bascule

The only part of the limbic system to my knowledge which we're sure plays an active role in memory (specifically long-term memory) is the hippocampus. What parts of the limbic system are you suggesting are involved in memory? You're describing something similar to Minsky's idea of S-lines. It'd be nice if you could cite some source which backs up your ideas. You're speaking with a rather matter-of-fact tone while engaging in rampant speculation.

Well, this is all over the news at this point so I'm not really sure posting an article is relevant. My question is will this finally undo the Congressional logjam regarding investigating Bush? Is Gonzales's resignation in addition to Rove's resignation tantamount to the two abandoning a sinking ship? Were Powell and Ashcroft just ahead of the curve?

I appreciate the "actions speak louder than words" sentiment, however I'm not sure exactly what you want me to do. I live in a county that is practically European in its character. A Republican has a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected here. Our city has passed resolutions calling for both a withdrawal from Iraq and for the impeachment of Bush. Any action I took locally would just be preaching to the choir. I've participated in several locally organized writing campaigns to our US Representative and Senator. I almost considered participating in a sit-in at our Representative's office, however that resulted in at least one of the participants being arrested.

In regard to great scientists who are also proponents of atheism, how about Steven Weinberg?

I think this is a prime example of why we need a Read the Bills Act

That's a rather roundabout way of saying that Dawkins' work is a synthesis of older ideas. What he accomplished in the Selfish Gene was an excellent juxtaposition of biological vs. cultural evolution, demonstrating that the underlying mechanisms are remarkably similar. But you're saying his work being a synthesis undermines its value? Virtually everything is a synthesis of earlier work. "...I have stood on the shoulders of giants" and all that jazz. By the way, your usage of "brain child" is not correct I would say, first and foremost, that he is an excellent author with a deep understanding of science.

So, was anyone else appalled by Bush's shaky grasp on history and his attempts to use one of the bloodiest conflicts in which the US was engaged in recent history to push his Iraq agenda? Iraq is a situation where there are no good choices. Staying or leaving both entail profound negative consequences which must be factored into any decision. Bush and the partisan hacks who support the war continue to drum up the dire negative consequences of a withdrawal, completely glossing over the dire negative consequences of remaining. But Bush has taken a conflict he willfully skirted (while somehow Kerry, a decorated veteran, managed to take the heat on Vietnam) and used it to metaphorically argue against one of the few things one of the most corrupt US presidents of all time actually managed to get right. The Washinghton Post has an interesting take: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR2007082301835.html?nav=hcmodule

Because money is the simplest and most straightforward way to garner mindshare

There's really 3 sides you have to look at. There are two sides you can consider dumb, but it's not really stupidity, more like ignorance and falling prey to the third, exploitative party. These two sides were Wall Street investors who pumped money into companies like New Century Financial, and the borrowers who opted for mortgages they could not afford. The third side is the executives of these companies, many of which were also investors. They not only reaped huge salaries (at its peak New Century Financial had a market cap of $1.75 billion, now valued at $55 million) but also sold their stock before the valuation crashed. They're now under criminal investigation.

To be fair to pioneer, cortico-thalamo-cortical loops do exist and many speculate they play an important role in consciousness, including Jeff Hawkins in this video.

Let me quote David Cross here: "I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel and our ties with the Saudi royal family and all of our military bases in Israel. You know why I think that? Because THAT'S WHAT HE F*CKING SAID. Are we a nation of 6 year olds? Answer: yes."

To put it in perspective:

I dislike her because I find her platform is abominable. She supports troop increases in Iraq, above and beyond the levels of the present surge. She thinks that our new tactics in Iraq are working: "We're just years too late changing our tactics. We can't ever let that happen again. We can't be fighting the last war. We have to be preparing to fight the new war." She continues to trumpet the same "war on terror" rhetoric that the Bush administration uses, instilling fear of a nonspecific phantom enemy forever lingering in the shadows. Obama is guilty of this to a certain extent as well, whereas Edwards has decried it (there was a thread here earlier about that) and prefers to focus on the complex and nuanced nature of specific groups that we should be addressing. She's lodged a number of baffling and hypocritical attacks against her opponents. She downplayed Obama's foreign policy experience when he suggested meeting directly with the leaders of foreign nations. What foreign policy experience does she have? She's much in the same boat as Obama... but I guess she wants people to believe that an additional four years of Senatorial experience somehow gives her an edge on foreign policy. But really, that's all just a bunch of piddly nitpicking. I can go on about the specific issues in her platform with which I disagree, such as support for the death penalty. She's painting a picture of a rather totalitarian state, and she will be inheriting unprecedented executive power from the current administration. That's not an idea I find particularly comforting. But there's one real underlying issue: She's a divisive person with a grating personality. We're living in a country which has been in a rather extreme state of political polarization for some time, perhaps culminating in the 2004 election. Hillary would just be a continuation of that same trend, which I think is damaging to our country. In terms of my personal choice for an ideal candidate who reflects my views on the issues, I'd support Kucinich. But I don't. I support Obama, even though he differs in opinion on a number of issues I consider important. This is because I see Obama as someone who can actually reach out to the other side, perhaps even make some friends over there.

I'm continually appalled when I read that Hillary is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Yet I'm also confused, because I'm still yet to meet a Hillary supporter. Who are these people and why do they support Hillary? Do you support Hillary? If so, why?

