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Jerry Z. wrote: Senescence of cell and senescence of
organism are
related? Of course it's related! How could it not be related? We're talking
about parts of the same living organism. But how it's related and what
effects those relations create-- that's where the work has to be
done. I agree with you that aging isn't simply a case of all body cells getting
old. If it's the interface of the body with the encoded information
that the body's "internal predictive models" are based on, then this would
manifest itself as a global failure of the system without any clear-cut local
reason. Or, as a general weakening of the system in its entirety, with a
corresponding enhanced vulnerability to all sorts of natural hazards of
life. Every compensatory measure the system generated would require a rebalance
of all other relations affected, and when this begins to happen often enough and
fast enough, the rebalance would never be completed before new ones arose. So
the system enters a phase of constant imbalance, which is not a good place to
be.
Cancer cells have all sorts of unique properties, unlike the body
cells they were supposedly borne from. For example, they seem to have an
entirely different sense of "self"; they've somehow reverted (or evolved) to the
individual sense that a new organism would have. How to survive in the hostile
environment in which they "evolved", how to exploit all opportunities which
exist in that environment, and how to live, grow, and reproduce. There is no
"intelligence" to it; it's all encoded behavior and goes with the territory of
being an anticipatory system.
Body cells of a multicellular organism don't have an individual
sense of self, they have a "we" instead of an "I". So, a suicide protocol of
individual cells isn't really suicide-- not to the "self" that the cells
recognize. The "we" continues and that's the imperative all individual body
cells operate from. Cancer cells have an "I". They have their own agenda and
their own drive to live and survive, as well as their own means for doing so. As
RR described it; they are too adaptive in the individual sense and will
ultimately kill the host, which they experience as "the environment". But their
timeline is different from our experience of time. They have endless
generations worth of time before confronted with the end. I have said
before that no organism has any notion of "sustainability" encoded into it.
That's not part of anticipation. The human mind, as far as I can see, is the
only anticipatory system that even considers a concept like that. Our bodies
surely don't.
But that doesn't explain aging. Cancer is a whole other phenomenon.
Even infants can develop cancer. There have actually been cases in utero!
But, like all complex systems, the way cancer develops from a healthy body is a
different process from the way cancer behaves once it has come into being. I
don't see how medical science can ever really understand the nature of something
like cancer without considering the anticipatory aspects. And I suspect the same
will be true about aging, as well. So, Jerry.... are you going to be the one who
develops a breakthrough???
Judith
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