Redesigning Humans

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Tom Spence, Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're redesigning humans. Now Nick, you came up with this topic and it's obvious why, it's evident. So what is it? I mean you must have lived with this burden for years. What would you like to read? Well specifically, the other day I just got all nice and snuggled up in bed and then I thought, oh what do you know, I need a wee. And it turned out my water bottle was empty at the same time. So I went down to the toilet, I filled up my water bottle from the tap. Well if it was empty you're fine, you can fill it right there. And then I separately did a wee into the toilets. And then it struck me, I had a brainwave. I thought this is so inefficient. I'm just replacing the water that I'm weeing out. So why don't I just stop drinking water and weeing? But anyway, it turns out that's not as easy as you might think. But it did occur to me, why don't we think of ways that we could make all these inefficiencies about our body probably. If we were being intelligent designers, instead of just letting natural selection do the job, are there some fixes we could make? How could we make humans more efficient? What would we do? What would be top of the list? I like it. What would go on the backlog? What did God do wrong and let's get it fixed? And he's not the designer he's cracked up to be maybe. It sounds like this should be fixing physiology, right? Not fixing biology. I mean, because we're talking about humans. Redesigning humans. Yeah, okay. All right, well thank goodness we've got an expert. Oh but I do have a rule. Oh yeah. It's got to be physically possible. You're not allowed to redesign. No sci-fi. Yeah, you're not allowed to say, well I'm going to make them telepathic or something. You've got to have a mechanism which is physically possible and you've got to propose what that mechanism is. But if it's physically possible, then it's then we can do it. And it's, I mean, why haven't we done it? Right, now I'm just saying we're not allowed to suggest fixes that require unknown technology. This is real practical stuff here then.

Speaker B: 00:02:16

As though what we're suggesting is, what are the best bits of comparative physiology from around the animal kingdom that we could merge together and create the optimal creature? In a kind of

Speaker A: 00:02:28

ghastly chimera of like with the head of a lion and the foot of a man. Exactly. Yeah, okay. And the digestive tract of a horse. And the hair of Peter Coghill. You know, I say that there's an obvious comeback. I mean, you know, that can't be my hair. I make bald jokes enough, right? Getting old. New material. Yeah, yeah. No such thing as old material. Anyway, look, I think we're very well qualified for this because I'm a theologian. You're a kind of economist-y type person. There's an engineer and we've got a biologist as well. No, biology, zoology? I can't remember. Partial biology.

Speaker B: 00:03:08

What am I on about? You're a chemist, aren't you? I was a chemist but my university was a broad-based one. So I did a lot of biology in my first year. He's clearly not qualified for this

Speaker A: 00:03:18

conversation, but we are. Okay, look, how do we kick off? Where do we want to go? Well, Tom, do you know why we do wheeze? Can you explain why this wheeze thing is going on? I can, yeah. So

Speaker B: 00:03:29

when you break down things like proteins in your body, in your metabolic pathways that have nitrogen in them, you produce nitrogenous waste. Just out of interest, why would I be doing that? Because you need to for various mechanisms. So you can do it to break down energy or to create

Speaker A: 00:03:47

energy. Right, so I eat some pasta, I've got to break down some proteins. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So

Speaker B: 00:03:52

we can absorb the proteins ourselves, you mean? No, so this is after that. You have large chains of amino acids that make up proteins in the food you eat and so on and so forth. You break those down into individual amino acids. A lot of those amino acids you then use to build your own proteins. You put them together in different ways and so on. Some of them you break down to make other things. So you can, you know, chop the nitrogen off, stick the ends together, turn it

Speaker A: 00:04:19

into something else. Oh, that's pretty cool. So we're kind of reusing some bits which are not

Speaker B: 00:04:23

directly, right? Yeah, that sort of process, so several of the metabolic pathways in the body produce nitrogenous waste, so waste containing nitrogen. And in the animal kingdom, there are a range of ways that organisms have developed to get rid of this nitrogenous waste because it's pretty toxic if you keep it in your body. It's powerful antioxidant behaviour, too powerful essentially. And if you let it build up, you'll probably die. So it basically is going to go

Speaker A: 00:04:51

around grabbing oxygen from actually your like things like your brain. Yeah, essentially. Are we still talking about why we need to wee? Yes, give me a chance. Right, I'm just making sure.

