The Hormesis of the Macroscopic
Bear with me while I bluntly conject. The universe has bits of chaos and order, high entropy and low entropy we might say, in varying amounts in space and time. From a mostly visual thermodynamic model that keeps obsessively swirling in my head, I conclude that to grow "stronger", or adapt to this system, a thermodynamic entity has to encompass the nature of this system, establish a symbiotic relationship with it, because by somewhat mirroring this system it's assured that it's just as robust as the system it is of. If you're against a powerful and seemingly undefeatable system, by mirroring this system while still retaining as much of your own order or identity as you can, you get a potentially acceptable trade-off. In other words, if you can't beat them, join them. Sometimes we adapt the arms and tech of our enemies because we see the benefits at a cost of losing part of us, this case being perhaps a loss of pride in our polity or state. But the important thing is, important being how you find and define meaning in life which is a whole other topic, is that you live on by adopting foreign but more optimal tools. The enemy in this case represents an agent of change, a conflict, a temporary disorder of your local ordered system, which if adapted increases robustness of said system. Also to preface, I tend to use system, agent, entity, organism, unit and such as analogs. I suppose because they're mostly comparable in my applications or sometimes one is more apt in certain contexts and of course, forgive me for spouting more pretentious wankery, but it's more intellectually provocative to use synonyms when possible.
To reiterate, some bit of chaos or entropy is needed, or to inject a more personal opinion, it's deterministically applied, for an organism, entity, whathaveyou, to be more adaptable to this system; the thermodynamic entity needs to somewhat absorb the nature of its host system. Military advancement doesn't happen in stagnation, it happens when threats are applied to the system, passively or aggressively, an example case being potential threats to the State create a push for offensive or defensive technologies. Our muscles adapt when stimuli is applied at the cost of introducing what could be a potentially negative stressor to the system, an example case being when one lifts weights sufficiently to induce hypertrophy. Software becomes more robust when threat agents are applied, an example being pen-testing software, fuzzers, your local hacker and so on. This I think represents an abstracted notion of hormesis on a more macroscopic level.
And from this sequence of logic, if you will entertain that it's a logical hypothesis, we could safely say that you, as a thermodynamic entity, "wish" (quotes to imply those who entertain a non-deterministic point of view) to prolong yourself, "yourself" being you, your offspring and other remnants we might see as part of our identity such as culture, beliefs, etc, then some amount of change in "you" and that of you including said components, is to be reckoned with and potentially absorbed from the external system. In other words, you should change with the times when applicable as long as with due processing, the times don't change too much of you in a way that's reckless to the "you" as we might typically define it. Which brings up another question, how do you define "you"? How much of a ship can we change before it's not the same ship anymore? Here's a relevant wiki link so you can enjoy the philosophical rabbit hole it leads to. So just how much can we change of ourselves before we consider ourselves not ourselves anymore? Are we our genetics or other more dynamic, ethereal and abstracted notions such as our culture, our ideas, our beliefs, our emotions, etc? Does the material host the immaterial or vice versa? Of those, it seems the more static is our genetic profile so I personally consider it to be more the core of what we are as humans and I'm assuming most do already although some are so passionate about said immaterial properties that they're willing to forgo the material host in favor of promoting the immaterial. But when all other things are roughly equal, we're generally more protective of family than of those in the tribe who share our same culture, beliefs and ideas. Incidentally, when we change too much of ourselves within a short time it can lead to an existential crisis or moral dilemma; "the more you change the less you feel", to quote one of my favorite songs. While at the same time you could make the argument that excess stagnation causes the same dilemmas. We've all been there, points in our lives where we're going nowhere, life seems redundant and you dwell on questioning the point of a life where little to nothing is happening.
This longing to stay true to oneself and not change as well as this aversion to challenge is what you could define as sacredness, which I tend to respect somewhat but also equally abhor. I'm naturally someone who doesn't like change and felt this way a lot of my life but as I've grown older I've had to challenge my stubborn natural tendencies very strongly so I could adapt to the world as modestly, to put it flatteringly, as I have. As you know if you've read my very previous blog entry on being a selective mute for most of my early life, growing up I really had a strong aversion to change and interact with this world as little as possible. That meant being very picky about who I talked to, what I ate, what information I input into my brain or chose to believe, what contact I had with other things that people had contact with and other strange personality anomalies. I felt whole as a person and that little to nothing needed to change. Of course entertaining this sacredness is essentially a death sentence if taken to extremes in this changing world and for better or worse I've learned to swim with the tide to some extent. This all came at a great cost to the self or ego and consequentially in my late twenties I believe I experienced what's known in psychological circles as ego death, or more aptly an ego still on life support as I began to absorb more of this world, or sought to maniacally explore and learn as much about it as I can when apathy isn't tightening its noose.
