Jerry Story

Spelling correction: That should be "inanition", not "inanation".

According to Harry Browne, the government has huge mega-quantities of real estate, both land and buildings, plus other stuff. And according to Harry Browne, if most of this was auctioned off to the private sector, it would generate mega-quantities of money. Enough to pay off the national debt and other things with money left over.

There is something called "rationalism", which is an epistemological mistake. To those who confuse between fasting and starving, how much do you know about fasting? What books about fasting did you read? What people did you correspond with or talk with who have fasted? Do you have experience with fasting, doing it or supervising? Do you know something about fasting? Or is your opinion about fasting based on musings? This is from the table of contents in a book about fasting. Can you figure out all this stuff purely by philosophical reasoning? The author of this book supervised 40,000 fasts. That's forty thousand. Ranging in length from one day to ninety days. He also seems to have read the whole body of literature on the subject and the book has many references.

This was not intended as an insult and I am surprised that it was taken as an insult. It was a compliment.

Wrong!

That's the question. No point. A question. Hunger is a sensation/experience that means eat. The question is how to identify it. I assumed the answer would be trivial for anyone who is well versed in Objectivist epistemology. Ayn Rand wrote that we must learn to identify hunger. It seems like a relevant and practical question. For what it's worth, here is my attempt to partially answer the question. Hunger (true hunger) is always accompanied by salivation. I mean beyond the constant salivation which is necessary to keep the mouth from going dry. If there is no salivation, it is not hunger, no matter how intense one's desire/craving for food is, and no matter what symptoms of pathology one has that one attributes to lack of food. But this is only a negative test. Salivation does not mean hunger. Salivation can be a defense against irritating spices; this is not hunger. For me, since I avoid irritants, salivation probably can be taken as hunger. A desire/craving for food can be (perhaps always is) a mental/emotional association. Some people are bored and they eat, thinking they are hungry. Or they are tired and they use food as a stimulant instead of as nutrition, again thinking they are hungry. (The correct response to tiredness is rest.) Some people use food as an alcoholic uses alcohol, to drown or bury their problems, and they think they are hungry. Objectivists don't do these things. Objectivists eat rationally.

That's the question that I started this thread with. The term "false hunger" is really a misnomer. It is not hunger. But it is an expression that expresses the idea that it is falsely interpreted as hunger. The term "true hunger" is redundant, like "round circle". Obviously if it is a circle, then it is necessarily round. But one might want to emphasize the roundness of the circle. Hunger is the body's way of saying: Eat! Ayn Rand wrote that we can know that we have a sensation (hunger), but the knowledge that it is hunger must be learned. The "false hunger" experienced by some people during the first 3 days does not seem to be any more an indication of need for food than a "craving for a cigarette" is an indication of need for tobacco. If there is no salivating, it is not hunger. (If there is, it still might not be hunger.)

About the idea that fasting is abuse: Dr. J. H. Kellogg says: --

Fasting is not starving. The term that covers both fasting and starving is "inanation". There are two stages of inanation: fasting and starving. Inanation means abstinence from food, water only. The difference between fasting and starving is that during fasting the body is consuming its reserves; during starving the body is consuming its machinery. Starving begins when reserves run out. The body consumes its tissues in reverse order of importance, the least important first and most, the most important last and least, during both fasting and starving. For example the body readily consumes fat and pathological tissue (eg tumors). But I saw charts showing results of autopsies of people who have died of starvation, and the fat is pretty much gone but the brain tissue and nerve tissue are hardly touched. About "frothing at the mouth like a dog": That was more from the smell of food than the sight. But anyway, the lesson to be learned from that experience seems to be that there is a difference between true hunger and false hunger. I do not recall anyone else in this discussion agreeing with this distinction. Should I judge from my own experience and conclude that I am right and everyone else here is wrong? Or should I accept without explanation that I can understand that everyone else is right and my experience is wrong?