Speaker B: 00:05:01

Turns out biology is quite complicated, you need to stick with it. You can't write it on the back of a stamp, he's not interested. Well, actually, I recommend to you some of the posters you can buy of all the metabolic pathways in the body with the tiniest, tiniest fonts, because there's just so much going on. We'll put a link, I think. But yeah, so a few different ways you can get rid of these nitrogenous waste products. You can excrete them as ammonia, which you may be familiar with, smelly compound, quite volatile on insect bites. Yeah. Yeah. Using rocket engines, all sorts of purposes. Right. You can excrete it as urea. So you can turn it from ammonia into urea and then excrete it. That's what we humans do. Or you can turn it from ammonia to urea to uric acid and excrete it. So each of those steps takes energy. So getting all the way to uric acid takes the most energy. But each step also makes it easier to get rid of. So the ammonia is really hard to get rid of. You need a lot of water to flush ammonia out of your system. You still need quite a lot of water to get urea out of your system. And uric acid, you don't need much water at all. So based on the availability of energy and water, different organisms have got different ways of getting rid of it. Fish and almost all fish excrete as ammonia because they've got a lot of water, you know, they live in it. There's plenty of water. Mammals tend to excrete as urea. Is that what I was doing when I went to the toilet? Exactly. Weeing. Because water is fairly plentiful on land most of the time and energy is reasonably plentiful as well. Birds tend to excrete as uric acid because, you know, up in the air, they can't drink that often, right? So they need to conserve more water. And so they do that at the cost of using more energy to turn their nitrogenous

Speaker A: 00:07:00

waste into a product. But like, I guess from an economics point of view, the energy they would need to expend to get the water is more than the energy it costs them to turn it into uric acid. Exactly. Got it. So that's all about economics. So this has easily fixed your weeing problem, Nick. Basically, you either need to start living in a tank of water or you need to sprout wings and fly. Yeah, we'll splice some bird DNA in with you. Yeah, exactly. Because unfortunately, the problem with all these facts and knowledge and stuff is actually it gets in the way. No, I think this is really good, actually, because that gives us a bit, you know, that tells us what the physical constraints are, right? We've got this problem that we're not going to be able to do anything about this nitrogen. This nitrogen seems to be the big problem. There's no getting around that. So the

Speaker B: 00:07:44

Nick's suggestion of just not weeing wasn't an option, because you'd have to get rid of it somehow.

Speaker A: 00:07:49

Right. But you might be able to die in great pain as your kidneys failed. Are we going to inevitably run into some biological roadblock here that actually thinks as great as they are? I want to make an observation, right? Yeah. Which is that as it happens, and this is just going with where we are now as a species, we have worked out how to get abundant energy. So I'm inclined to say that whenever we've got an option, while we're discussing options, if there's something where it's like, okay, the optimal solution in the evolutionary environment is a certain thing, we should be now, we should say, well, let's throw some more energy at it. So we might have evolved in a situation where we didn't have enough energy to go for the uric acid option. But now I want to say, well, look, we've got pizzas that cost £10 in Fiji for a day. So we can just, can we now cut, what would it look like if we were excreting uric acid? How often, how much of a saving would

Speaker B: 00:08:40

that be in terms of trips to the toilet? I mean, you know, you know, bird poo. Right.

Speaker A: 00:08:45

That kind of, you know, much sort of slimier, thicker. Which, but they have a cloaca, which is like a combined wee wee and poo hole at the same time. An all purpose hole. Yeah. Would we need

Speaker B: 00:08:58

one of those? Or could we? Not necessarily. Well, I'm not certain. I don't think so. It's literally just which hole it goes out of, right? Yeah. So you could probably just have it rooted into

Speaker A: 00:09:09

the existing ducts. Right. Although I don't like the idea of squeezing bird poo out of my old chat, but. Maybe the other way. Let's send it out the back. I think that's it. I think maybe the other way, bring it in. That's an interesting one. Look, okay. I mean, is there more to explore in this aspect where we're talking about the whole weeing problem? But do we want to keep on going that, find a solution? Or are there other things we want to bring in that we want to change? I've got one. I do have one thing to suggest, but I think, yeah. Let's have Peter, then back to Nick.

