Some themes appear to exert a magnetic pull on my attention: I keep coming back to them and often feel like I’m on a treadmill. It’s hard to figure out why: why am I compelled to keep these topics alive? A recent insight ties some of it together.
Years ago, I wrote a post called A Physics-based Diet Plan. The premise is that humans do not create or destroy atoms within their bodies, and that the energetics are too minuscule to register measurable mass–energy conversion. As such, a person’s mass change—as measured on a bathroom scale, for instance—from one day to the next is completely captured by the difference of mass inputs and mass outputs. It’s just atoms in and out.
Now, the human body has many channels for mass loss. Bathroom functions, breathing (net carbon/water loss really adds up!), and perspiration being the main mechanisms. Mass gain is almost entirely through our pie-holes. And entry via that channel is almost always facilitated by a hand delivering food to the mouth under the control of a brain. If you want to lose weight, the directive is simple: eat less and breathe more. In other words: diet and exercise. I know: radical, right? Every successful program for weight loss involves essentially this same advice, in various guises. That’s because it’s just atoms in every single case, at the foundational level. But oh boy, you wouldn’t believe the resistance I get to this framing. Let’s talk about that…
AI Warning
Before getting underway, I thought I would point out that I typed “do the math physics diet” into Google so that I might review what I wrote 12 years ago. The AI summary at the top said:
The “Do the Math” physics diet, popularized by mathematician Steven Strogatz at the University of California San Diego, is a concept that applies principles of physics to weight loss. It emphasizes that weight loss is fundamentally about managing energy balance, specifically calories in versus calories out.
The UCSD part is okay, but Steven who? Googling “Steven Strogatz UCSD” delivered this AI summary: “Steven Strogatz is not affiliated with UC San Diego. He is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University.” Great; I appreciate the consistency! Can’t spell fail without AI.
But most infuriating to me is that my emphasis was on mass balance, and explicitly not calorie-counting! It serves as a warning to not trust AI to correctly represent ideas.
Restated
Perhaps it helps to by crystal clear here. If a weight measurement one day indicates a gain of exactly one kilogram from the day before (and we trust the scale), then your body added one kilogram more mass than it removed. Maybe food and drink added to 2 kg and poop, pee, net exhalation, and perspiration added to 1 kg. Or it might have been 3 in, 2 out. Or 3.14159265359 kg in (I did call it a pi-hole after all) must indicate 2.14159265359 kg out. [Actually, thermal losses (radiated, convected, conducted) and associated mass–energy conversion via E = mc² would make it 2.14159265349 kg out. I hope you’ll forgive me for leaving this wrinkle out of the main story. And if your scale is that good, I call BS.]
The math can’t work any other way. Accounting for every atom (and its mass) that comes in or goes out is bound to add up to the net change…every time.
Eating more and/or breathing (exercising) less leads to weight gain. Just as gravity never grants an exception to humans, eating less and/or breathing more leads to weight loss…every time. When I see my own weight creeping up by a kilogram or two, I can generally fix it in a day or two by skipping a meal or two. I let myself experience hunger! My stomach may begin to growl and throw a tantrum, but it shuts up and I carry on. I let it cry itself out in a tough-love relationship. We’re still on good terms.
Objections
I will say that it is rare not to get pushback—often vigorous—when I present this foundation. That, to me is fascinating, and I think part of why I return to it—not so much in my blog posts, but in conversations over the years. In fact, it’s dicey enough that I have to exercise judgment on whether I can “go there:” can this person handle the strain of mass conservation: of matter over mind?
I would be totally fine with objections of the sort: “Yes, that is unassailably true, and I’m not arguing with the basis. But many complicated elements come into play in terms of how we experience the phenomenon.” Absolutely. Physiology is complex, and psychology even more so. This does not change the basic statement that at the end of the day, mass change can be no more or less than the balance of mass in vs. mass out, and that the mass-in part is especially controllable.
Objections take many varieties. Almost inevitably—as we saw in Google’s AI interpretation above—the goalposts are changed to counting calories rather than mass. Try as I might to steer it back to mass, I sometimes just can’t land that point, to my astonishment. Another ubiquitous response is a variant of “but I’m different; my metabolism won’t allow me to skip a meal; I need protein right now; you’re lucky; not everyone is the same.” Granted, I can’t know another’s experience, and thus gauge how much of the difficulty is physiological vs. psychological. Still, everyone is made of atoms. Everyone obeys mass conservation. To learn otherwise would be huge news!
Yes: I can agree that physiology varies. For example, two different genes are responsible for both the production and detection of the odd odor from asparagus in urine. That makes four possible types of people combining production/smelling capacity. To some people, cilantro tastes like dish soap. Some don’t metabolize lactose. I don’t happen to like cucumber or watermelon (same base flavor), or raw tomatoes (though relish cooked tomatoes). Some physiologies handle excess food differently in terms of fat storage, or burning fat. Lactose processing varies genetically. Psychologies are even more varied.
None of that changes basic mass conservation or the fact that we are made of atoms.
The Crux, and Thematic Root
In the introduction, I mentioned that some topics keep drawing me in. I didn’t list them before, but the three are (linked to Do the Math posts):
- Mass balance in diet
- Food makes babies
- Consciousness, free will, determinism, mind, soul, etc.
All of these can produce sparks. The first two are related to food and our experience of it. The third relates to experience more generally. All touch on the atomic, animal, evolved nature of humans, and all offer enough complexity to obscure the basics.
