bascule

This leads me to wonder if you've ever seen a cadaver... Consciousness is something which arises out of our mental plasticity at least several months (if not over a year) after birth. In that I have no morally justifiable argument against the use of babies for biomedical experimentation, but I offered some other reasons on the animal testing thread about why using infants for biomedical testing is simply infeasible: http://scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=207029#post207029 I feel a moral obligation to protect human consciousness that I do not with animals. If you ask me, the legacy of the reptilian/mammalian brain is humanity's greatest shortcoming. That makes it sound like you're unappreciative of the beauty of human consciousness. Well, it sounds like neither of us is going to convince the other of anything. But here's a few parting thoughts... Do you regret being immunized with vaccines derived from animal testing? Would you immunize your children with animal-derived vaccines? If you had a diabetic child, would you withhold insulin because it's made from animal-derived products? Wouldn't doing anything less make you a hypocrite? Do you have any diabetic friends? Do you think they deserve to die so that animals might live?

The suffering of animals is horrible, but the suffering of humans is worse. Which scene would more greatly disturb you, discovering a field of dead animals, or discovering a house full of (human) cholera victims? No, I am a materialist deeply rooted in the philosophy of Dennett regarding the nature of consciousness, and I see humans as meme exchangers as being on an entirely different evolutionary plane than animals around us. Basically, I can't even begin to imagine what life would be like without a large cerebral cortex, but I can certainly appreciate the richness that it (along with all the memes which have infected me throughout the course of my life) brings. What other creature on earth would give pause to consider something so abstract as the ethical implecations of killing other animals, rather than killing at the instant their instincts command it? This is but one example of how much richer the human experience is than that of animals. We can be taken aback by an awestriking city or landscape which is mere terrain for an animal. Looking at art or listening to music can be a very powerful and moving experience for us. The bottom line is I respect the beauty of the human conscious experience as being something unique in the animal kingdom, and while animals may share the basest levels of it, by being unable to communicate or understand the complex abstract concepts required to appreciate art, music, philosophy, or the other elaborate creations of man or nature, they are missing out on the most beautiful parts of what makes us human. The more I study human consciousness the more I am taken aback by how amazing humans and everything we have accomplished as a species throughout the course of our history really is, and this respect for the majesty of human endeavor seems to be lacking in most animal rights activists. Most of them come off quite misanthropic...

So you think an animal's existence can compare to being able to swim in the vast sea of the human memetic experience? The very kinds of lives we can live thanks to the immense power of human collaboration depend on a mutual respect for our own kind and adhering to a set of rules in which our standard of living can increase. But I agree, but just as a search and rescue dog has loving owners who wouldn't give it up for testing, a retarded individual has parents and family who care about that individual and don't want to give them up for testing. Such testing would in many cases be tantamount to a death sentence (i.e. inject a vaccine, then deliberately infect the individual and see if they survive) What if the "violent criminal" is in fact the innocent falsely accused? And bottom line, this violates the Geneva convention. Didn't we learn anything from the holocaust? Or perhaps you're more concerned with the "Holocaust On Your Plate"

That or our massively enlarged cerebral cortex and our ability to spread memes which convey abstract knowledge or concepts, and that the memetic evolution of our species has so ridiculously transcended that of any other that they are simply incomparable. Let me ask you... was it not worth the animal sacrifice required to procure insulin for diabetics? Should all diabetics simply have been doomed to die so that the animals we needed to experiment on to create insulin products could've lived? How about vaccines for anthrax? Chicken pox? Cholera? Diptheria? Flu? Hepatitis? Measles? Mumps? Polio? Rabies? Rubella? Smallpox? Tetanus? Whooping Cough? Yellow Fever?

Without animal experimentation we have no biomedical science. I think it's silly to forego the future benefits of biomedical research which has the potential to save countless human lives just to save the lives of animals. I mean, bottom line, if someone made me pick between killing a human and killing, say, a thousand gorillas, I'd save the human every time. Human life is more precious than animal life, and I refuse to see humans hurt because certain people have the unrealistic notion that animals are our equals. Bottom line, we're sentient and they are not.

I love BitTorrent, it's all about the barely watchable zero day cam releases

Sounds like http://thefinaltheory.com

The question you're trying to ask is "Is the universe discrete or continuous?" Certain theories, like Loop Quantum Gravity, presuppose that it is discrete and therefore could be represented "in binary"

According to this you're right: http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/geology/crust_elements.html

Irreducable complexity makes a good (did I say good? I meant specious) argument against ambiogenesis at least... I mean, how exactly would a replicator form spontaneously? It boggles the mind...

The bottom line is that we're 6 million full time jobs away from recovering to pre-9/11 employment utilization rates... while the unemployment levels are close, the number of people working part time jobs has skyrocketed. I mean, yes, we can be happy these people can have jobs, but since we don't have universal healthcare it means these people aren't getting health insurance benefits...

Well, the thing to remember is that 2.2% is still 6 million people who are worse off than they were 4 years ago... so there's the answer to your question.

It means they're too unintelligent to wrap their brains around the concepts behind evolution/natural selection...

