all comes from radioactivity was ~1% of full reactor output for a few days. ~10,000 kW or so from a fairly compact object which is why it was still melting through concrete.
As to a point source, if you’re making an approximation use the center of the object and your 100m distance calculation would be corrected by about 25x. Though obviously the building itself provides shielding.
I used the figure you quoted, which I got from wikipedia [1]. I said "at the time of the accident"; you are pointing out it was 8 months after the accident. I guess I should specify all the details in my comments on HN going forward? I said that now the radiation level must be lower, and I could't find any more recent estimates, but I ballparked it at 100x lower.
In the end, I'm not sure what your point is? Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun, and therefore fungi can't "feed" on it, because this energy is nowhere near enough to sustain life?
> Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun
Yes, the elephants foot is not the only radiation source at Chernobyl making your calculation meaningless in practice.
You’re making such a huge range of incorrect assumptions here and I was trying to correct some of them. I’m honestly done with this conversation but it’s worth remembering that order of magnitude calculates can be off by 100,000 fold when you make the wrong assumptions.
Also, Wikipedia itself says the reading was from 8 months after the accident. “At the time of its discovery, about eight months after formation, radioactivity near the Elephant's Foot was” The falloff from 8 months post accident to now isn’t actually that large because even iodine 131 had already seen 30 half lives at that point the really nasty stuff was already gone and the reasonably long lived stuff is what was left.
Finally, fungi get by on way less energy than plants do from photosynthesis it’s really not a particularly meaningful benchmark.
> That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material
Over what timeframe? If that’s 0.05 J per hour and “the researchers found that fungi that faced the galactic cosmic radiation for 26 days grew an average 1.21 times faster” 26 * 25 / 21% and the numbers don’t look that unreasonable.
Yeah, from that it sounds like the main advantage of this mold is that it gets some compensation from all that deadly radiation, and thus does better than mold which doesn't.
Yes, its not learned "knowledge" it is evolved. Mammals are born with systems primed to fear things that look like snakes. Not cause their parents learned that snakes are dangerous but cause the parents that was born without those priming circuits died.
I don’t think it’s things like ‘fear snakes’. He’s observing structure and concluding it’s meaningful instruction. It’s instead base layers of cognition, meta cognition.
All research points to ADHD having multiple causes. Each case will have a specific causal pattern. This makes sense as it is a diagnosis defined by symptoms. Same with autism.
Attachment Styles is a very low dimensional way of observing something that has very high dimensionally.
When people use this type of dimensionality reduction you get problematic outcomes.
This type of phenomena will always keep happening. The world is complex and perceptually high dimensional. We try to understand it(the world) using low dimensional concepts and when those low dimensional concepts have low validity issues arise.
That is there are many different things that can cause the behaviour.
Anyway on your main point, the definition of all psychiatric disorders has requirements of subjective suffering. So if you don't have subjective suffering you don't have the disorder.
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