Challenging Mythology
When I constructed a list of mythologies of modernity, basically all of them reveal blind spots or distortions about how we humans perceive ourselves. We’re not very reliable when it comes to self-assessment. The three items above also—deep down—get at what it is to be human. I sense that the fierce objections these topics generate stem from the same place: wanting to believe (and feeling) that we are more than atoms, animals, corporeal.
And this is why I am compelled to keep coming back. How we perceive ourselves is of critical importance to how we behave in the world. It colors every relationship, and sours many of them (just as I am in danger of doing by harping on such unpopular themes).
A position of humility seems far more likely to work well within the Community of Life, forging strong, respectful, two-way relationships. Exploitation and extreme power differential is no way to form meaningful, lasting, mutually-beneficial bonds. Our propensity for crafting grossly asymmetric, exploitative relationships is a one-way ticket to extinction.
Thus, I keep hammering at the hubris of specialness, or transcendence. Ultimate humility is accepting that we are dirt. We are atoms. We are material. We are corporeal. Warning: achieving humility might require a bit of humiliation. Creating exceptions (my body is different; the rules do not apply to me; humans are in control unlike animals; we have a non-material consciousness, soul, transcendent self) is expected behavior for members of the human supremacist club.
I’ve said multiple times that I’m sick of living in the Human Reich. This is why I repeatedly challenge attitudes that elevate humans above the rest. It’s a very dangerous and destructive place to be.
The Unimaginable Gulf
I’ll wedge this bit in, even if it’s not perfectly in the flow… Picture a barren, lifeless hunk of cooling lava that has just broken the surface of the ocean as new land. Compare this to a tract of living tropical rainforest an ocean away. In pointing out the material basis for humans, I’m suggesting that despite radically different appearances, the foundations are essentially the same: rock/atoms/physics. Standing on the volcanic island (i.e., a scientist studying fundamental interactions), it might be possible to know essentially all there is to know about the lava (and there’s nothing else), yet hopeless to use the same tools to track the complexity of the rainforest. They seem to be entirely disconnected from each other. Moreover, from the island, the rainforest is well over the horizon and out of sight. Yet, they are still connected by an unimaginable expanse of rock that runs under the ocean. Earth turns out to be round, even if—rather understandably given its vastness—it looks extremely flat to our eyes (i.e., to direct experience).
I’m basically saying that the two rather different-seeming realms are not different planets; are not using different rules; are made of the same stuff. But the analogy fails in that when comparing inanimate to animate arrangements, we simultaneously have access to both rudimentary physics and complex biology: both are on full display. What’s more, we find wherever we look that life is made of the same stuff, obeying the same rules—even if we have to throw our hands up at the unfathomable complexity of Life, honed over billions of years. The striking commonality is a major hint that is very awkward to deny!
It’s like we have one foot in each domain, and it takes a big stretch to recognize that uncharted connective tissue joins the two. Instead, we tend to imagine we’re split into distinct categories (lifeless material vs. living “otherness”). The sheer size of the gulf is what does it. We can’t wrap our meat-brains around it—but that fact is hardly surprising, of course.
While some perceive the Necker Cube so that my assessment is reductionist and unimaginative, it is also possible to view the same situation through an expansivist lens: admitting that real-world complexity far outpaces our imaginative capacity, and stretching to allow that disparate-seeming phenomena could actually all be connected in a round-earth continuum—despite intuitive first-impressions based on over-the-horizon separation. It’s a matter of looking inward vs. outward—seeming reductionist if looking toward the small constituents; but once there amazingly expansive views avail looking out—just turn around! At some level, my position is that of the irrational dreamer: suspecting a twisted series of connections hidden from complete, provable view. It’s never hard to find folks unwilling to swallow that too-expansive-for-our-brains perspective, based on how things seem to be in our limited experience using limited sensory and processing tools.
Ultimate Truth
Despite impressions, I am less interested in obtaining Ultimate Truth than might be assumed. Rather than proselytizing that a material basis is the one right way to believe, I’m just saying that we have insufficient justification for fabricating something more flattering, and that the associated humility of materialism can be a positive step for humanity. For those among us who accept a material aspect to the universe (i.e., atoms are real—and not every philosopher does), then the most parsimonious, non-dualist stance—and one against which we have zero evidence—is that humans are constructed of atoms in fabulous arrangements governed by evolutionary feedback into complex material entities obeying physics with no override or intervention capability. Every experience or feeling we have rides on this basis, utterly dependent upon it (try feeling anything without involving atoms!).
Part of the challenge is to make clear that our perceptions of the world—and who we are—all filter through limited meat-brains, and that lack of a full, detailed account for how atoms and electromagnetism create a sensation of love does not constitute a valid refutation of an underlying material basis. In other words, our unavoidable cognitive limitation when it comes to stitching it all together is hardly reason to reject the most unflattering material account of our existence. We can’t expect too much of our spare capacity, after all.
Atoms are clearly important to who we are. We could not exist without them, and their arrangements clearly are vitally important as well (i.e., a blender quickly destroys these intricate vital relationships). Why not accept that the same atoms and interactions are capable of extraordinary complexity? What is threatened, exactly (besides supremacist mythology, obviously)? Assuredly, it’s a stretch too big for our brains to connect all the dots. But does that constitute justifiable grounds for facile short-cuts or end-runs? The way I see it, demanding an explanation that fits in brains not adapted for that purpose is tempting but not justified: again putting humans first. We possess neither the right nor the hardware to know Ultimate Truth. But the allure of that trap is very difficult to resist or escape.
Note: I will be away from internet access until July 6, so comments will sit in the queue until then. My apologies for the delay, but please don’t let it stop you from contributing.
Views: 269