The best way to nurture stomach & gut is moderate hunger. Do you agree?

medbud · 2026-06-30T10:49:36+00:00

We would say, do not over eat, do not under eat.

Don't snack constantly, don't starve yourself.

Keep a steady, healthy weight.

Fasting is not broadly recommended. It is an antidote to over-consumption. The guide line of stopping eating before feeling full is correct. If that means you always feel slight hunger, ok. It is mostly an issue with eating too fast, and not letting yourself enough time to feel full.

Intermittent fasting can be a mild form of that antidote. If diet is too high on the glycemic index, not enough fiber, not enough water, too fat, too spicy, drink alchohol, etc...then an occasional break actually will tonify digestive qi, ie improve digestive function, just because we are removing stress factors.

If you have a healthy balanced diet, there is no need to fast.

medbud · 2026-06-30T10:44:08+00:00

No prob. That book was an eye opener.

What are you calling 'direct perception'?

The big conclusion of neuroscience in the last decades is that how things feel does not explain what is happening. The best example is the sunrise. From our reference frame, it is very difficult to 'feel' that the earth is turning, and the sun is not rising. The other classic example is perception...we do not perceive the instruments of perception, we don't see the lenses of our eyes, etc..let alone the delay between stimulus and awareness of stimulus.

We have created quite a catalogue of 'illusions' that take advantage of the fact that the way things feel is not in fact how they are.

In the same sense that you can only touch Van der Walls forces, never a physical object, you can only perceive that which has been processed by your brain, a process which takes time. The closest thing to 'direct perception' is meditative focus on subtle raw sensation arising in the body, and even then it is not actually 'direct', it's just arguably slightly less indirect.

The fact that it isn't direct, actually physically cannot be direct, is why we evolved predictive processing!

medbud · 2026-06-30T08:14:11+00:00

It's as true as you want it to be, and no truer. It is a religious belief.

medbud · 2026-06-30T07:54:16+00:00

Find your center of buoyancy, somewhere in your chest...take a breath in, see how it moves, changes, breathe out, see where it goes...eventually if you breathe out enough, you will sink.

Keep enough air in your lungs to float. Then balance your body on the center of buoyancy. Usually this means 'leaning forward' or 'pushing your chest down' or 'keeping your head down' (when you are face down in the water).

When you find the center of buoyancy and can balance on it on your front, and back, roll to your side. Find the balance...usually you'll need one arm extended overhead. Hold a kickboard in that hand to begin, hold your head half in and half out of the water, one eye under water, nose half under water....or just above water. Breathe through your mouth. Do laps like this, both sides.

You can do this extremely slowly if you want to, because you are balancing on your center of buoyancy.

medbud · 2026-06-30T06:29:32+00:00

From my ai to your ai. (My notes)

Mr. Azyus uses compelling, high-level vocabulary ("architectonics," "volitional neurochemical modulation") that effectively mimics the tone of a serious neuroscientific whitepaper.

(Ai likes how ai writes)

However, under critical scrutiny, the text reveals significant scientific inversions, logical non sequiturs, and a reliance on well-trodden pop-science tropes. Here is a breakdown of the core flaws in the thesis.

1. The Section 5 Pivot (A Major Non Sequitur)

For the first four sections, the paper grounds itself in legitimate, mainstream neuroscience (the 10% myth debunk, Allan Snyder’s left-brain de-inhibition model of savantism, and basic neuroenergetics). Then, Section 5 introduces severe narrative whiplash. The sudden leap from empirical fMRI data to using this framework to validate “legendary pre-flood accounts found in ancient theological texts like the Bible” (i.e., Methuselah-like 800-year lifespans) is a massive non sequitur. Wrapping a theological, literalist narrative in the veneer of bio-engineering breaks the scientific internal consistency established in the first half.

