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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5953 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Empirical results > logic and theoretical mechanisms. The most clear demonstration of this is general anaesthesia, which continues to lack an agreed-upon theoretical mechanism, makes no logical sense, and yet very clearly works. Anything less than taking empirical results above neat theories ceases to be science.

Is there a relatively simple explanation somewhere about why anesthesia makes no sense? I keep hearing this without anyone ever going into details, and it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would find very amusing.

So there's this way to get a human, and knock them out, that's safe! And not only that, but while they've lost consciousness, they have no memory of this happening. And they don't feel pain. And then, once the anaesthesia wears off, they wake up, almost entirely side-effect free! When the closest alternative is to whack someone in the head hard enough that they fall unconscious, which is significant more dangerous, it sure awfully convenient. The sum effects are equivalent to a coma or severe brain damage, but entirely reversible! Like it is some specific procedure that exists purely for the purpose of enabling surgery. How nonsensical it is for the body to have the ability to do this, given there would be no possible use for this back when we wandered the savanna 100,000 years ago? And yet, we do have this ability. A hidden off switch that can be controllably flicked with a few relatively easy to acquire gases.

Aliens?

More seriously, is it that we don't understand how it works, or why it evolved?

There are competing hypotheses for how it works, but nothing conclusive.

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