I'm a kinder and more understanding person as I've gotten older at a cost to losing some of my self although there's still a kernel of it lying somewhere underneath that serves as a protective mechanism for when my musical taste gets mocked. As we see, when eagerness to explore is taken to extremes and you have too much change or disorder, too much entropy within the local system, it can also be a death sentence. Nothing should be sacred or above contest yet a body always in contest is hardly a body and so if we want a civil society which nurtures technological advancement, some amount of sacredness for order is to be respected as well as some amount of change is to be respected. Life straddles a fine balance between order and disorder, being against and with the forces of this universe, both of which can be mutually complementary in relation to thermodynamic entities such as ourselves. More relevant to my title, using the model of hormesis as reference, we perhaps have license to entertain that some amount of toxicity, stressor or entropy to the system is optimal, you could also say inevitable if you're a determinist, for longevity of the local order, the thermodynamic entity, or life in this case. Another case in point, bacteria were once a threat and some of course still are, now they're a part of us and serving us. Viruses were also a past threat but now some of them fill the same role. My ex is hardly much like me but together we co-opted what we think are the best parts of us both and produced offspring. My point being that humanity has co-opted some formidable opponents (my ex being one, hah!), in the process we changed or lost part of ourselves, but so far it seems a beneficial evolutionary trade-off or in other words we were successfully filtered through the thermodynamic system mostly in tact, so far, by mirroring or exchanging with other systems which were potentially a threat (insert another ex joke here).
So can I conclude that there's any truth to the old saying of 'that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger'? Probably no more than the obvious answer which is 'sometimes' and 'within reason'. Many weak threats can make you temporarily stronger but when applied over time can weaken you. A major threat over short time or a minor threat over a long time such as the infamous death of a thousand cuts, pick your poison. Maybe Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence could be loosely applied here and it's telling us that there are no cheat codes in life, that we are finite entities encompassing finite timespace within a larger timespace and that time, mass and energy are very happily married so we're typically exchanging one for another within our local thermodynamic system. Somewhat related though not very substantiated science. I think proof enough in that we will always be very finite beings in timespace, of very limited power, is that if we could supposedly become immortal then of course that means a core part of us would be resistant to change which would be utterly impossible in a changing universe. Immortality would require infinite energy in this supposed infinite universe to be vigilant enough to seek out all possible threats through all spacetime that could change us in any way, shape or form in body or mind because remember, immortal essentially means unchanging lest we delve into the aforementioned Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Another factor is that variables of power seem to change the nature of its host which consequently arouses the Ship of Theseus problem again. A black hole is only as powerful as it is because it is a black hole and can manipulate the universe only in the way a black hole can. I know, I'm such a downer but when you try to explore new lands it's inevitable that you'll find new fences; that's the price you pay as the curious cat. Not to say that perhaps I'm envisioning fences where they may not objectively exist, or wrong, but I welcome input to the contrary. So a related question, would you rather be blind and be content being married to an ugly partner or have your sight while being married to an ugly partner and living in misery (closing your eyes during intimate moments is cheating now)? I think I'd choose the former and live in ignorant bliss but that doesn't seem to represent my appetite for truth at the potential cost of disappointment. I suppose because the curious cat's already out of the bag now and there's no going back, unless of course I lose my memory which according to recent performance, seems a possibility as entropy takes hold in coming years.
Now I'd like to reiterate that I think hormesis makes a decent general analog for my purposes in demonstrating that a little bit of a "bad" thing can be a "good" thing but I agree with what seems to be the scientific consensus, that as of yet the medical model is very unsubstantiated and admit that I'm especially skeptical when it applies to heavy metals such as lead. Perhaps there's some units on the thermodynamic scale that fail to respond reciprocally in any meaningful way due to a vast energy imbalance between the two such as how x-rays affect our bodies far more destructively than our bodies do them or how some units are hardly affected at all when interacting with normal matter such as neutrinos, dark matter and such. Untested hypotheses as this should never be used to endorse anything that may potentially be unhealthy. Though I'm still a fan of using layman thermodynamics and trying to apply it at other scales. I'm a visual thinker so from my point of view, I see the nature of hormesis represented as thermodynamic bodies coalescing with other thermodynamic bodies and in doing so they have a tendency towards mirroring compatible and likewise conflicting parts of each other iteratively which serves to innoculate, or neutralize one against like stressors, comparable to how receptors in our brain fail to respond when already bound with an agent or in elementary terms, a Connect Four piece filling in for another. Or maybe more aptly, if you had a tuning fork that could play at varying frequencies simultaneously, or let's say an organism of tuning forks, and it encountered a frequency it wasn't exposed to and it had receptive resonating features, it'll naturally adopt, or resonate, to the foreign frequency if receptive to it. And perhaps parasitizing amplitude, power, from its new host, the newly adopted frequency naturally starts to resonate at an amplitude and frequency which is phase shifted enough that it can attenuate other like but invasive frequencies.
