Humans are very bias in choosing their method of conducting experimental measurements or make observations without being aware of it. What percentage of the entire electromagnetic wave spectrum can we perceive? No more than 5% for sure. But the changes, of which we must be aware, before we can understand aging, are most likely much more distinct outside our narrow sensory window because our sensory limitations did not affect the evolution of aging in any way.

For example, humans can only hear part of the sound an elephant makes because humans cannot hear such low frequencies as the elephant can. This tends to prevent the full understanding of the elephant’s communication options. Humans cannot distinguish such low sound frequencies from background noise, i.e. environment, because they cannot perceive the low elephant sound frequencies from being different from the background environment. But without considering those imperatively hidden factors we cannot fully understand elephant communication. Therefore, humans tend to miss cellular processes, which can only be distinguished from background noise outside the electromagnetic wavelength interval, for which humans have evolved sensory organs, i.e. eyes, ears and skin. The mechanism by which the tongue and nose operate is of an entirely different dimension because they cannot sense any wavelength.

For example, before magnets were discovered, they remained for us an imperatively hidden object because we could not even suspect them in any way. But still, just because we lack any senses for perceiving any kind of magnetism does not stop it from affecting our lives. Only after we discovered the consequences of the forces, which the magnetic field has on some metals, prompted us to search outside the limited window, within which we can sense differences in wave length. Magnetic fields could affect life in many positive ways because they are used to treat major depressive disorder and cause involuntary muscle contraction. But has anybody even thought of measuring the magnetic field of a cell or brain, which I expect to be strong enough for us to measure with sensitive devices? Since any electric current causes a perpendicular radiating magnetic field, it can be hypothesized that the weak magnetic field is pulse-like and depends on the temporal pattern by which neurons fire action potentials. The changes in the magnetic field of a cell is expected to be enriched for the cellular component membrane because they have proton pumps and maintain an electric gradient to produce ATP. But what if changes in this magnetic field are causing us to age? Then we could stop the aging process by any intervention, which sets our cellular magnetic field pattern back to its youthful benchmark.

I suspect that the reason for our only rudimentary understanding of the aging process is caused by us missing such kind of imperatively hidden objects, which are required for making the essential key observations without which aging cannot be fully explained. I view a magnetic field as a concept, which exists, regardless weather we are aware of it. There may be many more other hidden concepts, which we must develop correctly, before we can reverse aging.

Analogies to aid in the understanding of the concept of Imperatively Hidden Objects (IHO)

Let’s say that an immortal interstellar alien highly intelligent out-of-space critter has landed on Earth. Let’s imagine that he can only perceive wave lengths within the limits of the magnetic field. Then we humans would not even notice this out of space interstellar visitor because he/she remains an imperatively hidden object (IHO) that we cannot even suspect. Let’s say this interstellar species has not evolved a body or anything to which our senses are sensitive. Let’s say that this life can be fully defined by irregularities within the magnetic field. But this interstellar critter can perceive us humans because our magnetic field disrupt the homogeneity of the background environment and must therefore be something other than background noise. Let’s say that this immortal interstellar critter can perceive and process all the magnetic fields on Earth. Could he maybe develop the concept of siblings or parents on its own? Is the magnetic field of relatives more similar to each other than expected by chance? It is very likely because humans vary a lot in their neuronal wiring architecture. Hence, each human could be defined by the pattern of his/her action potentials. This inevitably causes a very weak unique perpendicularly acting electromagnetic field that cannot be detected by our instruments. Therefore, instead of humans, we should use the giant squid as model organism to understand the relationships between life, aging and changes in magnetic field because it has the thickest neuron. Therefore, it must fire stronger action potentials than our human neurons. This will inevitably cause a stronger perpendicularly acting electromagnetic field, which may be strong enough to be detected by our instruments.

Let’s say that this interstellar critter wants to use machine learning to predict the risk of any particular university student in the USA for having to return home after graduation because they lost their immigration status and could not find a job, which would have made them eligible for one year OPT (Optional Practical Training). Let’s say that this interstellar critter has no concept of aging and that his most important goal is to develop a classifier by developing a new machine learning algorithm, which can predict in advance the risk that any particular student is facing to no longer been allowed to reside in the United States. Let’s say that accomplishing this objective has the same meaning and importance to this critter as for us the cure of aging and elimination of death.

What should he do? He cannot talk. No human even suspects him. He could start using supervised machine learning by observing thousands of students to find out what those students share, who are forced to leave, or what they lack compared to citizens, who are always welcome here.

I hypothesize that no matter how clever and sensitive to irregular interruption of the homogenous electromagnetic field, which is the only dimension, in which he can sense the presence of humans and any other form of life, he has no chance to understand the risk factors for being forced to leave America after graduation, because they are an imperatively hidden concepts (IHC) to this critter, because he cannot even suspect them in any way. However, without developing the right concepts in advance, this critter can never the discover risk factors for having to leave the USA after graduation.

The same applies to aging. We are still missing essential concepts without which we cannot fully understand it. But even if somebody by chance could detect the magnetic irregularities caused by this foreign interstellar critter, he/she could never suspect that it is highly intelligent.

