Covid: The End of Hope Hypothesis (part one)
Seemingly disparate concepts
Strap in and run with this. It’s likely to feel like a confusing, disparate mix of topics and concepts. They will be brought together in subsequent parts, I promise.
Base manifestations of hope
Hope is a feeling of desire and expectation that things will go well in the future.
What is a basic, fundamental manifestation of hope for human beings?
Consider the entire timeline of human existence. The majority of it has been lived without most of the trappings of “modern life” associated with the last several thousand years. So, strip human existence right back to these constituent parts:
One’s own existence, over which one originally had no control.
One’s own ongoing direct survival based on:
initial dependence upon parent(s) or a guardian until self-reliance is achieved.
conscious and unconscious pro-active and reactive interactions with one’s environment, which would include:
acquisition and consumption of food;
dependence on internalised/bodily systems (digestion, immunity, senses etc).
The existence of another human with whom one is in direct contact (socialisation and co-operation) from which practical and emotional aspects of survival flow.
The possibility to procreate.
An illustration of the above could be found directly from other primates, to whom geneticists state that humans are related and evolved from.
Accounting for those who subscribe to the theory of intelligent design rather than evolution, human history embodied within Genesis still fundamentally incorporates these constituent parts. Adam and Eve were created by God and were imbued with the ability to live in their environment (God “parented” them) and lived from that point forth; they survived in their environment through these internalised and externalised means (they had human biology and base forms of psychology); they were each other’s company/tribe; they procreated.
At this base level, what do humans live for, once they simply begin to live? There appears to be an innate, biological (internalised) drive to survive in all organisms on earth. That drive may, for argument’s sake, also come from some external source e.g. God’s will, over which we may not have control, as embodied by the possible belief in “God’s plan” and fate. Belief in this latter concept must therefore accept that the act of suicide is in fact directed by God and not a sovereign or conscious act, else the notion of a plan or fate must be interruptible or possible to reject via suicide.
Amongst all species, there are two consistent behaviours or desires that manifest in all organisms, irrespective of the level of intelligence or self-consciousness that humans believe those organisms possess: the consumption/excretion cycle and the procreation/reproduction cycle. There are no organisms that do not engage in both of these cycles, even if the act of procreation does not require a second organism e.g. hermaphroditism or binary fission.
Ultimately, it could be argued that a base drive to continue to exist is to engage in the procreation cycle, wherein consumption/excretion is the cycle that enables the organism to live long enough to develop the ability and opportunity to attempt procreation/reproduction.
Figuratively speaking, it might be said that a bacterium or virus “hopes” to reproduce. Reproduction, it appears to us, is their base purpose also. Other emergent properties may stem from their successful reproduction e.g. symbiotic relationships with other organisms, or properties or capabilities that emerge from a colony; but if the bacterium or virus cannot live long enough to reproduce in the first place, the emergent property is a secondary outcome that cannot be realised. For example, do all humans hope to procreate enough to produce their own genetic tribes or empires, or do they first hope to produce at least one offspring?
In the human context, most people have children or try to, which is why the size of the population grows and this is the dominant behaviour of the species, irrespective of reasons why human fertility in some territories for some reasons may be in decline. Factors that we might identify as causal for this decline in reproduction rates are speculative and include possible biological and socioeconomic causes.
Thus, I would posit that it is fair to say that, like all other organisms, humans are driven to reproduce if they do absolutely nothing else in life, and they consume and excrete in order to achieve that.
Children: Hope and immortality
Humans have already achieved immortality, in some sense, via reproduction. That version of immortality could be considered to be altruistic because it manifests through another version of the species instead of a direct copy. More conventional notions of immortality centre on the continuation of one single organism: you are immortal if you live forever.
Individual immortality is not without its problems. If you are the one who is immortal, the world is stuck with you, your talents, your gifts and your traits forever. There are obvious pros and cons that, for example, centre around your ability to develop, adapt, improve and change. These terms and concepts are loaded with much subjectivity and dependency. It is a complex and imperfect concept.
Reproductive immortality is equally imperfect. On the one hand, renewal via a new version of the species brings the possibility for “improvements” (genetic or otherwise) in that new version. Equally, that new version is dependent upon upbringing, which is context dependent e.g. poverty and opportunity are major determinants of a human’s net life outcomes, measured on relative, subjective and objective scales.
These are tricky, deep and complex concepts. Exploring them is not the point of this article. I float them simply to contextualise a certain base concept of hope amongst the human species.
