blahblahblah:
our conscious perception of positive qualities (in this case, ‘sweetness’) as relative to more abstract qualities of the subject (‘heavy water’). our perceptions are our perceptions, but there are physical realities that our bodies and the outside world both depend on. [/quote]
The usual psych jargon for differentiating between “subjective sensory experience” and “external reality being perceived” is to call the first one “qualia ”.
Not sure that you’re right on that, but I’ll leave it for a math/physics type to sort out.
Related manifestations of an underlying thing, but not “the same”.
Not sure what you’re trying to say there.
Not really, no. It ain’t mass that drives pharmaceutical qualia; it’s the interaction of drug molecules with neuroreceptor systems, usually by closely mimicking the physical shape and polarity of endogenous neurotransmitters.
[quote=“blahblahblah, post:47, topic:91652, full:true”]simple sugar would seem to buck the trend, but then i start thinking about about tesselation and how space is filled. giving your body lots of little carbohydrates makes it easy to fit them all in you, again allowing for greater density intake. like packing a car full of basketballs vs golf balls. the golf balls leave less empty space.
Molecular shape does matter for biology. The major reason for the difference in biological impact of saturated vs unsaturated fats is that the straight-line structure of saturated fats allows them to pack more densely than the crooked structures found in unsaturated fats.
