Stuff

Recently I was thinking of interesting ways of completing the following sentence – “I am so hungry that I can eat _____.”

One interesting way I could think of was this – I am so hungry that I can eat myself – which then led me into thinking if such a situation can actually occur. Or to be more precise, does there exist a situation where eating yourself will lead to a larger chance of your survival than just staying hungry? This can be answered trivially. The answer is no, because eating yourself will always lead to your death (Proof – Let’s say it doesn’t and so you successfully finish eating yourself. Since in the end you have been eaten, you must be dead, which is a contradiction), but staying hungry may not. But then what about the following variation of the above question – does there exist a situation where you will have a larger chance of surviving if you eat a part of your own body than if you stay hungry?

This, now looks more like a question for a person with a good understanding of the human anatomy. However, I being someone who has absolutely no understanding of the human anatomy, conjecture that the answer is ‘yes’. The reason is as follows. Not all parts of the human body are crucial to living. Some parts, such as the appendix, are in fact so useless that they can be removed from your body and your body will not notice. However, these parts still contain (I assume) stuff that can be digested by our digestive system to produce some energy. So now consider the extreme case of food deprivation, that is, a situation where you must eat something or else you will die with almost 100% probability. This can happen if you are so starved that your body doesn’t have enough energy to pump your heart. In this case, if you eat your appendix (or some other not very essential body part), you should survive for at least some more time.

However, from a completely different point of view, if the above is true, there is a major bug in the design of the body. It’s rather silly for your body to keep energy shelved into something as useless as the appendix when something as important as the heart needs it, especially because just removing the appendix from its original place and putting it into the digestive tract does the trick. When there is energy present in the body itself, albeit in a rather inaccessible corner, there should be some mechanism to use it. Or may be, there exists such a mechanism. That’s why I said this is a question for someone with a good understanding of the human anatomy.

I will stick with a ‘yes’ though.