From Computer to Brain: Foundations of Computational Neuroscience Book

The thing with me is that I don't get anything. Here's an example: I want to find out about viruses, so I track down the best book I can about viruses and I read it, and now if you ask me what a virus is I can say things. They hijack a cell's normal function so that it makes copies of the virus's DNA, instead of copies of their own DNA. Something like that. Amazing, I am so smart. But what if you ask me what a cell is? Or what DNA is? I can keep saying things - the cell is the factory of the human body, DNA is the blueprint for life - but I'm just saying things, dude. I'm a fucking parrot. Understanding a thing metaphorically is not the same as understanding the actual thing. I don't really, at a core level, know what I'm talking about, almost ever.


metaphor

So I know it's sortof a cliche to get all "the older I get the more I realize I don't know" or whatever it is old people say, and also it's untrue in my case because I didn't think I knew anything before either, but at a certain point you start to wonder, like, why am I even reading books. I guess it might help if I was at a party and chatting with a virologist and he wanted to say something interesting but there's a certain base level of knowledge I'd need in order to understand the more interesting thing? haha I don't go to parties and all my friends are unemployed graphic designers.

Carl Zimmer is not that virologist who has something interesting to say. I wasn't all that into this book. Look, Siddhartha Mukherjee is the gold standard for talking about medical shit in an engaging and vaguely understandable way, right? Carl Zimmer's nowhere close. On the scale between textbook and Mukherjee, Zimmer's pretty low down. I was bored.

Also he says to take zinc for a cold and I'm pretty sure that's bullshit.


not totally clear on to what extent this is a metaphor

He does, finally, at the end, talk about whether viruses count as "alive" or not, and I think that debate is super interesting. We've come up with a definition of "life," which like all definitions is sortof "decide what you think is alive and then describe that and there you are," so in other words it's bullshit, but anyway what it is is you have to be able to reproduce, and some other stuff, and viruses don't exactly reproduce, right? They make other peoples' cells do it for them. So does that count? What if viruses feel really bad about making us sick, and they keep having conferences to try to come up with ways to reproduce without making people sick, but maybe there's a contingent of like alt-right viruses who don't believe in sickness. This is the interesting part - saying we don't know shit about colds is not the interesting part - and there isn't enough of it. I also wanted to talk about rabies, because rabies is bananas, and he didn't. My thing with rabies is, it gets into your saliva, that makes sense, but then it makes you want to bite everyone so your saliva gets into them? That's so awesome! How does it do that? How did evolution come up with that? I don't know! I don't understand any of this!