David Chapman on Debugging Illness and Health
Pain Points with Max Shen
What is the 'central governor' hypothesis for fatigue recovery?
They explore the idea that set-point regulation can become conservative and strenuous effort can re-teach the body its capacity.
In this episode of Pain Points, I’m speaking with David Chapman, a writer and thinker whose work on meaning, meta-rationality, and science has been the most important education I received outside of MIT.
David was a prominent AI researcher in the late 1980s and later a startup founder, but for decades he has written deeply about philosophy, systems, and what he calls “meta-rationality.” In this conversation, we explore how that lens applies to healthcare and chronic illness.
David shares his own story of navigating years of debilitating fatigue and food intolerance, how the medical system failed him, and the experiment he devised that restored his health. He also describes his experience with long COVID, and how a six-mile run cured his fatigue.
We also discuss: why debugging is inherently meta-rational, how most medical science may be false, and why bright lights—not antidepressants—end up curing decades of seasonal depression.
“I could barely stand up. So I drove myself to the trailhead, ran six miles, and by the end…the fatigue was gone.”
“Popper spent his life trying to solve the question: what separates science from non-science? He failed. Everyone has failed.”
Episode Outline
[00:00 – 08:00] Meta-Rationality and Debugging
* Rationality vs. reasonableness vs. meta-rationality
* Debugging as paradigmatic example of meta-rational thinking
* Chronic illness is necessarily metarational
[08:00 – 14:00] Failures of the American Healthcare System
* Patchwork of semi-systems that don’t communicate
* Anecdotes of bureaucratic breakdown (insurance snafus, mis-sent faxes)
* Emergence of the communal mode: relying on personal networks instead of systems
[14:00 – 19:00] Medical Interventions and Their Limits
* Treatments are often presented as “fixes,” but the body still does the healing
[24:00 – 33:00] Fatigue, Food Intolerance, and Experimentation
* Years of symptoms: fatigue, brain fog, GI distress
* Multiple doctors, useless tests, failed elimination diets
* Breakthrough: reducing diet to three foods, symptoms vanish in a week
[47:00 – 49:00] Mislearned Associations
* Pesto and cheesecake stories as examples of the body “wrongly” learning aversions
[53:00 – 59:00] Long COVID and the Six-Mile Cure
* Fatigue relapse after a hike
* Experiment: pushing through with a six-mile run
[60:00 – 72:00] Somatic Practices and Newtonian Mechanics
* Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais as non-woo somatic methods
* Health as alignment, awareness, and agency
[74:00 – 79:00] The Demarcation Problem and Medical Science
* Why the line between science and non-science can’t be drawn
* Why most medical research may be false
[87:00 – 92:00] Bright Light Therapy and Seasonal Depression
* Curing decades of winter depression
* How breakthroughs often come from outside the medical system
[92:00 – End] Closing Reflections
* Health as agency and experimentation
* The need for communities that avoid both scientism and woo
* Restoring agency to people dealing with chronic illness
Links
* You can find David’s writing at meaningness.substack.com
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