The latest National Intelligence Estimate paints a rather mixed picture of the surge's effectiveness: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13920438

You might have a look at Mad Money host Jim Cramer (who just had something of an onair meltdown over what bullshit this entire situation is) has to say: http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/bottomline/35813/ Nobody's penalizing the corporations here. Offering federal loans to subprime mortgagors would, in fact, hand the money right over to the corporations! For the mortgagors, they could get loans on terms that are actually sustainable. Yeah, that was started by the same thing: deregulation. In this case it was Alan Greenspan, on the way out, pushing the dream that everyone should own a home. Then, he left, and nobody watched while predatory lenders swooped in, got a bunch of people to invest in that dream, gave a bunch of money to people who wanted that dream, pocketed the profit and left. I'm not saying bail out every individual. Start by bailing out those who don't have horrible credit and may actually stand a chance of paying off a loan if the terms aren't horrible. Federal loans are socialism?

Well let me put it this way, injecting liquidity into the system by buying mortgage-backed bonds: 1) Doesn't help lenders who are holding worthless mortgages doomed to be foreclosed upon 2) Doesn't help mortgagors who are getting foreclosed upon 3) Isn't going to improve the value of those bonds, eventually the liquidity will dry up and the bonds will be worthless Paying off predatory ARMs and offering federal loans on reasonable terms: 1) Gets the lenders their money back right way 2) Prevents foreclosure and helps mortgagors get affordable, reasonable loans. This could be combined with an education program to help these individuals manage their budget and ensure they're not at risk of foreclosure 3) Preserves the value of the mortgage-backed bond market In the end the money that's fueling this entire market comes from the mortgagors. That's where we're seeing a massive, systemic failure. People who shouldn't have been eligible for mortgages in the first place got them, at rates they couldn't afford, due to predatory subprime lending practices.

I think the best way for the government to help subprime mortgagors in over their heads is in the form of the government or a non-profit taking on their mortgages and providing low interest fixed rate mortgages in their stead. The government already does this through several different channels. For example I have an FHA loan. The real problem is that most of the current subprime mortgagors can't afford an FHA loan, and many are not competent enough to have a mortgage in the first place. Perhaps an experimental program with slightly relaxed qualifications aimed at letting nearly-competent mortgagors to exchange their adjustable rate mortgages for federally financed (or through a government backed non-profit like Fannie Mae) fixed rate mortgage could be pursued. Of course Bush would never do that. Instead the government is trying to directly inject liquidity into the system by directly buying up mortgage-backed bonds, which are growing increasingly worthless due to massive foreclosures. We're seeing a bailout here. It's just the government bailing out the lenders...

So, thoughts? I've posted about this pretty extensively in the past. A combination of some unsound economic policy and predatory lending has the Dow all bipolar with periods of excessive fear followed by reassuring bouncebacks. We have the fed injecting liquidity into the mortgage-backed bond market, which appears to be drying up as more become aware that mortgage-backed bonds may be worthless. Is this going to be a case of a few parties being screwed (in addition to the millions of homeowners being foreclosed upon) or will it cause a larger effect on the economy as a whole? (by which I do mean the world economy, sans China who's making out like a bandit) Also, what about Bush's reluctance to inject money into programs like Fannie Mae who would help homeowners saddled with subprime mortgages find a sustainable fixed rate alternative? Isn't the real way to correct this situation to pay off the predatory lenders and replace their unfair terms with ones that the unwitting mortgagors can actually manage? Isn't a not-for-profit federal program the proper resolution to this crisis? Furthermore, it wouldn't compete with private industry, as no reputable mortgage lender would want to take on a subprime mortgagor who's about to be foreclosed upon. I'm certainly worried this will have a massive negative impact upon our economy, and that if we can stabilize the economy and let people live their dream of owning a home on reasonable terms that's the way to go.

10:1? It's a big online sausage fest

That's not my understanding of how memory works. You might have a look at Green's Theory of Geometrical Phenominalism in which the thalamus provides a global workspace in which various parts of the neocortex can collaborate within shared working memory. This compliments the otherwise shared-nothing architecture of the neocortex, which shows repetition of Layer I in certain regions chained into Layer VI in a continuous hierarchical structure. At the top of this hierarchical structure (in each hemisphere) is the hippocampus. The cortical hierarchy passes unrecognized patterns upward. At the very top, the hippocampus archives patterns which were not recognized at any other level of the cortex. These patterns are continuously replayed backwards down the hierarchy, at the greatest intensity during REM sleep. In this respect, short term memory is effectively stored in the thalamus, whereas long term memory represents patterns which the rest of the cortex failed to predict or classify, which are reprogrammed into the various levels of the cortex as a whole, which continually replay them in different invariant forms: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=75631972-E7F2-99DF-3FF928A23B2CCBCD&chanID=sa007

Yes, he is presenting an opinion. His opinion is that science, as a system of mutually supporting evidence, should trump those who can only present anecdotal evidence to the contrary. To quote Dawkins, "We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise, we favor those who would obscure the truth" This program deals quite little with religion. The religions it does deal with are cultish fringe religions like Spiritualism. The rest is just an exploration of new-age beliefs and other sorts of unsubstantiated belief in the supernatural whose claims fall apart under scientific scrutiny. It's basically the James Randi or Penn & Teller M.O. Indeed a central point of the series seems to be that scientific experimentation can easily debunk these sort of wishy washy supernatural claims. The experiments with dowsers and horoscopes make this abundantly clear, as does James Randi's prize for demonstrating paranormal powers under scientific conditions.

This idea has been floating around transhumanist circles for years, and was most recently popularized by World Transhumanist Association cofounder Nick Bostrom. Sadly, I know many transhumanists who think it MUST BE COMPLETELY TRUE! I'm of the opinion that it's probably easier to create a universe from scratch than it is to simulate one in software.

UPDATE: Slate has an awesome article on this issue: http://www.slate.com/id/2172461/fr/rss/ Looks like this was a case of incompetence

I would say language (and semiotics in general) are integral to the thought process and our brains use several different types of language internally, including natural language.