hiv/aids 3

More little tidbits:

British Concorde study in 1994 found that AZT (the AIDS drug) did not prevent AIDS, and increased mortality 25%.

Numerous studies show that the only long-term survivors of HIV do not use illegal drugs, and do not take HIV-inhibitors.

HIV-inhibitors do not attack HIV -- they attack cellular function, since the cell is entirely responsible for replication of HIV. Specifically, they inhibit DNA replication. A drug that attacks cellular function does two things -- one, it damages the body and its immune system, leading to increased cases of AIDS (suppressed immune system type). Two, it increases lifespan after AIDS has been acquired, because it acts as an antibiotic on other infections. End result: you go from healthy to miserable, and stay there for a long time.

Cataloguing Categories

All this talk of conceptual categories left me wondering if I could catalogue them. Here's what I came up with:

1) Objective: Verifiable, testable statements about the physical world. e.g. Objects accelerate at x rate due to gravity. Virus A causes disease B through mechanism C.
2) Subjective: Experiential statements. I feel cold. I chose to go to the store. I love you.
3) Descriptive: Statements of value about something. She's pretty. Good job. This town is boring.
4) A priori: Definitions. A dog is a living organism with X characteristics; Blue is light of these wavelengths.

There may be more, but this is all I could come up with on the way back from Taco Bell.

The first thing I noticed was that the first three types all come down to a priori concepts in the end. That is to say, "This worm is 2 cm long" is an objective statement -- but it depends on an a priori definition of what a worm is, what a centimeter is, and what the word "2" means.

The second thing I noticed was that you can retranslate just about every sentence among the first three. For instance, "Ouch! I'm in pain" (subjective) Ouch! That hurts! (descriptive) and "The contact between your elbow and my chest caused X reaction in my nervous system." (objective). Each of them looks at the event from a fundamentally different vantage point. The first expresses feeling. The second expresses judgment. The third describes reality.

And then I wondered, "if we can state things from all three angles, I wonder if we can examine them from all three angles." Obviously, you study objective reality through the scientific method. Subjective reality must be studied through introspection -- looking into your own experience. Descriptive reality must be studied with respect to a purpose. That is to say, "This is the perfect car" presumes a set of criteria in the mind of the speaker for what a car is intended for -- criteria that exist independently of the characteristics of the car, but which the characteristics of the car happen to match.

The next thing I noticed was that you can't study one category with another category's means. For instance, you can't study the characteristics of a frog through introspection or determining what the frog is useful for. You can't study why you're afraid of the dark with a microscope, or say it's not useful . And you can't determine whether a woman is beautiful or not with a ruler, or hour of meditation. Each type of statement has to be evaluated in its own way.

And then I thought, seems like most philosophical disputes come down to a failure to place concepts in their proper category. Scientists, for instance, seem to want everything to be studied in an objective manner. That works for some things, like chemicals in a test-tube. But it doesn't work for philosophy, interpersonal relationships, or self-awareness. Little wonder so many masters of the lab are failures in their own mind and life. Similarly, subjectivists seem to want everything to be an extension of their feelings. If they feel a thing, it is true. They argue that science is just a rationalization for the emotional biases of the scientist. And surely it often is -- but not when science is properly applied through its proper tools, and in its proper scope. Finally, the religious tend to see everything in terms of its inherent "value." Man is "evil." God is "good." sex is "only for marriage." The purpose of life is to serve God. Always judgment, evaluation, and purpose. And surely sometimes that is good. But they often neglect simply understanding what is (objective world) or what they are actually feeling (subjective world), constantly evaluating, and never understanding.

Is it any wonder that groups looking at the world through such radically different epistemological glasses would come into conflict? They literally look at the same event, person, or phenomenon, and see something completely different. No wonder the bickering never ends.

I think I might be onto something here.

Categories applied to determinism + free will

A few months ago, I wrote about categories of concepts, and how it's important to keep them straight. Thus "Dog" is a word we use to describe an object with certain characteristics, while "two" is a word we use to describe a grouping of objects, but not an object itself (you can never see a 'two'.) Seems like a lot of philosophical errors come down to crossing these categories -- for instance, the platonic forms treating describers (like "beauty") as real -- more real, in fact, than the things they are used to describe.

Then yesterday, it occurred to me that free will and determinism come down to a similar error. The two are in different categories. Free will is a subjective experience we have in the world -- similar to "pain" or "love." Free will is the experience we all have of choosing a ham or salami sandwich -- of deciding whether or not to give a bum a dime. You cannot see "Free will." There is no "free will box" in the body. You cannot observe an animal and see "free will" at work -- all you see is bodies in motion. Free will is an experience -- a feeling -- a knowledge that you can make your body go either way, depending on what you decide to do.

