on illness and disease

The human race has been, and is, much concerned with combating disease, and the traditional, and continuing, view is that disease is an umfortunate fact of nature that we could well do without. Thus, modern science devotes much effort to the erradication of causes of disease, and even boast one or two successes, such as small-pox. But then, just as one disease has been pushed out the front door, a whole host of new ones sneak in the back-door!

This is inevitable, and must be.

One has to understand the nature of the human machine. That is to say, the bodies we inhabit are of the nature of biological machines. The point about being biological, as opposed to mechanical or electronic, is that biology supports a complexity that is way beyond the reach of electronics etc.

Now, as all programmers of computers will know, you have to have ways of testing the software, of catching little faults when they occur, and of getting them out of the system. This becomes a horrendous task when software becomes as complex as our modern electronic computers are able to support --- and they are nothing compared to the biological computers that our minds and bodies are.

So how do you cope with keeping such horrendously complex mechanisms up and running? You create little workers, an example of which is the virus, which are designed to seek out weak spots and amplify them. But you also provide the mechanism with self-protection and maintenance --- part of which, in the human body, is know as the immune system. If the body has no weaknesses, the viruses cannot get a hold; if it has weaknesses, the virus highlights the weakness, and the body is equipped to target and repair.

Thus viruses and other disease mechanisms are our FRIENDS, not our enemies.

We do ourselves a serious dis-service when we try to protect ourselves from disease, and this goes for diseases of the mind, also, which we are accustomed to call 'evil'.