Speaker C: 00:09:46

Yeah. Well, there are all sorts of weird constructions within the mammalian body, let alone other animals. For example, like the laryngeal nerve, right? Connects, plugs into your spinal column and provides signals to your larynx and your throat for swallowing and talking. It's a short trip from where it sprouts out of the spinal column and goes into services, the parts of the body it needs to connect to. However, it takes a very circuitous route, goes down into the middle of your chest, loops around your aorta and comes back up again. And that's a sort of like a historical evolutionary weirdness. So back in the, you know, back in the, when we were sort of fishy-like creatures, the heart was in a different place and had a different, altogether different construction and was much closer to where the two connections were made. It's just that as we've evolved, the way that it's sort of plumbed has not sort of, there's no intelligence about it. It can't sort of say, oh, well, actually, we can take a shorter route. We'll just swap it over here. It's sort of, as the heart moved down, this nerve had to continue to stretch and loop around. And that has real practical problems during heart surgery and aortic surgery. That's a real key thing that you mustn't touch because you can paralyze the patient's neck and larynx. So that's biologically potentially quite an easy fix because all we need to do is intervene in fetal development and change the order in which things occur. So have the heart simple process. Yeah, let's do that. What does it do after breakfast? Conceptually simple, where you just, we just change, flip the order in which things develop. So we have the, have the, the nerve develop before the, before the heart structure does. Actually, I think, I think this

Speaker B: 00:11:41

is a particularly interesting example because it's also something that we see a lot in, in statistical analysis and so on, is that what's happened there is you found a local minimum. The, you know, moving the, the evolving the nerve to a different place would take you through much worse situations where it goes through the aorta or, or, you know, there's a hole in the aorta. Or the two ends don't connect up or something. Yeah. The barriers to what may be a better state are so high that you can't really move through them in evolutionary terms, at least not easily. Yeah. And I think there's quite a lot of things that

Speaker A: 00:12:18

fall into that category. So we would say probably these are the things that are the obvious problems rather than, so these are problems. There's the famous epiglottis one, right? Well, there's, there's, yes, what you mean that being next to your, your windpipe and your esophagus being next to each other and that causes change. But also the blind spot is another famous example of a kind of evolutionary workaround because our, our body.

Speaker C: 00:12:37

And inverted retina is quite a key one as well. Sort of the wrong way up.

Speaker A: 00:12:41

Apparently our sinuses are upside down as well. Are they? They should be draining downwards because our noses got all squished up over time. You know, our once elongated snouts, which were very useful when you're a tree shrew have turned into these little stubby noses and now our sinuses don't drain properly, which is why we get too many sinus infections. And we carry handkerchiefs around. Right. Exactly. And, but no, I was going to, so I think there, there's a lot of those things where they're kind of local optimizations where we're stuck because we can't get to a sort of better outcome without getting worse first. We'd have to evolve our way through a period of being a, being a less effective creature. Of course, we, in this thought experiment here, we can get, we can do that. We can have the foresight to do that. But I just wanted to ask the question though, first of all, is what are we trying to achieve? Right. We haven't really tackled that. What is the aim? Do we want to design with the same aim as natural selection in mind, which is, well, basically, you know, is this going to breed? Can we maximize our effectiveness at breeding? Or do we want in fact, to do what a natural selection doesn't do, doesn't even try and do, is make us happy. Do we want to design humans to be happier? Let's go for the second one. Well, okay. In that case, we just, all we would be is one giant pleasure center. Yeah. Continually stimulated. Yeah, exactly. So this is, there's a thing called wireheading. But not necessarily with any little kids coming along. No, this is, this is exactly, this is called wireheading. And this is the wireheading, which was this concept named by a sci-fi writer called Larry Niven, where, and apparently this is true. If you stimulate the pleasure center or whatever bit of the brain it is, you never get bored of it. You know, it's, you don't get satiated or you don't build up tolerance to that. If you stick a wire straight into the brain. Well, is it, see this, and this brings me on to, I think another rule we need to put down, which is the sort of Chesterton's fence rule, which is we need to be very careful that we're not sort of designing something in or removing something, which in fact has a hidden benefit. And I would say the fact that we're not happy all the time actually does have this hidden benefit, which is that it makes us do stuff. Like, you know, it makes us do, and I, and so I feel like. But it doesn't matter if you're happy. No, if you're just a blob, pulsating blob of happiness. Yeah. In fact, hundreds, what you do is you'd have hundreds, you just, an organism would just be a big load of blobs of happiness. Yeah. Just sit there being happy the whole time.

