What relation do you find between these two things? Besides the fact that thermal processing destroys some valuable heat labile ingredients, and produces others, potentially cancerogenous ones, although more by baking, frying and roasting and less by cooking, there are positive effects of that activity, primarily killing of potentially dangerous microorganisms, which makes the mentioned connection. Things are, however, not that simple, since there are other reasons why people started to do that, at certain point in time of human evolutionary development, for example because food becomes more digestible that way, however the main comparative advantage is in fact disinfection, ie sterilization. On the other hand, scientists present other reasons for raised temperature during infection, other than creating unbearable living conditions for microbes, which can be read here:
Hence, maybe raised temperature doesn't kill microbes directly, maybe it has only indirect effect, by helping cells that do that, or maybe it's just a side effect of their signalization, and the question is what temperature stress can body temperature rise from 36.7 to 40 degrees Celsius present to each particular type of microorganism at all, which can be examined in vitro and one can analyze resulting Arrhenius diagrams. Pathogenic and symbiotic bacteria that live in our organism are mesophile, and they cannot be significantly inactivated by temperature producable and sustainable by human body, but viruses can. The question may seem artificial and unimportant, but not to any parent whose child has fever. There is always a dilemma, lower the temperature immediately, or leave it to do its job. And it also raises several other interesting questions, such as:
1. Are there pathological conditions that cause raised temperature without any chance of positive effects, and are its potential negative effects always bigger than positive, in any pathological condition?
2. What else human does without proper understanding of a background of the effects he produces? Although experience led him to conclusion that thermal processing keeps food longer eatable, and that without it sometimes it's also not safe to use it immediately, let alone keep it for later use, man for a long time did not understand why it actually is so, until Antonie van Leeuwenhoek didn't look through his microscope and came to his revolutionary conclusions, which by the way were accepted with significant amount of scepticism by the established scientific community of that time. However, these conclusions were more than logical, because the same logic applies to other food preservation methods, that make food inadequate for microbes, a little bit for us too, so that it must be conditioned a bit before or during consumation, to regain its normal temperature, water content, content of chemical additives such as sugar, salt, acid, etc. What does that story tell us about human race? It tells that we are capable of achieving significant knowledge progress, yet we lack modesty in understanding the incompletness of our knowledge.
3. How many independent IAs coexist in a human body, without noticable communication between them? IA is an agent capable of purposeful, goal oriented behaviour adaptable on basis of information percepted from environment, and its intelligence is a measure of effectiveness in achieving its goal. Humane immune system can be identified as one of such agents, that always had (a long ago before Leeuwenhoek's discovery) information about the existence of microbes, based on which it performed its complex duty with admirable perfection, watching for foreign intruders (and domestic cells getting out of control), however it never communicated it to another human's IA, that is its cognitive system, who had to perceive that fact through microscope. The definition of IA is envisioned to describe one of living beings fundamental characteristics, and behaviour of artifical devices to which human implemented intelligence. Although their intelligence is more or less coherent, it is not monolithic. It can be decomposed to functional subcomponents that are also IAs themselves, less complex ones than integral IAs of which they are part, but still IAs if they adhere to the definition of IA. Between some of them there is a tight communication, some are autonomous and independent. For example, let's assume we can identify our consciousness as one such functional subcomponent, and the IA that controls the work of our stomach as the other, and compare them to see how it fits to the picture. The center of the former is probably in our brain, and of the latter probably in our spinal cord. The environment for the former is outside our body, but inside too, as it has sensors for pain, or hunger, for that matter, the relevant environment for the latter is inside our stomach, as all relevant information for that IA comes from there. Actions that our consciousness undertakes are various, mainly signalling our muscles as principal actuators, actions for the latter are, well, whatever it does to process the content of the stomach. For the former, one might say it is suspended while we are unconscious, and that it operates in an alternative mode while we sleep, while the latter probably doesn't get affected by these two states. The former however, can be suspended to a certain extent from controlling certain actions, even in a default state (while we are conscious and awake), for example we can drive a car pretty focused on the road when we don't know where we are exactly, or totaly focused on our minds, when we follow every day route from home to work, that is when some other IA takes over and frees our conciousness to deal with our minds, instead of controlling our driving, when it requires less attention. Our conciousness however, cannot take over control from the IA that controls the stomach operations, ever. In that sense they are independent, as much as immune system is, from both. It's interesting to notice that main informational pathways for the last two IAs are neural networks, while for the immune system it is probably circulatory system.
4. Before appearance of artificial intelligence (theory and practice), was there any mathematical theory on natural intelligence? It seems to me that for some reason, other sciences and disciplines never overcame the limits of pure empirical dealing with the subject, like, you cannot say you understand the subject, until you can produce it artificially in a lab.
5. Are precise definitions of fundamental notions conditio sine qua non of hard science theory? Does the fact that in the past there was a multitude of definitions of intelligence, as well as of biological species, have any importance today? For example, see this:
A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence by Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter
and
A list of 26 Species Concepts by evolvingthoughts
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