Man, I love applying music to various aspects of our world and as I see it, the whole universe is vibrations. All that said, I'm just some dude on the internet who admittedly can be a bugbrain, as the late John Nash would say, and I have no academic credentials other than being someone who thinks about life admittedly too much and believes that science has many undervalued commonalities with religion, philosophy and many more subjects so take it all with a grain of salt. I hope I've been convincing enough to justifiably marry certain parts of them in my various blog entries to provide what little utility you can gain from these insights. And I'd like to think that my entries have gained slightly more clarity and readability as I've written more over the years as well as my brain functioning slightly better. To apprehensively tread down a more personal and darker path, in my past I've had really horrible and maniacal brain fits which would generally externally manifest as extreme anxiety and introversion. Weeks would go by and I wouldn't see another soul, an experience that can somewhat be personified in one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs. At various points I'd resort to self-harm because even just a punch to the face and to be punchdrunk for just a few seconds was better than the pain of the racing thoughts. That form of self-harm combined with the constant teeth clinching should've given me an iron jaw by now fit for an amateur boxer. Previously I also had what I can only guess was a bout of stress-induced schizo-affective disorder where I'd have invasive audio hallucinations which came about after a breakup; a very trying time in my life of which I couldn't afford any formal medical or psychological examination. To this day I still have to read over my entries at least a few times to make sure it's sensible and legible enough for the average reader since I'm still a bit of a scatterbrain which probably goes as far back as when I was eight years old and Tourettes started to rear its ugly head. With every twitch of my eye and sniff of my nose, it's like some epileptic erasing of thought takes place which makes it really hard to solve problems that require much working memory. Before the onset of Tourettes I generally did well in school and was usually among the first to finish my work so it was no surprise to me when I discovered that learning disabilities are co-morbid with it. Though you probably won't notice me doing any twitching in public as I've learned to control it but usually it manifests as a lot of facial tension which doesn't help my social anxiety. Anyway, sorry for the personal digression, but I have hopes that my own experiences and insights can give a passerby a more rational, reasonable and novel look at the world and perhaps make your life a bit easier, but of course in the spirit of hormesis, not too easy.
As a blunt end, let's start with a fine song. Since I referenced a Smashing Pumpkins song, I'll post another favorite song of theirs that is just right for sitting up late at night thinking about the world we live in while sometimes running into halting issues such as asking if a problem has an answer or if it's just too far beyond your mind to be answerable and so you sink into thinking about what you're thinking about what you're thinking about (nsfw).
To reiterate, some bit of chaos or entropy is needed, or to inject a more personal opinion, it's deterministically applied, for an organism, entity, whathaveyou, to be more adaptable to this system; the thermodynamic entity needs to somewhat absorb the nature of its host system. Military advancement doesn't happen in stagnation, it happens when threats are applied to the system, passively or aggressively, an example case being potential threats to the State create a push for offensive or defensive technologies. Our muscles adapt when stimuli is applied at the cost of introducing what could be a potentially negative stressor to the system, an example case being when one lifts weights sufficiently to induce hypertrophy. Software becomes more robust when threat agents are applied, an example being pen-testing software, fuzzers, your local hacker and so on. This I think represents an abstracted notion of hormesis on a more macroscopic level.
And from this sequence of logic, if you will entertain that it's a logical hypothesis, we could safely say that you, as a thermodynamic entity, "wish" (quotes to imply those who entertain a non-deterministic point of view) to prolong yourself, "yourself" being you, your offspring and other remnants we might see as part of our identity such as culture, beliefs, etc, then some amount of change in "you" and that of you including said components, is to be reckoned with and potentially absorbed from the external system. In other words, you should change with the times when applicable as long as with due processing, the times don't change too much of you in a way that's reckless to the "you" as we might typically define it. Which brings up another question, how do you define "you"? How much of a ship can we change before it's not the same ship anymore? Here's a relevant wiki link so you can enjoy the philosophical rabbit hole it leads to. So just how much can we change of ourselves before we consider ourselves not ourselves anymore? Are we our genetics or other more dynamic, ethereal and abstracted notions such as our culture, our ideas, our beliefs, our emotions, etc? Does the material host the immaterial or vice versa? Of those, it seems the more static is our genetic profile so I personally consider it to be more the core of what we are as humans and I'm assuming most do already although some are so passionate about said immaterial properties that they're willing to forgo the material host in favor of promoting the immaterial. But when all other things are roughly equal, we're generally more protective of family than of those in the tribe who share our same culture, beliefs and ideas. Incidentally, when we change too much of ourselves within a short time it can lead to an existential crisis or moral dilemma; "the more you change the less you feel", to quote one of my favorite songs. While at the same time you could make the argument that excess stagnation causes the same dilemmas. We've all been there, points in our lives where we're going nowhere, life seems redundant and you dwell on questioning the point of a life where little to nothing is happening.