Children, be they yours or someone else’s, are the direct manifestation of the future, and children imply that the future can and will be different to the past and present. Your children are different to you and therefore any emergent society with them in it after you have ceased to exist cannot reasonably be expected to remain entirely the same. However, history viewed through the lens of human behaviour over a long enough time frame shows repetitive cycles and common drivers. Ask a policeman why people commit crimes and the list of base reasons will be fairly short and consistent over a long period (before you get into the evolving definition of crime in any given society).
Children, therefore, are the embodiment of human hope. We procreate because:
we hope to achieve the natural version of our own immortality;
we hope that the life our children lead (with and without us) and the world that they inhabit is sufficiently tolerable at the minimum.
If, as in the P.D. James’ novel, Children of Men, the entire human race became infertile, what would be the individual and societal outcomes? What would happen to human hope? What would humans actually hope for in life, absent of the ability to procreate?
Human population levels
Basic claims are made that the world suffers human overpopulation, which is the root cause of many socioeconomic problems.
Fertility rates are in decline in some parts of the world, but the reasons why are not settled or fully understood.
Many socioeconomic theories, claims and assertions are made based upon human population levels. There are also certain and demonstrable problems that stem directly from population density.
These problems, some would have you believe, are couched in the here and now and very immediate future. These problems are often expressed in the context of resources, standards of living, access to opportunity and abstractions from them like happiness, meaning, productivity etc.
If you believe the climate change narrative, human population is the primary contributory factor because it explicitly drives behaviours and creates resource supply that play a part in that narrative.
Note: there is an specific reason why I say “resource supply” and not “demand”. Largely, I do not demand the things in society in the forms they are made available. Someone creating the supply of something creates the form in which it is supplied to me, and then I can notionally choose to consume it in that form. When you consider what this means, it is potentially profound because it exposes major issues in the supply/demand construct and has major ramifications for assigning responsibility for factors which are claimed to cause climate change. This is beyond the scope of this article.
On the subject of human population levels being a problem for the world and society, it boils down to this:
There are too many people who want too much from life and too many resources.
Too many people want a standard of living that increases these demands.
Too many people living in this way produces too much waste that we can’t handle.
All of the above contributes to man made deleterious climate change that you are told to believe is a one-way street i.e. humans are the sole cause of climate change and therefore our trajectory towards it is solely dependent on humans and their population size, density, location and lifestyle.
Compound effects of health and fertility
What if the following issues/phenomena manifested in the human race, by some means?
Rapidly declining health leading to shortened lifespan.
Detectable declining biological fertility.
Detectable increases in congenital birth defects in offspring.
Eventually detectable congenital decreases in biological fertility in one’s offspring.
In simple terms, what each of these phenomenon would look like when mapped out over time is this:
Increasing levels of general illness and all cause mortality as more people die, possibly younger, of more things due to overall worsening health for some/any reasons;
Decreasing birth rates amongst existing generations, where that deceleration may detectably increase;
Literally more babies born with birth defects (if they are detectable) and unknown numbers of undetected birth defects that may eventually manifest or become detectable/apparent;
A generationally delayed or offset further reduction to overall human fertility rates which would take a minimum time to manifest at detectable scale i.e. the time it takes for enough offspring to reach sexual maturity and then try to procreate, encounter problems and then for those problems to be formally recognised.
What are the compound effects of these phenomena?
What rates would they have to each occur and sustain at individually to produce what effect on a nation?
What combined rates of all of them would bring about noticeable effects on society?
Could the above be caused by one or just a small number of root causes within a very significant proportion of the human population? If so, what could the cause be and how could it occur?
The most obvious cause is some form of nuclear disaster.
This would immediately kill large numbers of people on a primary basis. It would kill large numbers of people on the secondary bases of radiation sickness, nuclear winter, environmental/ecological destruction, and infrastructure and societal destruction.
On a tertiary basis it would introduce recessive genetic damage to the population and lead to birth defects and possible fertility impacts.
This is why people don’t want and seek to avoid nuclear wars and disasters.
What if you did something that had similar outcomes but either:
were not intended to but ended up having unintended consequences that caused the above health and fertility phenomena to manifest; or
were intended to cause some or all of these outcomes, but was introduced under false pretences or by stealth?
What if, like a nuclear disaster, the effects were so profound, at such large scale and so long lasting as to be practically irreversible once the world realised what had happened?
