bascule

Yes, you find the genes which are responsible and demonstrate how they manifest their effects.

I reluctantly signed up not too long ago

Just use a char pointer in the function declaration/prototype instead of an array. i.e. int function(char *string);

Yay, so apparently one person has used loop quantum gravity/loop quantum cosmology to construct a discrete-time model of the universe. This is old (2001) and I don't know anything about it, so can someone fill in this poor layman about how this paper was received and if it has spurned any further developments in discrete-time models of the universe based around LQG/LQC? Martin, I'm looking hopefully in your direction... http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/18/6/308

gib65, it seems like you're trying to ask "Does every particle in the universe transfer some small bit of force, however incomprehensibly small, to every other particle in the entire universe?" Or, to put it another way, is the state of any given particle for a particular timeframe truly dependent on the state of the entire universe? Is everything causally interconnected? I'm afraid the answer is just going to be "models are just models and can't answer those kinds of questions" I presupposed the answer to this question to be "Yes" in my crazy theory of the universe.

We didn't even know the CMBR existed until we attempted satellite telephony and we actually tried to receive microwave signals from space using complex electronic instruments. The CMBR isn't strong enough to get through our atmosphere at any sort of intensity that would affect life processes.

The first one is. I'm not going to bother with the rest. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/spheres.html

i.e. untestable and irreproducible I'm sure you can find people with a much higher degree of credulity than the scientific community with which to share your ideas. Science wants you to conduct a controlled experiment that's easily reproduced and gives the same results every time (or if certain experiments occasionally give different results, you can explain why) That's all Dennett used to substantiate his "Empirical Theory of Mind" in Consciousness Explained. Okay, let's see what you have to say... Uhhhhhhh, right. How did you know you "develop(ed) an interactive rapport with the right hemisphere"? Were you in an MRI at the time, and noticed increased blood flow to the right hemisphere after you, uhh, asked it a question, or something? One time I entered a state of deep Transcendental Meditation and spoke to the second incarnation of Buddha. He told me that the only way you can reach Enlightenment is if you eat an egg salad sandwich at the Proper Moment. You can never know when your Proper Moment will come up in life, so the only way to guarantee you will reach enlightenment is to constantly eat egg salad sandwiches. Yes, the above is an example of: Try to relate it to what you're saying and see if you detect a pattern.

All human behavior is natural

Write a functional specification

"When I think about a computer, I imagine myself...." ...merging with one in approximately 25 years

Research, uhh... bioremediation

By 2025 we will be able to create a molecular model of a human being, from egg to adult organism, in realtime, and the rate at which a human can be modelled increases exponentially thereafter. 50 years would place us some 30 years after this happens. I would say in 50 years we will not only know everything about the brain/consciousness, but we will have dramatically improved upon it to such a degree that consciousness at that point in time is simply incomprehensible (i.e. the Singularity). Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 a $1000 computer will be a billion times as powerful as all brains on earth.

Careful there, Empiricism is the belief that sensory experience is the source of all knowledge (which is obviously true, since the senses merely represent the input into consciousness and knowledge is a concept which is entirely irrelevant outside of a conscious process) You can interpret the data however you want. The important part was that the scientific method was used in obtaining the data (i.e. a hypothesis was formulated, a controlled experiment conducted, and the results and conclusion documented, and in most cases, peer reviewed) When the scientific method is used to obtain information, that information is inherently more reliable than information obtained by other means, which generally consist of such methodologies as "pulling it out of my ass" Actually, neurophysiologists are hard at work studying consciousness in the best empirical means possible: running models of it on computers. See Blue Brain and The CCortex Project. Autophenomenology concerns the self-study of only your consciousness. If you're attempting to look at any collective properties of human consciousness, you've already stumbled into the field of heterophenomenology. And at this point, there's only two ways to go about it: use the scientific method, or don't. One generally yields reliable answers (or is at least documented to the point that unreliability can be exposed in the future), the other does not. As much as it has been seemingly discredited, I very much espouse Carl Jung's idea of the "collective unconsciousness", specifically as it relates to mapping the a priori brain constructs we are given genetically onto human temperment (i.e. genes control how you behave). This idea now dominates modern psychology, with the Freudian overemphasis of nurture vs. nature having been mostly discredited at this point.