If this sickness is caused by abstinence from food, then why does it go away upon furthur abstinence from food? When a drug addict quits a drug, or when a heavy smoker quits smoking, or when a heavy drinker of alcohol quits alcohol, they tend to experience what is called "withdrawal". ("Withdrawal" is the commonly used word, but perhaps it is misleading. There is a reason for the "withdrawal", based on a certain unpopular paradigm.) Even in the case of a heavy coffee drinker, quitting coffee (and everything else that has caffiene in it) can result in a headache. The "symptoms" (as I facetiously called them) during the first 3 days of a fast (and some beyond) seem to be "withdrawal" from bad eating habits. People with no bad eating habits tend to not experience this, or not as much. That is why I asked the question: what is the difference between hunger and drug addiction? One difference seems to be: True hunger is pleasant (at least according to Shelton); false hunger and "withdrawal" are unpleasant. When I read Ayn Rand's statement that one must learn to identify hunger, I thought maybe Objectivists could elaborate and explain the difference between true hunger and false hunger. Maybe not. I'm not sure about this. Perhaps the body has a different agenda during a fast, which is incompatiable with eating. When resources are low, then it changes its agenda. But perhaps true hunger can return BEFORE resources are low IF its agenda (healing, waste removal, etc.) is completed before the 40 days or so. I don't know. If this happens, apparently it is rare. There are cases of individuals who have fasted for ridiculous lengths of time such as 120 days, without harm to health. Normally a person loses something in the order of about a pound a day. I read of a case where, due to slow metabolism, the person lost about 1/4 of a pound a day. Shelton (who supervised about 40,000 fasts) says that in his experience, fat people fast worse than normal people. He seems to think this is at least partly psychological, they like food too much. But also, fat people, tho they have more reserve of calories, do not necessarily have more reserve of the other nutrients.

About "abuse": The hunger mechanism can be "abused" without fasting, by eating a small amount each day for a long time. Hunger (assuming that's what it is) does not quit from this "abuse". It seems that something else happens on the 4th day of a fast. I offer the following two theories: 1. The body figures this [insert cuss language] guy is not going to feed me, so there is no point in being hungry. 2. After both the stomach and the small intestine are empty, they cease to act as organs of digestion and start to help with removal of waste. This is from Dr. Moser. If this is true, then it would not make sense for the body to want food while this is happening. Hunger does come back fully, thereby showing that the "abuse" does not permanently destroy the hunger mechanism. The stomach is not abused by fasting. The stomach can be abused by overeating, by eating foods that are hard to digest, by eating bad food combinations, etc. During a fast, the stomach gets a rest and recovers from abuse. Macaroni and cheese would not be the best foods to eat on the first day of a fast of any length. Fasts must be broken properly.

I make a distinction between: 1. the sensation 2. the need for food The question is how to make the connection. First one must prove a need for food. We can't prove that (yet) by sensation, because we are trying to prove the connection. There is only one way I know to prove need for food (if we have not learned to identify the sensation with need for food). That is by reaching the skeletal condition. Maybe there can be a need for food before the skeletal stage, but it's not clear to me how one would prove it (if one starts off not knowing how to identify the sensation as hunger). When the need for food is proved, then one is able to observe whatever sensation is associated with it. That becomes a hypothesis. Furthur testing will tend to confirm or deny this hypothesis. That's the scientific method, right? Maybe it's too much trouble to do all this by oneself, so we learn about the experiences of many people who have gone thru the process, plus whatever experiences we have had. Put it all together and maybe come up with something. The above described process seems to suggest the conclusion that there is a difference between true hunger and "false hunger" (which is not really hunger but only seems to be). Perhaps it is possible to experience true hunger and false hunger both at the same time. I assume that a healthy person experiences true hunger regularly. But it has been said that most people never experience true hunger ever in their lives. I find that hard to believe. Many years ago, coming off a 15 day fast, I thought I experienced something much like how Dr. S. describes true hunger. Did you ever see a dog foaming at the mouth with saliva while you are opening a can of dog food? I had a similar copious flow of saliva. I had no sensation in the stomach, no suffering, none of the negative things. A feeling of well-being. I had a keenness of senses of taste and smell. On the 10th day of the fast my sense of smell was so keen that if I had not experienced it I would not have believed it. But a fast of only 15 days is too short to prove much. Somehow I doubt that Ayn Rand had fasting in mind when she wrote that we must learn to identify hunger. But she must have had something in mind.

That would be a false conclusion. What I'm looking for is an Objectivist answer to the question. How to learn to identify hunger. I assume that Objectivists can explain better than I can how to distinguish between true hunger and false hunger. Maybe it's such as easy question to answer that nobody here takes it seriously. But in ITOE, 2nd edition, Ayn Rand takes seriously a similar question about the color blue.

I assume that hunger is a sensation that indicates a need for food. The question is not how we know whether we have a sensation, but how we know that the sensation indicates a need for food. The first is automatic; the second is learned. I do not see that as proof that it is hunger. It does not distinguish between hunger and drug addiction. A drug addict's "craving" will go away upon another dose of crystal meth (or whatever). Does this prove a need for crystal meth? I am not talking about a personal problem, but a question about epistemology. Ayn Rand did mention this, but without going into detail. I thought this would be an appropriate topic under the heading of epistemology. I tried to pick a topic that definitely is relevant to Objectivism and at the same time is of possible interest to a large number of people. Everyone eats, right? Here is a discussion about hunger: http://tinyurl.com/6zaht