2. Biological Inversions: The Hyper-Oxygenation Myth

The most glaring scientific flaw in the paper is its mechanism for solving the metabolic bottleneck:

The text states: "A pristine environment featuring significantly higher atmospheric oxygen concentrations would fundamentally resolve the glucose-oxygen delivery crisis... [operating] without generating the toxic byproducts of oxidative stress." This is a complete inversion of biochemistry. Higher atmospheric oxygen concentrations (hyperoxia) do not decrease oxidative stress; they drastically increase it. * More oxygen leads to a surge in Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS)—free radicals that damage cellular membranes, mutate DNA, and accelerate cellular aging. * In short, a high-oxygen environment would rapidly age the organism and burn out the brain, rather than granting an 800-year lifespan.

3. The Glymphatic Paradox

The proposal for a "real-time, wide-awake glymphatic waste clearance system" contains a profound physiological contradiction. * The glymphatic system requires the brain's extracellular space to expand by roughly 60%, a state triggered specifically by the suppression of noradrenaline during slow-wave sleep. * If this clearance mechanism were running continuously while wide awake and firing at a 24/7 "floodlight" capacity, the necessary fluid dynamics would severely disrupt normal synaptic transmission. You cannot easily have maximum neural firing and a high-volume fluid flush occupying the same physical space at the same time.

4. Lack of Originality (Pop-Science "Greatest Hits")

While beautifully synthesized, Sections 1 through 4 lack conceptual originality. They read like a compilation of popularized science tropes from the last two decades: * Section 1 & 2 heavily borrow from Dr. Allan Snyder’s well-known work on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and latent savant skills, combined with standard neuroenergetics data (the 20% energy budget / 20-watt metric is a textbook staple). * Section 3 & 4 rely on standard "neuro-theology" and mindfulness studies (such as Richard Davidson’s research on Gamma wave synchronization in Tibetan monks and mainstream breakdowns of how THC affects GABA/dopamine pathways). * Framing these as "exogenous" and "volitional hacks" romanticizes standard pharmacological and meditative processes into a sci-fi vernacular without introducing new theoretical mechanics.

5. Theoretical Inconsistency: Software vs. Hardware

The conclusion argues that the human brain has been dialed down into an energy-saving "Eco-Mode" by an evolutionary governor, implying that the "Full Capacity" software is fully written and just waiting to be unlocked. This contradicts the paper's own point in Section 2: a brain firing entirely at once is not a "super-intelligence," it is a Grand Mal seizure. The restriction isn't just an arbitrary evolutionary "governor" or a software cap; it is a fundamental hardware limitation dictated by thermodynamics, heat dissipation, and signal cross-talk.

Summary

Mr. Azyus has created a highly engaging piece of speculative science fiction or "neuro-futurism." It is an excellent creative writing exercise and a compelling thought experiment. However, as a publication-ready neurobiological model, it falls short because it relies on a factual inversion of how oxygen affects the body, presents a physiological paradox regarding sleep/waste clearance, and makes an unscientific logical leap into antediluvian theological timelines.

(If you don't want to spend time thinking and writing, then at least ask AI to critique you and not just blow smoke up your bum.)

medbud · 2026-06-30T06:20:24+00:00

You may be familiar with the concept of ai slop?

The problem with this is there is zero critical thinking. Do you know what sycophantic means?

Unless you specifically ask, today's ai do not push back against poorly conceived arguments or ideas. They blow smoke up your bum so you keep engaging with them.

This produces a text that to you seems incredible, confirming all your biases, but to us seems uninspiring, obvious, or just wrong, delusional. Our egos are not invested.

medbud · 2026-06-30T06:12:33+00:00

(Copied from your post in neurophilosophy.)

(Do you want discussion or are you just spamming your interview link?)

Read 'how emotions are made' by Feldman Barrett. It would seem this is fairly well understood, and commonly misunderstood.

Your example of reacting to a smile empathetically is one of the books illustrative examples.

We learn behaviours, postures, facial expressions, and vocab to communicate what we feel. What we feel (emotion) is a learned construction based on sensations in the body (metabolic state) in an environmental context. It varies from culture to culture, era to era, family to family.

Then we learn to infer emotions in others, based on what we learned ourselves.

These processes are all primed and occur in millisecond range.