Autoimmunity
Autoimmunity is a defect of the immune system wherein an organism’s own immune system attacks elements of the organism, causing damage to the organism. This is a wholly unwelcome phenomenon.
Your adaptive immune response encompasses autoimmune capability i.e. your immune system inherently has the ability to attack and destroy you. This capability is prevented and held in check by complex processes. Your immune system recognises what is “you” and does not attack “you”. It detects and attacks foreign matter (antigens) and leaves you (self-antigens) alone.
If you are infected or poisoned by antigens such that the destructive aspects of your adaptive immune response are triggered, some of your cells may have to be literally destroyed in order for you to survive. You may recover fully or partially as a result of that process.
Consider viral hepatitis. Should your liver become sufficiently infected, the virus responsible is damaging your liver cells while reproducing inside them. Your immune system will attack the virus and the infected liver cells until the virus is defeated or disease progresses to a terminal outcome, absent of any other medical intervention. If you survive naturally, you may have lost, temporarily or permanently, some liver function from both the damage the virus did to your liver cells and the damage your immune system did to them. You may recover liver function if your body can generate enough replacement liver cells.
What is being described here isn’t autoimmunity in the sense that your immune system isn’t primarily attacking you from the outset. It is attacking a foreign virus and dealing with the systemic effects of the virus by removing infected cells which become a reservoir of infection. This is “normal” immune response.
Autoimmunity can be triggered by the presence of auto-antibodies, which are proteins produced by your immune system that are directed against other self proteins in you, with negative effects. This is considered to be a defect of your immune system.
Autoimmune disease, howsoever triggered, is not new, although it is not fully understood, controlled or prevented.
What if, by internal or external means, your immune system was tricked into attacking you? If the location, duration, scale and speed of the attack was sufficiently limited or contained and ended, you may survive with no long lasting negative effects. But were this to happen in a critical tissue, organ or system, at too great a scale, or for too long or too fast, then you may be permanently harmed or killed.
If someone offered you the chance to take something or do something to yourself that had the capability to trick your immune system in such a way, would you do or take it?
Degradation of the human immune system
Aside from the issue of autoimmunity howsoever caused, the complex immune system is not fully understood and it is known to fulfil many functions beyond just fighting infection.
One function that the immune system fulfils is the control and regulation of the cells which make up your entire being. Most cells have limited lifespans and degrade over time. The immune system has a hand in managing the cell lifecycle. Some cells mutate at some point, and/or become somehow defective. The immune system can regulate that by killing off defective cells, if it can detect them.
Thus, the human immune system is primarily involved in the suppression of cancer, which is, in simple terms, the unwanted and uncontained growth of cells out of line with their intended purpose, scale and scope, or the mutation of cells that exert benign or malignant effects on the host organism.
Degrade the human immune system and at least two things may result:
Increased vulnerability to infection and resultant illness;
Increased susceptibility to cancer, whether internally or externally triggered.
Mutation
A mutation is a change in the DNA sequence of an organism. Mutations can result from errors in DNA replication during cell division, exposure to mutagens or a viral infection. Germline mutations (that occur in eggs and sperm) can be passed on to offspring, while somatic mutations (that occur in body cells) are not passed on.
Assuming you were born without significant harmful mutations in your DNA and were considered to be fully capable of human functions including reproduction, mutation could occur in you by either internal or external means.
Evolution is the effect of beneficial mutation that results in an organism’s or species’ successful adaptation and ongoing survival. Mutation isn’t therefore entirely harmful.
Drinking a drop of Skydrol aero hydraulic fluid every day is unlikely to immediately poison you if taken in sufficiently small quantity, but over time it could exert mutagenic effects which are likely to manifest as harmful cancer well before they make you better at surviving. Skydrol carries warnings that it is carcinogenic and not for human consumption.
If you were asked whether you would like to:
knowingly risk DNA mutation by some means with unknown effect; or
do or take something whose mutagenic potential was literally unknown;
What would your answer be?
In the case of 2, we are talking about something that is neither proven nor disproven to have mutagenic effects, where the circumstances of its use or its very nature could have mutagenic potential. In this case, the potential has simply not been explored at all, for some reason, so knowledge of this thing’s mutagenicity is “unknown.” This absence of knowledge can and is presented by “fact checkers” as a statement that looks like this:
“There is no evidence of [insert thing here] causing mutations in humans.”