Thanks for the explanation. In the interest of clarity on the subject, it would be improper of me to not ask the following question: How does one tell the difference between hunger and drug addiction? Drug addiction and "withdrawal symptom" seem to have the same concomittant variation as need for food and hunger. Also the sensations/experiences often associated with hunger (correctly or incorrectly) seem to have some similarity to "withdrawal symptoms". I dug up the following signs (symptoms?) of hunger: "dull ache" "uncomfortanble pang or gnawing" "lassitude and drowsiness" "faintness" "depression and a feeling of weakness" "pangs of hunger" "hunger pain" and such like Are these signs of hunger? Or are they symptoms of sickness? What is the correct response? Eat? Or maybe lie down and keep warm and close eyes and sleep until one feels well enough to be able to eat? There is another kind of hunger, where all these signs(or symptoms?) are absent, which happens coming off a fast of sufficient length. Are these two different kinds of genuine hunger? Or is one false hunger and the other true hunger?

The reason why I said that is that I figured someone would tell me (perhaps sarcastically) that I should do a complete fast and thereby find out what hunger is. For me fasting is contraindicated, at least now. How did Ayn Rand identify hunger? Is this an improper question for this discussion group?

Getting drunk has a volitional cause: excess consumption of alcohol. The act of drinking beer etc. is a choice, an act of volition. If someone has a birth defect, say a defect in DNA, this is a non-volitional cause. The person did not have a choice in the causing of it. When I look for causes of a disease, I look for volitional causes, causes that I have a chance of doing something about. My purpose in identifying causes is to do something about them. It is possible to state the cause (or causes) of a disease in technical biochemical terms that have no obvious connection to what I call a "volitional cause". For example Blaylock says something about deficiency of an enzyme resulting in excess glutamic acid. This is of no value to me unless I can do something about the deficiency of the enzyme. In the case of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), I know that the progression of the disease can be slowed down dramatically by abstaining totally from all foods that contain MSG (including hidden sources of MSG and they are many). This is something I can choose to do, something I have control of. (One of many things.) This is the sort of cause that I am interested in. I suppose all diseases have a non-volitional cause component. For example even getting drunk might be connected to a defect in DNA that makes the person get drunk quicker than a normal person. But it would be ridiculous to say that he can't do anything about. He just has to consume less alcohol than a normal person can get away with, or no alcohol. Similarily I probably have a defect in DNA that makes me more sensitive to MSG than the average person. No matter, I can avoid MSG. I can control ALS.

About causes of excess glutamate: All that is irrelevant. I am looking for the ULTIMATE cause. That must be volitional. I am not interested in any causes except volitional causes. I thought this was understood without having to say it. It is not MY claim that the answer is unknown. The medics claim that. Again, speaking of the ULTIMATE cause. I don't seek knowledge from sources that claim to not know. Where do you find VOLITIONAL causes of ALS?

From Ayn Rand, The Virtue Of Selfishness, page 21: --- [begin quote] --- A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as "hunger"), ... --- [end quote] --- The question is: how to identify hunger. This is a perfectly valid question and it is a question that comes under the heading "epistemology". And it does not require special knowledge, only everyday knowledge. (unlike glutamic acid) And it is of relevance to everyone. (again unlike glutamic acid) Animals have instincts (according to Ayn Rand). Humans must identify hunger by reason. Probably someone will say, go without food long enough and you will experience hunger and then you will know what hunger is. But experiencing hunger is not the same as identifying it. How can I know whether what I am experiencing is hunger? Perhaps someone will say, if it goes away upon eating then it is hunger. What if it goes away if I eat and if I don't eat? This is the case with what is called "habit hunger". If one always eats at 12 noon, then the stomach learns to expect food at 12 noon and one experiences "habit hunger" at 12 noon. It goes away 2 hours or so after 12 noon whether one eats or not, and therefore seems to be related to time on the clock and not to need for food. If hunger is associated with need for food, then why does what most people think is hunger go away after 3 days (or 2-4 days) of total abstinence from food (water only)? How can the need for food go away as a result of not eating? If hunger is a watering of the mouth, then what about Pavlov's dogs? Is hunger related to the ringing of the bell and not to need for food? Or do they need food because they hear a bell? If one lives on water only, "hunger" (or whatever it is) typically goes away on the 4th day and does not return until the body's resources are nearly run out. In the case of a healthy normal person, typically "hunger" or whatever it is will return after about 40 days or so. To go beyond this stage is starvation (meaning that the body is living on its structures instead of on reserves). I think probably a case can be made for the proposition that the "hunger" that one experiences at the end of a "complete" fast is true hunger (meaning need for food). But the "hunger" that returns is usually not the same as the "hunger" that went away on the 4th day. The sensations/experiences are usually different. How can this be? Are there two different kinds of hunger? Is the hunger during the first three days not true hunger? The description made by some people of the "hunger" during the first three days sounds like ...urm.. symptoms of sickness. (Whatsisface says that's exactly what they are, and that's supposed to be good) Is hunger a sickness? The "hunger" after a complete fast is said to be actually pleasant. I have never done a fast until hunger, so I don't know from my own experience. I have done shorter fasts (<=15 days) and the "hunger" coming off them seemed to be free of symptoms of sickness. Seems even the NHs (who probably know more about fasting than any other group of people, both from experience and from the literature on the subject) are not agreed about the first 3 days. --- [begin quote] --- A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as "hunger"), ... --- [end quote] --- The question is: how to identify hunger. Someone might ask: why is this important? If I eat when I am not hungry then I am faking reality. That's dishonesty. If I don't eat when I am hungry, then I am evading the fact that I am hungry. That's evasion. Someone might say: don't matter. But that's the Kelley philosophy. Objectivism says: Every IS implies an OUGHT. Being hungry and not being hungry have moral implications. I would consider doing a complete fast except that for me it's supposed to be contraindicated. Maybe I will eventually do it anyway.