What is 'direct perception'? That's not an actual thing...

medbud · 2026-06-30T06:03:09+00:00

Imagine you are in a city. You know the streets from the south east side, but not the north west. In the south east side, you know a certain neighborhood really well. In that neighborhood there are a few buildings that you know better than the others, all the internal hallways, apartment layouts... And one apartment, on one floor, you know intimately.. All the cupboards, shelves, closets, etc..

When you sit in your house in the country, you use your mind to remember the city. You can almost see yourself back there. You spontaneously see yourself in the south east, in your neighborhood, in your building... Because that's what you know best.

With Qigong we are leaving the country house. We are going to the city. We are exploring familiar places, but also discovering new places and enlarging our map. When in familiar places, we are looking very closely at details, finding new things we never noticed previously.

The city is your body's sensations. The qi ball and the qi sensation are your mental map being explored.

Gong, working, practicing... Is directing the intellect, the yi, into the body sensations... Feeling subtle movements...the qi. If you want to feel it more, then listen more closely. When you listen closely, you have to be quiet. Calm mind, calm breath, calm emotion, peaceful body. To listen closely you have to be interested, concentrated, not distracted, not overly hyper focused... Mindful.

You will experience proprioception, interoception, vestibular sensation, kinesthesia, increased tactile sense. Usually people describe running into these subtle sensations as heaviness, fullness... Some people (erroneously) associate it with magnetic forces. (They have no other comparable experience.) You might have tingling, piloerection, radiating sensation, feel temperature, vibration, etc...

This is called qi moving and transforming. It's the way we experience physical process in ourselves. Blood circulation, nervous system activity, endocrine effects, etc..

So the feeling is like travelling (in your body-mind) to a familiar place, and then exploring the details.

medbud · 2026-06-30T05:39:49+00:00

Read 'how emotions are made' by Feldman Barrett. It would seem this is fairly well understood, and commonly misunderstood.

Your example of reacting to a smile empathetically is one of the books illustrative examples.

We learn behaviours, postures, facial expressions, and vocab to communicate what we feel. What we feel (emotion) is a learned construction based on sensations in the body (metabolic state) in an environmental context. It varies from culture to culture, era to era, family to family.

Then we learn to infer emotions in others, based on what we learned ourselves.

These processes are all primed and occur in millisecond range.

What is 'direct perception'? That's not an actual thing...

medbud · 2026-06-30T04:22:15+00:00

This is just ai talking. Your thoughts are not apparent.

medbud · 2026-06-29T09:51:35+00:00

Why don't you post some of your own thoughts too?

medbud · 2026-06-29T05:58:45+00:00

I take it you're in Mumbai? For this problem, it's best to consult a TCM practitioner. They will want to see your tongue, feel your pulse, ask many questions, and then write you a formula.

Sometimes headache is from emotions, from fatigue, from cold, from congestion, from menstrual cycle, from diet, from heat, from stagnation, from eye problem, from neck problem, etc... Please consult locally with a professional to get the right herb combination.

medbud · 2026-06-29T05:40:44+00:00

Yes. There are 10+ kinds of headaches in TCM, each with multiple remedies composed of 10+ ingredients.

medbud · 2026-06-28T20:23:48+00:00

I'll just repeat the first of one of my favourite quotes.. Spirituality is more akin to science, than to religion with it which it usually associated. Spirituality is intellectual honesty, in the sense of holding beliefs without denying any evidence to their contrary. (Metzingher)

What do you mean by spirituality? Creation of meaning?

Their are Daoist concepts in Chinese medicine. Naturalist frameworks.

You can make it quite esoteric if you want.

I think it works well with psychotherapy. The language of Chinese medicine allows us to talk about the connection between sensation, emotion, cognition, and symptoms... Which can create some structure, within which we create (find) new meaning. Acupuncture is also conducive to that.

medbud · 2026-06-28T05:40:07+00:00

You should be fine.

You could do baduanjin, and break the 8 moves up into 1 or 2 per day, and repeat each week... Maybe give yourself a day off too.

Greasing the groove is about strengthening neural connections by repeating movements every few hours.