This means that even if we measured a cell across the entire wavelength spectrum and could clearly detect its presence we would never suspect it to have any kind of intelligence because we would consider the anomalies in the magnetic field as background noise. Our visiting interstellar critter has a similar problem. He cannot develop the essential concepts without which he could never develop a machine learning algorithm to predict all the correct risk factors, which impair the chances for somebody to be allowed to keep residing in the US while not full time enrolled. As long as this critter has no concept of “country”, e.g. the USA, he has absolutely no chance to discover nationalities because even if he could figure out the nationality of everyone, it would make no sense to him. But words like “American” “German”, “French” or “Indian” cannot make any sense to this critter as long as the concept of “country” remains an imperatively hidden object for him. How can somebody be considered “German” or “American” as long as the concept of Germany or USA are still lacking? One can only be German if Germany exists. Without at least suspecting the concept of a country, e.g. Germany, there is absolutely no way to discover the required concept of citizenship. But without determining the feature “citizenship” no machine learning algorithm could learn to make correct predictions. .The same applies to aging. We are still lacking so many essential concepts without which aging can never be understood

For example, as long as the concept of a ribosome is lacking, we have no way of understanding the changes in the relative abundance ratio of mRNA and proteins. We may have some initially success with building a model to predict protein abundance and concentration because it is about 70% similar to the transcriptome. However, according to Janssens et al (2015) [1], this similarity declines with age and is a driver of replicative aging in yeast.

But no matter how many training samples we use to train our predictor, it must fail, unless we have developed a mental concept of a ribosome. I believe we face a similar predicament with understanding the causes and regulation of epigenetic changes over time with advancing age, despite being able to measuring them so clearly that we can use them to determine the biological age. But unfortunately, as long as we lack any concept, by which epigenetic changes could be connected to other cellular processes, we cannot understand how epigenetic changes are regulated.

Before we could correctly conceptualize the role and scope of the ribosome we had no way to explain the mechanisms by which mRNA and protein abundance are linked. But even after we conceptualized the role of the ribosome correctly any machine learning algorithm to predict protein concentration would inevitably fail as long as we lack the correct concept of the poly-AAA-tail. Similarly, there are still lots of imperatively hidden concepts, factors, dimensions or objects, which we cannot suspect because we cannot perceive them, which prevent us from fully understanding aging. However, the fact that our current observations fail to fully explain aging, indicate the presence of imperatively hidden factors of which we can see the consequences without being able to detect them. But since every consequence must have a cause, any unexplained consequence indicates the presence of imperatively hidden imperceptible factors (IHIF) without which we cannot succeed to improve our feature selection.

As I have explained in my immigration example, only when selecting the correct feature, e.g. citizenship, the risk for being asked to leave America by the federal government can be fully understood and hence, can be predicted much better. Could I convince anybody of the high likelihood of the presence of imperatively hidden factors, which we cannot perceive yet as being distinctly different from their environment?

Conclusions and proposed responses/adaptations of our study design

What is the rate-limiting bottleneck, which limits our research progression and why?

The current bottleneck in defeating aging is not addressed by further improving our machine learning algorithms and increasing the training samples, but instead, we must focus on improving proper feature selection first. My main contribution towards defeating aging is to predict features, measurement types and intervals between measurements, which could show the actions of aging much clearer than the features, which we have currently selected to stop aging and defeat death. Now it is up to wet-lab scientists to test my hypotheses. But even if all of them can be ruled out, the possibilities, by which the mechanism of aging could function, would be reduced. This would leave us with fewer hypotheses left to test. Since the options we have for fully understanding the aging process are large - but yet finite - any crazy appearing – no matter high unlikely seeming - hypothesis, which can be ruled out, brings us a tiny step closer to immortality.

The reason why I claim that correct feature selection, but not the gradually improving performance of our machine learning algorithms, is the current bottleneck, which is holding us back from improving our understanding of the aging process, is that our machine learning algorithms have been improving gradually over time, but our feature selection methods have not.

The fact that I cannot find any data for measuring the yeast transcriptome in five-minute intervals for more than 3 out of the average 25 replications, which is considered the average wild type (WT) yeast replicative lifespan, indicates that nobody has seriously suspected that we could at least observe the effects of the aging mechanism by selecting new periodic features, such as period length, temporal phase shift or amplitude, which only make sense if we replace our linear with a periodic concept of life. However, this requires us to change our concepts about life to be driven by linearly acting trends to cyclical periodically acting trends in order to expand our feature selection options to periodic quantities, such as period length, temporal phase shift, amplitude or oscillation pattern, which would have been impossible to imagine when holding on to the old linear concept. In this case – although we could clearly measure the period length - we could not detect it as a feature affected by aging until we explicitly define, select and measure this new feature, e.g. the period length, temporal phase shift, amplitude or oscillation pattern.

Please let me know if this writing makes sense to you, because so far, almost nobody, except for me, seems to worry about this problem. Thanks a lot for your time to read and think through this. I welcome your feedback because my conclusions are logical but surprising to me because nobody else appears to have been aware of this because our study designs don’t reflect this insight yet.

I worry about that there could be many still hidden dimensions, which are very similar to the magnetic field that we cannot yet anticipate. But we must first associate information from these kind of magnetic-field-resembling still imperatively hidden dimensions with aging before we can understand aging.

Since we humans have observational tunnel vision, which is mostly limited to the dimensions of our sensations, which must use artificial intelligence because for it all the different dimensions and the features, which define them, are more equal. Only if we can make people understand this, we will have a chance to collectively survive. I need help to get this published because only then experts will take it seriously. For that, I must provide proof-of-principle that we still very naive and observation bias humans would have missed important relevant information if we would not have let artificial intelligence (AI) define possibly aging-relevant features for us in a much more systematic and less bias manner. For us bias humans to create a much less bias AI, we must be able to look at life from many different ridiculous-seeming perspectives because that is what we expect our aging-features-selecting AI to accomplish for us. I am really good at that but the problem is that nobody seems to have time to me to listen. But if I write it, almost nobody has time to read my writings either. We need to create AI to systematically search for relations between our observational measurements, which we humans cannot suspect.