Determinism, on the other hand, is an unfalsifiable claim about the objective world. It is the claim that everything is invariably caused by something else. But of course this can't be tested at present, because we cannot identify every cause of everything that occurs in the universe. It's not an experience. We don't experience the alleged genes and childhood traumas that force us to select a cheese or salami sandwich. Now don't get me wrong -- we experience the CONDITIONING of our choices -- primarily through habit, but also through compulsive behavior -- but that is different from determinism. Determinism says that everything is decided in advance. Conditioned choices, on the other hand, are our experience that certain choices are more DIFFICULT to make than others, because we experience them as SCARY or UNFAMILIAR or something else. Again, that's experiential. Not deterministic.

Defined this way, free will and determinism do not conflict. If determinism is true, our subjective experience of free will is still true. If determinism is not true, our subjective experience of free will is still true. Demanding that free will be demonstrated in the objective world is just as silly as expecting a child to find the "Two" sitting on the table between two apples, or expecting a doctor to remove the "pain" from my broken arm and place it on the examination bench. Nonsense.

This is compatibilism of a sort, but less rigidly defined than classic compatibilism. Classic compatibilism defines "free will" as "things that are done without external compulsion," despite the fact that they are internally compelled. I don't need to define things that rigidly. My compatibilism holds that determinism is an open question about the objective facts of nature, and free will is a settled question about the universal human experience. They seek to answer two different questions, and are therefore not incompatible with each other.

The key, I think, lies in defining what mean mean by "Free will" and "determinism" as clearly as possible. Within a moment or two, it becomes apparent that what we mean by "free will" is not something that can be observed in the physical sciences -- it is something we know because we feel it. Similarly, determinism is something that could potentially be known through the sciences -- if we were able to compile all facts about the universe into a computer and predict all future outcomes -- but of course we can't yet.

As always appears to be the case, age-old philosophical debates stem from a failure to adequately define our terms.

And I think this modified definition of free will is adequate to serve all its necessary purposes. One of the necessary purposes of free will is in support of moral responsibility. Our sense of justice is offended at the prospect of being punished for actions that were determined, rather than chosen. Free will is significant insofar as it supports a system grounded on moral responsibility -- on reward for good bahavior, and punishment for bad behavior. Without a meaningful free will, there really is no basis for differential treatment for different behaviors. But because we DO actually choose what to do, a world in which bad behavior was rewarded rather than punished would lead people to CHOOSE to engage in much more bad behavior.

But if we acknowledge that free will exists as an experience, if not a physical reality, then it retains its place in our social organization. Whatever the physical reasons, we experience choice. Because we experience it, we must structure our lives and our society around that experience. Good behaviors should be incentivized, so that people are more likely to choose them. Bad behaviors should be disincentivized, so that people are less likely to choose them.

By analogy, "Pain" does not exist in the physical world -- you can't point to it or touch it. It is merely our subjective experience of certain nerve reactions in our system. But that doesn't make it any less real. And medicine needs to take it into account, if it wants to function properly. You can't say, "Well pain isn't a physical entity, so it doesn't exist, and we shouldn't take it into account." It's very real -- but SUBJECTIVELY real. And we ignore it at our peril.

So it is with choice. Whether or not it's one day discovered that all things are ultimately caused by some other physical cause, the fact will remain: we all feel like we have choices, and so our lives and societies will have to take that universal human experience into account.

Conformity

"Just before WWII, total research and development funding in the United States, public and private together, amounted to approximately $250 million per year. By the mid-1950s, the federal share along had grown to more than $2 billion, reaching $63 billion in 1989, and in 1993 becoming half of all research and development spending in the United States at $76 billion. Federal research money has turned into the major funding source for universities and other institutions, expanding and reshaping departments in its wake ... the total number of science doctorates awarded each year has increased from under 6,000 in 1960 to nearly 17,000 in 1979 ... as a result, "of every eight scientists who ever lived [in the history of the world], seven are alive today [in 1969]" ... Competition among large numbers of scientists for one or a few central sources of funding restricts freedom of thought and action to a mean that appeals to the majority. The scientist who is very productive, most able to sell research, and well liked for not offending his peers for new hypotheses and ideas is selected by his peers for funding. The eccentic, "absent-minded professor" with "crazy" ideas has been replaced by a need breed of scientist, more like a "yuppie" executive than the quirky genius of old academia. These peers cannot afford a nonconformist, or unpredictable, thinker because every new, alternative hypothesis is a potential threat to their own line of research. Albert Einstein would not get funded for his work by the peer review system, and Linus Pauling did not (for his work on vitamin C and cancer even though he received two Nobel Prizes). The only benefit of the numerous cascades of competitive tests and reviews set up by peer review is the elimination of unsophisticated charlatans and real incompetence. In sum, the review of too many by too many achieves but one result with certainty: regression to the mean ... a scientists's grants, publications, positions, awards, and even invitations to conferences are entirely conntrolled by his competitors. As in any other profession, no scientist wecomes being out-competed or having his pet idea disproved by a colleague ... The transition from small to big to megascience has created an establishment of skilled technicians but mediocre scientsts, who have abandoned real scientific interpretation and who even equate their experiments with science itself."

Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS virus, p. 67

AIDS/HIV 2

More interesting tidbits:

1) The HIV test doesn't determine the presence of HIV itself, much less its prevalence -- only the presence of antibodies that indicate infection at some point in the past. Consequently, you could come up HIV-positive on a test and have no HIV in your system. The test can't tell the difference.

2) There is no documented demonstration of how HIV actually attacks T-cells.

3) HIV-positive Africans in Uganda without HIV treatments have the same 10-year survival rates and HIV-positive Westerners with the treatments.

4) In the West, AIDS is defined as any of 20-some diseases, plus the presence of HIV. For example, multiple bacterial infections plus HIV = AIDS. Multiple bacterial infections without HIV = not AIDS. So the correlation between AIDS and HIV is definitional. In other words, if you define "strong" as "being able to lift five pounds, and being tan," then you shouldn't be surprised when all the "strong" people are tan.

AIDS/HIV

Many props to my new friend Sadunkal for opening my eyes to the question of whether HIV causes AIDS. I found some interesting articles that raised interesting questions, but I just found the clincher.

The World Health Organization's definition for AIDS in Africa -- called the Bangui definition -- published in Science in 1985, modified slightly in 1994, still used today.

To have AIDS in Africa, you have to score 12 on the following diagnostic tool:

Weight loss exceeding 10% of body weight 4
Protracted asthenia (lethargy) 4
Continuous or repeated attacks of fever for more than a month 3
Diarrhoea lasting for more than a month 3
Cough 2
Pneumopathy 2
Oropharyngeal candidiasis 4
Chronic or relapsing cutaneous herpes 4
Generalized pruritic dermatosis 4
Herpes zoster (relapsing) 4
Generalized adenopathy 2
Neurological signs 2
Generalized Kaposi's sarcoma 12

So in other words, in Africa, if you have 10% weight loss, protracted lethargy, diarrea lasting over a month, and a cough, the World Health Organization says you have AIDS. Of course, drinking from the river, sleeping on a dirt floor, and not having enough food for the season will yield the same symptoms. But the World Health Organization calls it AIDS. And then our government pays pharmaceutical companies billions of our dollars to "treat" it.

Most interestingly of all, you can be diagnosed with AIDS without an HIV test.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangui_definition
http://www.popline.org/docs/1025/083913.html
http://www.fearoftheinvisible.com/africans

Establishment

I've always been of the opinion that the establishment of religion is worse for religion than it is for the state. Sure, it violates people civil rights to publicly express their beliefs, and that sucks. But much more insidiously, it subjects the world of the soul (religion) to the forces of corruption that result inevitably from a government-created monopoly. Imagine if the government established one type of restaurant as the "state restaurant." Not only would people losed the opportunity to explore other types of food (certainly a loss) but the chosen restaurant would itself deteriorate, because it would not be required to adapt, grow, learn new things, and approve itself. It would not need to try -- it would be guaranteed its position whether or not it tried. So it would decay.

That's what happened to religion in Europe. Most of those decaying states still have official state religions. But those religions have done nothing but decay since they were established. And the rates of belief in those decayed religions is remarkably low -- why? because there's nothing worth believing in those churches.

But recently, I've been realizing that the same dynamic applies to philosophical and scientific schools of thought. There are a large number of out of date, demonstrably incorrect notions that still hold sway in universities. Universal common descent in biology. Plate techtonics in geology. Keynesian Economics. Behavioralist psychology. It doesn't take much work to debunk these silly ideas. Yet they remain in power.

Why?

Well, let's follow the money. This article raises the interesting point that virology departments receive enormous amounts of money to research HIV as a virus. But what if (as the article intimates) AIDS is not caused by a virus, but by some other agent? What would happen to the virology department's money? They'd go broke.

The same principle would apply to plate techtonics. If the Earth is expanding, as is strongly supported by the evidence, all current geology researchers -- who have committed themselves to plate techtonics -- would be out of luck.

The same principle would apply to evolutionary biology. Add an intelligent design research department to a biology department, and the evolutionary biologists lose their livelihood.

On and on and on. The people preaching "scientific consensus" are not unbiased observers -- on the contrary, their livelihood depends on the widespread acceptance of THEIR particular academic niche. If their niche is discredited, they go broke.

Suddenly, the existence of so many "pseudosciences" that make so much more sense than the nonsense they spoonfeed us at school comes into full focus. The "scientific community" is merely a state-funded intellectual monopoly, with the same dynamics as a state church -- intellectual stagnation and a desperate effort to squelch heresies that (while truer than the institutionalized beliefs) threaten the livelihood of the establishment just as much as protestantism threatened the power of the Pope.