Speaker C: 00:15:15

I think there's another interesting question we could try to explore is, can we reconcile the two goals, the kind of traditional classic evolutionary goal, which is to procreate the species, procreate that genome with the, with a more kind of high-minded human goal, which is to improve collective happiness and not just happiness of the individual. It's not just about that one individual's genome. It's about some sort of egalitarian collective goal for the whole species. I think that, I think, I think they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. So we have, we have, we've evolved these complex behaviours, which means that we can start to cooperate and, and, you know, benefit each other as well as ourselves at the same time. The question is, how can we hard code some of that stuff into biology? So that becomes sort of, you know, natural.

Speaker A: 00:16:08

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting one because a lot of, a lot of the things that we think of as sort of, well, there's the prisoner's dilemma, which is this sort of, you know, people can look it up, but I mean, it's the point is that it is this problem where you have individual incentives to do a certain thing because it gives you an individual advantage. But if everyone does it, everyone ends up worse off. And the exact, the kind of natural selection example that's always brought up is the peacock's tail, where, you know, lady peacocks find male peacocks with big, peahens find peacocks with big tails attractive. And so peacocks, male peacocks, you know, evolve longer and longer tails until, and this sort of arms race that continues. And you sort of think, well, if all the peacocks could get together and say, listen, why don't we all just agree to all have short tails? Maximum tail length, standard tail length. Yeah, exactly. Then actually everyone would be better off because instead of wasting time growing these ridiculous stuff. And so, but I think that, so Peter's talking about like almost, could we, could we fix the prisoner's dilemma problems in society? So the problems that we tend to behave selfishly and, and, you know, we, which, which causes all of these tragedy of the commons type outcomes. Now, I wonder though, if that's vulnerable to, to my stipulation that it has to be physically possible, because the problem is that there is an incentive to evolve mutations to start being selfish again. So, you know, if we made everyone, changed everyone's genes now to make us all lovely sort of, and nice to each other, there would be a big incentive for someone to evolve the gene to exploit, yeah, to be a scumbag. Yeah. Didn't they make a film about that?

Speaker B: 00:17:50

Is it the invention of lying or something like that? Oh, okay. I feel like there's a film.

Speaker A: 00:17:55

There's an invention of lying where it's not positive. Yeah. It's kind of similar territory.

Speaker C: 00:17:59

I suspect my, my kind of ideal is vulnerable to fundamental economic principles that actually, that any, any, anywhere that there's a, you can get competition, you will get competition,

Speaker A: 00:18:10

and that will undermine any kind of. But also, I've just realized, although I like this idea of just evolving into this, you know, happy block. A happiness block, that's your aim. I like that. But unfortunately, it sounds like to me that because if you're going to on a, on a gene, then inevitably you're going to die out, right? And so you can never have eons of happy blobs. Well, Tom probably knows more about the mechanisms. But why do we have to age? Why do we have to, why can't we just build in not aging? Like, why do we, why do we. Yeah, Tom. Why do we die of natural causes? Like, why can we design that out? Yeah, fortunately, again, we would go to our expert here, Tom. That's a tricky one. Why do we have to die? Yeah, have you fixed

Speaker B: 00:18:57

aging? Well, I think, at least, at least when I was being taught, I think there were various, you know, lines of research going on into aging. I believe one of the most promising ones is telomere length. So we have DNA, as I'm sure you're aware. That's right, yeah. And we, we replicate that DNA when our cells replicate and divide. And at the ends of the DNA, we have these things called telomeres that don't really code any useful information. They're just kind of like capping sequences on the ends of the DNA. The problem is every time you replicate your DNA, they get a little bit shorter, because you kind of, the enzyme that, or the protein that replicates your DNA attaches to the end and goes on from there. So the bit that it's attached to doesn't

Speaker A: 00:19:51

get copied. Yeah, well, I mean, so this is like the timer. This is a timer. Essentially, you've got

Speaker B: 00:19:56

like a fuse at the end of your DNA. And yeah, as they get shorter and shorter, or once they, once they run out, essentially, you start losing actually useful bits of DNA. That does seem really

Speaker C: 00:20:06

stupid. Well, potentially. But consider what an amazing thing the DNA molecule is. Oh, I'm not taking it away from DNA. It's got this one fundamental flaw, which essentially is fixed by having telomeres. It's got, actually, this is a problem. We'll add telomeres onto it. Do they stop it unravelling or something? No, it's just like, it's just like a flying lead that carries the information that the ribosomes catch on to. It's DNA replicates. Yeah, more or less. Yeah. Oh God, this thing's ending in A. They grab onto it. And that's where they grab. The bit that they grab is the bit that's sacrificed. Yeah, because the bit that it grabs. Yes, that's correct.