This longing to stay true to oneself and not change as well as this aversion to challenge is what you could define as sacredness, which I tend to respect somewhat but also equally abhor. I'm naturally someone who doesn't like change and felt this way a lot of my life but as I've grown older I've had to challenge my stubborn natural tendencies very strongly so I could adapt to the world as modestly, to put it flatteringly, as I have. As you know if you've read my very previous blog entry on being a selective mute for most of my early life, growing up I really had a strong aversion to change and interact with this world as little as possible. That meant being very picky about who I talked to, what I ate, what information I input into my brain or chose to believe, what contact I had with other things that people had contact with and other strange personality anomalies. I felt whole as a person and that little to nothing needed to change. Of course entertaining this sacredness is essentially a death sentence if taken to extremes in this changing world and for better or worse I've learned to swim with the tide to some extent. This all came at a great cost to the self or ego and consequentially in my late twenties I believe I experienced what's known in psychological circles as ego death, or more aptly an ego still on life support as I began to absorb more of this world, or sought to maniacally explore and learn as much about it as I can when apathy isn't tightening its noose.
I'm a kinder and more understanding person as I've gotten older at a cost to losing some of my self although there's still a kernel of it lying somewhere underneath that serves as a protective mechanism for when my musical taste gets mocked. As we see, when eagerness to explore is taken to extremes and you have too much change or disorder, too much entropy within the local system, it can also be a death sentence. Nothing should be sacred or above contest yet a body always in contest is hardly a body and so if we want a civil society which nurtures technological advancement, some amount of sacredness for order is to be respected as well as some amount of change is to be respected. Life straddles a fine balance between order and disorder, being against and with the forces of this universe, both of which can be mutually complementary in relation to thermodynamic entities such as ourselves. More relevant to my title, using the model of hormesis as reference, we perhaps have license to entertain that some amount of toxicity, stressor or entropy to the system is optimal, you could also say inevitable if you're a determinist, for longevity of the local order, the thermodynamic entity, or life in this case. Another case in point, bacteria were once a threat and some of course still are, now they're a part of us and serving us. Viruses were also a past threat but now some of them fill the same role. My ex is hardly much like me but together we co-opted what we think are the best parts of us both and produced offspring. My point being that humanity has co-opted some formidable opponents (my ex being one, hah!), in the process we changed or lost part of ourselves, but so far it seems a beneficial evolutionary trade-off or in other words we were successfully filtered through the thermodynamic system mostly in tact, so far, by mirroring or exchanging with other systems which were potentially a threat (insert another ex joke here).
So can I conclude that there's any truth to the old saying of 'that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger'? Probably no more than the obvious answer which is 'sometimes' and 'within reason'. Many weak threats can make you temporarily stronger but when applied over time can weaken you. A major threat over short time or a minor threat over a long time such as the infamous death of a thousand cuts, pick your poison. Maybe Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence could be loosely applied here and it's telling us that there are no cheat codes in life, that we are finite entities encompassing finite timespace within a larger timespace and that time, mass and energy are very happily married so we're typically exchanging one for another within our local thermodynamic system. Somewhat related though not very substantiated science. I think proof enough in that we will always be very finite beings in timespace, of very limited power, is that if we could supposedly become immortal then of course that means a core part of us would be resistant to change which would be utterly impossible in a changing universe. Immortality would require infinite energy in this supposed infinite universe to be vigilant enough to seek out all possible threats through all spacetime that could change us in any way, shape or form in body or mind because remember, immortal essentially means unchanging lest we delve into the aforementioned Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Another factor is that variables of power seem to change the nature of its host which consequently arouses the Ship of Theseus problem again. A black hole is only as powerful as it is because it is a black hole and can manipulate the universe only in the way a black hole can. I know, I'm such a downer but when you try to explore new lands it's inevitable that you'll find new fences; that's the price you pay as the curious cat. Not to say that perhaps I'm envisioning fences where they may not objectively exist, or wrong, but I welcome input to the contrary. So a related question, would you rather be blind and be content being married to an ugly partner or have your sight while being married to an ugly partner and living in misery (closing your eyes during intimate moments is cheating now)? I think I'd choose the former and live in ignorant bliss but that doesn't seem to represent my appetite for truth at the potential cost of disappointment. I suppose because the curious cat's already out of the bag now and there's no going back, unless of course I lose my memory which according to recent performance, seems a possibility as entropy takes hold in coming years.