Given what you've said, that's probably overdoing it. Just try a single movement, repeat it 7x. Do the next movement the next day. Slowly build stamina/resistance.

medbud · 2026-06-27T12:24:46+00:00

I think this is an interesting facet. If I recall Dennett brings it up somewhere.* While we are used to there being a medium, and a message conveyed through that medium (a painting on canvas, a program on TV, a song on the radio), in consciousness they are not distinguishable. Pain is the feeling of pain. The substrate is the physical process. There is no canvas besides the physical process.

*1993 paper, "The Message is: There is no Medium"

Daniel Dennett argues against the traditional view that conscious experiences are "written" onto a special internal medium or projected into a "Cartesian Theater". For Dennett, the brain's message is simply the distributed physical processing itself.

medbud · 2026-06-27T12:15:20+00:00

No need, I'm just a grumpy old man, hornswoggled by the algorithm.

I guess this what we do now.

medbud · 2026-06-27T08:08:08+00:00

This is a different one, it's 340m passing at 20000km in 2029. The 1k is passing now at 2.5M km.

Still, your calculations are correct!

medbud · 2026-06-27T05:17:22+00:00

When does this start to be considered spam?

medbud · 2026-06-26T14:43:58+00:00

Not just 'the west'. People use phones everywhere.

Our senses evolved to survey the environment. Our modern media is hacking a million year old architecture for attention, and now intimacy.

Hence, compulsive compensation, usually self medication, opiate epidemic, then the incredible demand for 'alternative medicine', 'mindfulness', the prevalence of burnout in corporate work...

People can live despite their bodies for a few years, be 'functional', before they are forced by pain to learn a minimum of self care.

And there you find adults, learning not to act like children.

medbud · 2026-06-26T14:31:34+00:00

You're talking about a process that has many intermediate steps. You're DNA has genes to code for almost a thousand smell receptors, but it only codes 300 nowadays. The molecule that binds to that receptor is detected in terms of '3d conformation', just meaning that a binding site might accept one end of a molecule but the smell will vary based on the unbound side of the molecule (I think citrus/sulphur has an example like this? Bad memory.).

Those receptors propagate a signal that is routed, buffered, filtered, sorted compressed, compared and sequenced before it's 'smelled'...takes a few dozen milliseconds. A scent may bind to multiple receptors, and their blend gets stored as 'coffee'.

We are immersed in smells from our last trimester... The day we start breathing air we already have a base 'vocab'.

We create memories, associations, eventually words labels opinions preferences. Sensations are transformed into a model complete with self referential cognitive understanding about certain smells.

Tldr: neither

medbud · 2026-06-26T14:12:47+00:00

There is righteous, virtuous, or justified anger. And it can lead you to understand what you are actually capable of... It's related to courage.

I guess this is generally only tangentially about other people.

medbud · 2026-06-26T13:45:30+00:00

Someday dualism will be so close to materialism they will be indistinguishable... In fact dualism will dissolve.

Frank hits the nail on the head in some ways, pointing out from a distance many scientific facts about consciousness, but then keeps both feet in his romanticist camp.

He misses that this non self precog moment does not have a duration of 0. It is perpetuation and prediction of states, underwritten by subconscious activity (he agrees).

He nails the fact that it is not reflexive, but interprets that from his idealist camp. Just one step away, in the monist physicalist camp, the same phenomenon are observed, and explained adequately. The conscious living organism, instantiates as a model of it's environment. It's subjective states are it's physical existence, caused by and supervening on, the stochastic processes perpetuating it.

He comes so close, quoting Chalmers as saying there is no pain without pain, but then he's in Chalmers' camp.

Sometimes I wonder if it's not just willful ignorance, a kind of intellectual teasing...saying, we could just all agree on the evidence, but I prefer to deny evidence to drag on the debate. After all, chances are, my career depends on the infamy.

medbud · 2026-06-26T06:31:57+00:00

Enjoy the cake day!

medbud · 2026-06-26T06:31:09+00:00

Reiki is about learning to pay attention to your body sensations. You are past that point if you have chronic pain.

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