Speaker A: 00:20:49

You attach. Oh, and a bit like a hand can't grab itself, the telomeres intrinsically cannot replicate because there would have to be another telomere to grab that. So it's like, if you imagine you're

Speaker B: 00:20:59

mowing your lawn and your lawnmower cuts at the front of the lawnmower. Yeah. If you put the lawnmower on your lawn and then start mowing, the bit that you put the lawnmower on will be uncut. Brilliant.

Speaker A: 00:21:11

Right. Okay. It's a bit like that. So we think this actually might be quite a hard one to fix,

Speaker C: 00:21:16

but I thought. Well, we could. If we could replace the way that the DNA, replicate the way the DNA does it, say in software. So you have some sort of artificial thing which spits out DNA molecules to allow cells to bifurcate. Rather than having biological machines do it, we could redesign the way that it's done in biology or we have some sort of silicon way of doing it. Then we could

Speaker A: 00:21:41

make a replicator that doesn't trim the telomeres. Well, obviously everything is about economics and I heard a good economic argument about aging and why actually things would die of natural causes anyway, or why it's actually sort of optimal in a sense to do that. And it's to do with this fact that there are, you can die of external causes. So if there's such a thing as dying from an accident, then investing in the ability to live to 10,000 is a waste of time because, you know, well, the life, as far as I understand it, the life expectancy of humans, if we didn't die of natural causes, would be about a thousand. Actually, and that's just in the modern world, it would be a lot less probably if in the natural environment, there's far more things that can kill you and you can die of an infection and all of that. So the point is, there's no point in making humans, you know, robust enough to live for a thousand because you would die of an accident in the first hundred years anyway. Yeah, that's quite an interesting thought, but there's no reason we should be constrained by that in our redesign. True. So that being the case, we're already some way in actually. In fact, we're more than some way in, we're towards the end. At this point, do we have something to add or do we want to, you know, set our minds to this task? Okay. I was going to ask a question towards the end about, hey, what is it about your body that you would like to sort of engineer differently, to happen differently? That was the question I was going to come on to at the end. But should that be the question that we should be asking right now? Or do we want to go about it a different way and say, hey, all together, this is one thing that we think is a problem. Let's change this. Or do we want to talk about something else? Well, I think that's a good one. Which one, the latter or the former? No, just the whole thing. What are we going to, you know, let's start suggesting modifications. I know something

Speaker B: 00:23:32

I'd want from the animal kingdom. Okay. So let's, I like the way if we personalise it. Tom. Okay. So if I could take one particular piece of physiology from the animal kingdom and add it to myself, I would quite like to take the visual abilities of something like the mantis shrimp, which humans have, I think three cones that let you see different colours. And the relative activation of those is how we see lots of different colours. But some animals such as parrots have more as well, can see far more colours than us into parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can't perceive at all. And I think it'd be really interesting to be able to see, you know, an unimaginable range of colours over what we can see. I'd settle for one more.

Speaker A: 00:24:29

I'd love that. I'd love it if I could, you know, you suddenly, oh, here's a totally new colour. You know, what does it look like? Is it a bit like red? No, it's not like red or green or blue or any of those ones. It's totally different. I'd love that. Actually, I'll carry on. I would love

Speaker B: 00:24:44

that, but only if everyone could have it, because I think the inability to describe it to someone

Speaker C: 00:24:49

would be torturous. I was about to say, the charts that you produced in your analysis would become unintelligible to everybody else because there'd be so subtly different colours. Half of them

Speaker A: 00:24:57

would be invisible. Yeah, I wonder, it's an interesting... The infrared light shows the growth in... Yeah, or would it though? You would potentially be a sort of a genius or in the world of art or music, but who's also mad and no one understands or actually you just commit suicide because you're just impoverished and no one can literally see what you're talking about. And yeah, I like that one, Tom. That's a good one. Nice. You like the one that ends up in his untimely suicide. Yeah. Well, the dangers of getting mantis shrimp eyes. Yeah, absolutely. You don't think about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a bit... Actually, I like that because it goes back to the Aleph thing and it goes back to Borges with the man who... What was it? Funes the Memorious. Yeah, who could what? Everything? Remember everything? Remember everything, yeah. It's that processing thing.