Now I'd like to reiterate that I think hormesis makes a decent general analog for my purposes in demonstrating that a little bit of a "bad" thing can be a "good" thing but I agree with what seems to be the scientific consensus, that as of yet the medical model is very unsubstantiated and admit that I'm especially skeptical when it applies to heavy metals such as lead. Perhaps there's some units on the thermodynamic scale that fail to respond reciprocally in any meaningful way due to a vast energy imbalance between the two such as how x-rays affect our bodies far more destructively than our bodies do them or how some units are hardly affected at all when interacting with normal matter such as neutrinos, dark matter and such. Untested hypotheses as this should never be used to endorse anything that may potentially be unhealthy. Though I'm still a fan of using layman thermodynamics and trying to apply it at other scales. I'm a visual thinker so from my point of view, I see the nature of hormesis represented as thermodynamic bodies coalescing with other thermodynamic bodies and in doing so they have a tendency towards mirroring compatible and likewise conflicting parts of each other iteratively which serves to innoculate, or neutralize one against like stressors, comparable to how receptors in our brain fail to respond when already bound with an agent or in elementary terms, a Connect Four piece filling in for another. Or maybe more aptly, if you had a tuning fork that could play at varying frequencies simultaneously, or let's say an organism of tuning forks, and it encountered a frequency it wasn't exposed to and it had receptive resonating features, it'll naturally adopt, or resonate, to the foreign frequency if receptive to it. And perhaps parasitizing amplitude, power, from its new host, the newly adopted frequency naturally starts to resonate at an amplitude and frequency which is phase shifted enough that it can attenuate other like but invasive frequencies.
Man, I love applying music to various aspects of our world and as I see it, the whole universe is vibrations. All that said, I'm just some dude on the internet who admittedly can be a bugbrain, as the late John Nash would say, and I have no academic credentials other than being someone who thinks about life admittedly too much and believes that science has many undervalued commonalities with religion, philosophy and many more subjects so take it all with a grain of salt. I hope I've been convincing enough to justifiably marry certain parts of them in my various blog entries to provide what little utility you can gain from these insights. And I'd like to think that my entries have gained slightly more clarity and readability as I've written more over the years as well as my brain functioning slightly better. To apprehensively tread down a more personal and darker path, in my past I've had really horrible and maniacal brain fits which would generally externally manifest as extreme anxiety and introversion. Weeks would go by and I wouldn't see another soul, an experience that can somewhat be personified in one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs. At various points I'd resort to self-harm because even just a punch to the face and to be punchdrunk for just a few seconds was better than the pain of the racing thoughts. That form of self-harm combined with the constant teeth clinching should've given me an iron jaw by now fit for an amateur boxer. Previously I also had what I can only guess was a bout of stress-induced schizo-affective disorder where I'd have invasive audio hallucinations which came about after a breakup; a very trying time in my life of which I couldn't afford any formal medical or psychological examination. To this day I still have to read over my entries at least a few times to make sure it's sensible and legible enough for the average reader since I'm still a bit of a scatterbrain which probably goes as far back as when I was eight years old and Tourettes started to rear its ugly head. With every twitch of my eye and sniff of my nose, it's like some epileptic erasing of thought takes place which makes it really hard to solve problems that require much working memory. Before the onset of Tourettes I generally did well in school and was usually among the first to finish my work so it was no surprise to me when I discovered that learning disabilities are co-morbid with it. Though you probably won't notice me doing any twitching in public as I've learned to control it but usually it manifests as a lot of facial tension which doesn't help my social anxiety. Anyway, sorry for the personal digression, but I have hopes that my own experiences and insights can give a passerby a more rational, reasonable and novel look at the world and perhaps make your life a bit easier, but of course in the spirit of hormesis, not too easy.
As a blunt end, let's start with a fine song. Since I referenced a Smashing Pumpkins song, I'll post another favorite song of theirs that is just right for sitting up late at night thinking about the world we live in while sometimes running into halting issues such as asking if a problem has an answer or if it's just too far beyond your mind to be answerable and so you sink into thinking about what you're thinking about what you're thinking about (nsfw).
"Deep in thought, I forgive everyone"
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