About the causes of excess glutamic acid: I am familar with libraries and all sources and spent years trying to track down this and related information. The official answer is the cause is unknown. But I know something about the causes. The regular medics deny that there is a cause in terms of volition, only a deterministic cause. The NHs accept that there is a cause in terms of volition, but tend to deny that one needs to know what it is. I would nonetheless like to know what it is. I don't agree with everything the NHs say. No matter, I will track it down yet. (Unfortunately.)

Wonderful! Now can you point out to me where I can access this information? Relevant to me. BTW, I do not count the subject of whether information survives black holes as being relevant to my life. I would be more interested in knowing the causes of excess concentration of glutamic acid. How can I (I'm avoiding "we") apply Objectivist epistemology to identify the cause or causes of excess concentration of glutamic acid? That would be a practical subject. The doctors that I have been to don't know and are not interested in finding out.

I have no problem with death, but I kinduv don't like the idea of being there when it happens to me. After I die I won't care. Why choose hanging as a way to die? I would rather die the way Scott Nearing died. When he reached the age of 100, he apparently started to feel the effects of his age and he decided that 100 years is long enough for a man to live. He killed himself by first living on nothing but juice (veggy juice and fruit juice) and then on nothing but water. He died without suffering and with a functional state of mind and at home. He was lying down talking with his wife and he said "Now!" and he closed his eyes and was dead. He lived as he chose and he died as he chose.

I have never been a serious chess player, but for a brief time I played in a few tournaments in the early 1980s. During that time I tried to see analogies between chess and Objectivism. Things like reason is our only means of knowledge, purpose, hierarchy of values, etc. In my own twisted corrupt way I tried to use Objectivism to help me play chess better and I tried to use chess to help me understand Objectivism better. Obviously I screwed up somewhere. This probably applies to Bobby Fischer. I do not believe that it applies to Kasparov. If this means that there is no conceptual thinking in chess, then either this is simply wrong or else I don't know what conceptual thinking is. This does not seem to be true of Kasparov. That's why I quit chess. Sometimes I have that problem with philosophy.

Perhaps I should have said philosophical discussion as it should be, to be more exact. That's great. Now that the subject of "what is truth" is settled, we can go on to the next step. I look forward to finding out the truth about subjects outside of philosophy that matter to my everyday life. Philosophy being a means and not an ultimate end.

This sort of question "What is truth?" has been discussed for something like 2500 years, and on HPO at least they seem to be no furthur ahead than 2500 years ago. At the current rate of progress (on HPO at least) they probably will discuss it for another 2500 years without a resolution. Notice that the question is not what is the truth about this or the truth about that, but the extremely abstract question what is truth. I asked on HPO, if the question got resolved (hypothetically speaking), what would be the next step? I would think that if the question has a practical purpose for the living of life, then the next step would be to find the truth about this or the truth about that, to the end that we may live better. The answer I got was "wait for it to get unresolved". And in a roughly similar context, someone said "welcome to philosophy". This sort of response ("wait for it to get unresolved") tends to turn me off philosophy. For me, philosophy is not for itself but is for the purpose of living. I might have some interest in the question ("what is truth") if it can be shown to to me to be of practical value to me in the living of my life. Aristotle said somewhere (quoting from memory): "To say of what is that it is or to say of what is not that it is not is truth." Can we accept this and get on with it? The foregoing is not intended as as an attack or insult to the person who started this topic. It is only a statement about the difference between philosophy as it often is and philosophy as it can be and should be. I hope we do the latter here.