Speaker C: 00:25:52

Yeah, okay. Peter? I've got a few ideas. So, one biological one and a technological one. I'm quite fascinated by the central nervous system of things like octopus, right? They have a very different central nervous system. In fact, it's not very centralized. They have eight limbs, right? They're not really limbs. They're not in the way that we have limbs, but they're eight tentacles. Each tentacle has got its own brain. Oh, that is cool. And they've also got a central brain, which controls the central side. What I'd like to do is be able to splice that system into me so that I'd have multiple different brains. So, the central brain would still be kind of in charge, but it could sort of delegate thoughts to the other brain, say... Oh, paralyzing thinking. Left arm, go and think about this problem for a bit. Right arm, you concentrate on making a cup of tea. Yeah, and so you could just think about lots of different

Speaker A: 00:26:50

things all at once. What happens if one of the legs goes rogue and decides it wants to do?

Speaker C: 00:26:54

Well, they do that. So, the octopus will be sort of minding his own business, hiding under a rock, and one of the arms will get bored and start exploring and start giving away the animal. And then the central brain goes, oh, get back here. Okay. Tom, you were going to come in on

Speaker B: 00:27:11

Yeah, I've actually got news for you, Peter. You do have a second brain.

Speaker C: 00:27:15

Oh, well, I've got a second brain, but it's kind of in your belly.

Speaker B: 00:27:20

Humans have a very rudimentary version of something similar, where we actually have independent neural activity in our guts that is separate from our...

Speaker A: 00:27:30

I've heard about this, and I worry that it's conscious. That it's another person who I can't communicate with, and it's got its own thoughts about what's going on inside. And all it wants is to get out. Well, what if it might sit there speculating and thinking, well, all I see in front of me is the inside of a body. I wonder if there's a person attached with thoughts? Nah, can't be. You know what I mean? That's an outlandish sort of thought. Peter, you said you've got more. Let's keep going.

Speaker C: 00:27:58

Yeah. So, in the vein of Musk's neural link that he's sponsoring and working on, it's a practical thing I quite like. It would be just an ethernet port in the side of my head that kind of just plumbed into my visual cortex and motor cortex. I wouldn't need to stare at a screen anymore. I wouldn't need to type on a keyboard. I could just sort of think thoughts, and they appear in a computer, and then receive information directly from...

Speaker A: 00:28:28

You wait till the pop-up ads start.

Speaker C: 00:28:30

Well, that's the greatest fear, I think, for anything like this sponsored by corporate sponsors, is it's just going to tune adverts directly into your brain. Any more? I did have another one, but we'll... Feels like you... I can pick up. I can pick up.

Speaker A: 00:28:49

Well, before you do, I've just got... Please do, because I've just got this horrible vision at the moment. I can't get out of my head of Peter squirming away with a load of legs with brains in them, and with a USB port going into his head. It's a horrifying vision, Nick. This one is actually, I think, simple fix, simple tweak, which would have a massive impact on health worldwide. This illustrates, actually, the real limitations of natural selection. It doesn't solve problems that don't exist, and it solves the problem of there not being enough energy around by making you hungry, and making you desperate to go and find some food, and you'll stop doing everything and get that food, get that energy inside you. But we've never had an abundance of energy in the evolutionary environment. We've never evolved the ability to stop acquiring energy. Hence, everyone's obese now. A lot of people struggle with their weight, or at least... It's clearly a big problem. I decided that we need a new sensation called hunger, which is like hunger, but it's the opposite. It's when you just don't need to eat anything because you're fat already. This is just something you would, at some point, naturally go into ketosis. You would start using your own body fat, and you just wouldn't want to eat until you got down to the right amount of weight. Hey, presto, we don't need to do dieting anymore. We don't need to get... Because people don't want to eat when they're fat. That, I think, is my number one. I like that because it reminds me of something that happens in the... First of all, you've got that kind of stuff in Dune where they secrete stuff into the... The stillsuits. Yeah, and it also reminds me of... Who's the Scottish writer who died? He's got two names, Ian M. Banks, when he's the M. And what's the name of the big... What are they called? The Culture. Culture. There you go. And they're always secreting stuff into themselves. And so, boom, that works. Because, yeah, you could take tablets and stuff, but I like this more cyborg approach, almost. I do have one more. Yeah, I want to hear it, but I think Tom is going to come in and he's going to piss on our chips again. Go on.