Uhoh, sunspot is attempting to delve into the nature of consciousness... Bingo. Attempting to study the nature of consciousness from within is what Dennett describes as "autophenomenology" which is a fundamentally unscientific and ultimately fruitless process. The main reason lies in such things as individual variability and so many of the processes by which consciousness operates being essentially hidden to the conscious process itself (i.e. unconscious processes fuel thought). Throughout his book he develops his model based on "heterophenomenology", using scientific studies into what people experience when subjected to various types of stimuli, and drawing conclusions about how these experiences (which are usually forms of sensory/conscious misinterpretation of what's really happening in the outside world) can give us insights into the operation of consciousness itself. As for consciousness "moving around the brain", well, perhaps the neocortical columns that are coming up with the ideas that influence behavior are constantly changing. But at the very least, the cortex is "home" to consciousness, although the rest of the brain is performing all sorts of very important tasks without which consciousness wouldn't function. It's for this reason that Dennett refuses to relegate consciousness to a single part of the brain.

Well, for one thing, we can see the sum of the stars. It's called "The Night Sky" The cosmic microwave background is the oldest light in the universe. That's the other problem.

$30

Then alt.pave.the.earth might've actually succeeded. What if all the world's inside of your head? Just creations of your own.

I've read the Hansen et al 2005 paper. My response to it is more or less contained in this post

Apparently, 28% as much as the energy that can be liberated from the extracted oil. Got me. The claimed energy inputs of the process are 2/7th of the energy liberated. You get 3.5 times as much as what you put in. Either they're right about this or they're not. It'd be better to question their methodology by finding where they argue for the efficiency of this process, for example see if they have a peer reviewed paper on the output:input ratio, and then question their methodology from that, rather than just throwing up a bunch of hypotheticals. I should mention that all of the oil shale in the Grand Valley is also one of the most abundant sources of natural gas on the continent. There's so much natural gas here, in fact, that they shut down a problematic nuclear plant here (Fort St. Vrain) and replaced it with one that just burns natural gas. We're up to our eyeballs in natural gas over here. If you really want to see something interesting, Google for "Project Rulison". They attempted to liberate large amounts of subterranean natural gas by blowing it open with an atomic bomb. Whoops. Didn't work, the gas was radioactive. Yeah, Americans are crazy. Well, this is fairly recent news, and I don't know how much it's been popularized. Believe me, this oil shale field abuts one of the largest natural gas reserves on the continent. They can quite literally pipe natural gas about one mile away in order to get to the oil shale (the oil shale is in a plateau formation called the "Bookcliffs", and the natural gas is mostly alongside the river that flows through that valley) I've driven past the scant remains of Exxon's Colony Oil Shale Project probably hundreds of times in my life, a byegone remainant of a forgotten era, which is quickly being revitalized as more work goes into harvesting oil shale in the area. All the natural gas they will ever need sits right next to the biggest oil shale field on earth. This process couldn't be more ideal. Well, in the case of the Grand Valley, I guess we really lucked out.

I used to live right next to where half of the world's oil shale lies buried underground. Over a trillion tons of it lies under the Colorado/Utah border. The town I grew up in experienced a small boom period when Exxon came in and created thousands of new jobs. They were going to try to mine the oil shale, crush it up and compact it under high temperature in order to extract the oil. This process was quite costly, and in the end Exxon gave up and pulled out of the town in the mid-'80s, leading to a "bust" period where half the stores in the mall were empty and downtown businesses were closing left and right. It was a pretty depressing situation to grow up in. Now Shell is experimentally trying to tap these massive oil shale reserves, not only because higher oil prices have made tapping into the shale more economically feasible, but also because they have new methods for extracting the oil directly from the shale without having to mine it. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html

The idea of an infinitely long causal chain in any form just kind of irks me...

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMLEX.html

Then they'd probably get along better, but with any fixed intelligence level across the entire population comes a whole set of problems that are solved by being a society of people with different intelligence levels. (not to sound like a royal asshole here, but, e.g. stupider people are less bored with a repetitive job) As another example, if we were to eliminate everyone from the populations except the super-geeky, then we'd probably have a way higher incidence of autism. If we had a population of people with only Aspergers/Autism, they may possess extensive mental abilities, but have considerable problems forming relationships with each other and reproducing. If we had a society comprised completely of idiots, well, uhh... we'd also have problems.

Me either. Oops. Who do I personally know that I admire? I live in a corrupt world of debauchery... not really anyone. The boss of my research group, I suppose, for standing up to alarmism...