That phrase is a deliberate semantic ploy that is designed to play on an inherent interpretive bias towards an assumed meaning of “this thing has been proven to not cause mutations in humans.”
Obviously, the two statements are radically different, which is why fact checkers never use the latter statement when the circumstances they are talking about are “unknown due to lack of research.”
The limits of knowledge on choice
If you don’t know anything, choices made can be considered uninformed. If you know something, choice might be considered to be informed to some extent. Is it possible to know everything? Very unlikely, depending upon the subject or thing in question, plus future dependent outcomes. Therefore, how informed can any choice actually be?
Where does one’s knowledge come from? Largely from other people’s or one’s own direct experience or observations.
Why and how did you first take paracetamol for a headache? Someone else you trusted told you that it was known to have a beneficial effect, without explaining how or why in full, if at all. You took it on that basis, encountered its effects and then associated it with a beneficial outcome for certain circumstances. You may have learned by various means more of the pros and cons of paracetamol by reading the packet insert. Throughout your life, your choice to take paracetamol may have moved from uniformed to partially informed to well informed as your knowledge and experience grew. It is unlikely to ever become fully informed because there remains a possibility of circumstances under which taking paracetamol is either inappropriate or ineffective, but you did not know.
This is an inherent limitation of the practise of medicine, and a fundamental driver of the process of experimentation to further medical practise. Through that process medical limitations are discovered. Someone, somewhere used paracetamol to no effect. Someone, somewhere, used too much paracetamol and suffered harmful effects. Thus, some limiting boundaries of paracetamol use were established.
The communication of those boundaries form the received knowledge governing the use of paracetamol, which manifests in packet inserts and other published information about the drug. From this, choices made around the use of paracetamol become more informed.
Regarding paracetamol and many other drugs, it’s possible to make an uninformed choice to use it, suffer harmful effects and then stop those effects by ceasing to use the drug. The effects of many things are thus reversible and this creates room for one’s ability to effectively make mistakes through lack of knowledge, survive, learn and educate others.
The above is largely grounded in rational thought and implies a degree of process that plays out over sufficient time.
What are the effects on choice (informed or otherwise) of reduced time (perceived or actual) or another factor like the perception of mortal fear?
If you were suffering a headache so severe that you led yourself to believe that something bad would result, knew literally nothing about paracetamol and were told to take it, would you be more likely to take it than you would were the pain less?
Similarly, if you were suffering from a cancer you were told was terminal and were offered an experimental treatment whose effects were unknown but that could extend your life by some degree, would you take that?
We already know the answers to these questions. In many cases the answer is “yes”.
Credentialism’s effect on the validity of a hypothesis
What effect does the credentials of a person suggesting a hypothesis have on the perceived validity of that hypothesis?
I think it depends upon many factors, including the context of the hypothesis, the field in question and myriad other things.
If you and I, who know nothing about each other, looked at a tree we both knew nothing about and I hypothesised that a particular branch of the tree would not bear my weight based solely upon the thickness of the branch, would you think the hypothesis was valid? Would your lack of knowledge about me have any bearing on your judgement of its validity? If you learned I was an arborist or a material engineer or a physicist or a carpenter, would my hypothesis become more valid? Relatively, would any of those fields lend more or less weight to my hypothesis?
If we remained ignorant of each other’s credentials, could we begin to test either the hypothesis itself or its validity by induction or deduction? Yes, we could.
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist, now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "saviour of mothers",[4] Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") could be drastically reduced by requiring hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[5] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods, with great success.
Even with sufficient credentials, one’s hypothesis risks being rejected and mocked, even if it can be shown to correlate with an outcome, on a predictable basis.
According to the above characterisation, Semmelweisz’s inability to explain the causal reason for his observed correlation between hand washing and reduced disease contributed to the rejection of his hypothesis. Rationally, the observable correlation should have inspired more people to investigate possible causality in order to prove or disprove his hypothesis and discover the possible mechanism, which did eventually occur.
Covid: The End of Hope Hypothesis (part two)
In Part One, I covered the following concepts: Base manifestations of hope Children: Hope and immortality Human population levels Compound effects of health and fertility Autoimmunity Degradations of the human immune system Mutation The limits of knowledge on choice
Survival and procreation is for animals.
Humans want salvation.
Those who are afraid of dying are already dead.
Those, who have nothing greater to live for than survival, are afraid of dying. They indeed, behave like animals.