Speaker B: 00:31:10

I think yours is a very interesting suggestion, Nick, but as with most things, it's got knock-on effects, right? Because you mentioned ketosis. Unfortunately, the brain can't extract energy from the products of ketosis, which is why breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because you can't store enough glycogen for overnight. So you're always in ketosis by the morning, but you also have to break down protein to feed your brain. Right. So you'd still need to find a source of protein. So you might need to modify it slightly.

Speaker A: 00:31:42

I mean, that's... Look, if I don't have breakfast, I'm not dead by lunchtime. So, I mean, clearly it's kind of working okay now.

Speaker B: 00:31:49

But I think the issue is that if you were in prolonged ketosis, you'd start experiencing muscle wastage.

Speaker A: 00:31:54

But you'd factor that in. You'd be like, okay, well, it turns out you need some protein. Yeah. You need an egg. You'd get an urge to eat an egg and maybe an orange for the vitamin C,

Speaker B: 00:32:02

but you wouldn't... The moral of my mini story here is that, actually, biology is hard. It's really hard. And you've got so many balls in the air. Oh, no, no, no, no. Let's move away from the naysayers. So I've got another one. With a negative vice. I've got one more.

Speaker A: 00:32:17

Yeah, Nick. So you know, we're allowed to assume energy abundance. So I was looking into neurons. Not very hard. I mean, I didn't spend that long looking at it, but I found some interesting... You've mastered it nonetheless. Yeah, exactly. I'm now a neuroscientist. It turns out, well, I read quite a convincing paper that suggested that they were trying to back out or at least sort of work out what would be the optimal kind of firing rate and width of a neuron if you were to design it from the bottom up. And it turns out that how our neurons are, as you might expect, is the most energy efficient arrangement. But I'm not looking for efficiency here. I want effectiveness. So now we've got all these things that we kind of actually are a bit weird, like our head, which has got our brain in it. I don't know if you know that, but it's got our brain in it, on this little sticking out of our body in a slightly vulnerable way. Whereas you might think, well, why isn't the brain down here? And it's because the brain needs to be near the eyes and the ears so that it can react to threats. I see where you're going. I like this. If it's a little bit further away... Keep going. Wireless communication or fibre optic nerves or something. I thought you'd say something different. I thought it was some sort of eyes and ears in your stomach. No, that's mad. You need the eyes and ears on movable appendages. There's no doubt about that. You have a stork. Yeah, a stork. But the brain can be now safely housed inside the chest cavity. But because of the fibre optic cables, it doesn't matter because you can now react at the speed of light to any stimulus. So there we are. Brains in your chest and hunger.

Speaker B: 00:33:58

I reckon we should couple that with some kind of like armour plating, like tortoises as well.

Speaker C: 00:34:02

Yeah, so the criticism of greater apes is that we've got this very exposed underbelly because we evolved rib cages when we walked on all fours and that gave us a sort of shell. But now we've got this sort of exposed, the genitals and your gut are highly exposed to attack.

Speaker B: 00:34:22

Yeah, so I'll move the brain down there, up armour it and have little eye storks.

Speaker C: 00:34:29

Regrowing eye storks. So if you walk under a low doorway and you snap one off, it doesn't matter. Next week, another one will sprout.

Speaker A: 00:34:36

Yeah, but definitely, definitely sticking the nuts inside this armour casing because it's the worst. It's just terrible design, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember challenging a biologist about that university and it's something to do with, yeah, bloody biochemistry and temperature and stuff has to happen. So hold on, I'm trying to imagine this new Aleph beast. So it's, it's got loads of arms and legs with their own brain. It's got amazing... Oh, but all of those brains are housed in parallel, inside essential, but they've got fibre optic cables. And it's encased as well in this carapace sort of thing. And what was your other one, Peter? Oh, and it's got a USB download port or whatever. And so you can... Yeah, and it doesn't, and it doesn't suffer from obesity. Doesn't suffer, it's beautifully slim and sees the wonderful colours of the world. This is brilliant. I don't know about you, but I think I drew this aged seven. Okay. All right. Nice. Well, there was the, there was the question, you know, what's wrong with biology, fixing biology, boom, half an hour, we fixed it. Yeah. Redesigned humans from the, literally from the bottom, from the cloaca up. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're going to stop there. That was brilliant. I loved that. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Tom Spence of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.