Well, you're somewhat correct, looking at the statistics... This is from December 2003... http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/16/national/main588815.shtml So how have things changed since then? http://stat.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_01092004.pdf The BLS reported in November 2003 that the total unemployed was at 5.9% and the total unemployed plus total part time at 9.9% Compare to now: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm The BLS reported in August 2005 that the total unemployed was at 4.9% and the total unemployed plus total part time was at 8.9% So yes, the number of part time employees has remained the same even as the number of unemployed has decreased, so we can safely assume that for roughly every unemployed person who got a part time job there was a person with a part time job who received a full time one (including myself, yay!) Still, that's a far cry from the 6.7% (for unemployed/part time) it was at in December 2000... http://www.bls.census.gov/cps/pub/empsit_dec2000.htm

That thread doesn't seem to have helped at all in creating an Atmospheric Science / Climate Science / Meteorology forum

That's been the typical response I've heard... that even if religion is fundamentally bullshit, it generally encourages its believers to lead a moral life and provides answers to the great metaphysical questions which science cannot. But there are enormous deleterious effects to allowing pathological memes to propagate, namely when those seeking political power leverage their religious clout in order to do so. This is what's happening in theocracies like Iran and it's what's presently happening in the United States. Things like the Salem Witch Trials, the Inquisition, the selling of indulgances, the suicide *cough*MURDER*cough* of Socrates, these are examples of a pathological meme going to extremes to protect themselves, and how something which enters one's mind as a Trojan Horse offering a path towards morality and goodness can so easily degrade into something horrible. Memes have enormous power to shape the thinking of individuals and how they view society as a whole. They create a power structure which allows the leaders of a group to leverage sweeping societal change, especially when you end up with all sorts of sub-memes propagating within a larger overall group which is infected with a given meme. We can't move forward as a society past violence and oppression until everyone esposues the ideas of moral relativism (and relativism in general). As long as there are pathological memes out there preaching an Absolutist moral code or Absolutism of any sort, it will sow the seeds for extremism. "Islam" may mean peace, but what that's not what it foments. We saw this culminate in 9/11. That's the end result of allowing these memes to spread. An event like 9/11 would NEVER happen in a secular world. 9/11 was a direct attack on Christianity by Islam. Yes, the 9/11 followers were not embracing the true ideals of Islam, but in reality, how many members of a religion are truly idealistic followers (e.g. Ned Flanders) vs those who preach bigotry and hatred in the name of religion (Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, the KKK, etc.) The latter is a direct consequence of allowing these memes to spread.

Christianity (and all religions, for that matter) as a meme contains several teachings which act as natural defense mechanisms to prevent the meme's own distruction. The bottom line is that Christianity sets up an "us vs. them" type scenario in which you have the good guys (Christians) and the bad guys (everyone else, i.e. the "secular world"). The "bad guys" teach things which undermine the teachings of Christianity, and the meme of Christianity rationalizes this as being the machinations of evil which much be destroyed at all costs. Christianity is a meme which has evolved and matured over the course of 2,000 years, and thus has achieved a high number of mechanisms to ensure that the meme continues to be propagated and works to oppose those who would see it erradicated. Science, on the other hand, has been quite a powerful meme too, because it's based around the idea that our core beliefs can be falsified and must always be viewed as potentially falsifiable, and if they are falsified we must abandon them and move on to better explanations. I think it's the idea that "The beliefs of science can never be knowingly wrong, because if they are knowlingly wrong the are amended" which has been so viral, because people know that science is presenting them demonstratable truth rather than asking you to take things on faith. Plus, there's all the nifty gadgets science has given us, the cures to diseases/ailments/other physical problems, and just the all around increase to our standard of living. Given this, science is a meme worth spreading, it's the obvious candidate to win out in the end against other incompatible memes. I really hope this recent backlash of fundamentalists working to oppose science really tunes people into the fact that this clash between incompatible memes, one based around reality and one based around pathological bullshit is going to grow increasingly more painful, especially in America where Christians outnumber the secular community more than 4:1. The secular skeptics really need to stop worry about hurting others' feelings and trying to humor their beliefs and realize that these people are infected with a pathological thought virus which must be stopped. And the only way to do that is to take on some of the characteristics which have made Christianity and other religions so successful, namely increased organization, evangelism, and refutation of the beliefs of others which are incompatible with a skeptical/scientific world view. That's not that you have to turn science into a religion, but more that you have to turn the effort towards erradicating pathological memes into a science. The world needs memetic pathology. It's hard, because I'm sure we all have friends/family infected with this meme, and it's a really tricky issue, but until we work to actively combat it in the same way we'd actively combat the black plague, it's just going to continue to spread and continue to cause societal unrest. Skeptics really need to be unafraid to stand up and say "The core tenets of religion are fundamentally false." It's been really nice to see Penn & Teller doing just that on their series, and I hope they can start a trend (i.e. propagate a viral meme)

I agree' date=' and think humanity really needs to shore up memetic pathology as a science. We already have memetic pathologists working hard to classify fallacious viral memes, people like Snopes, Penn & Teller, and MythBusters. I've come to realize that as an information worker (and "Internet participant") I spend a lot of my time receiving, sorting/classifying, and propegating memes, and the better I get at this the more I realize how easy it is for most people to be duped by a pathelogical meme. If you ask me, that's the only reason religion still exists... suckers.

It'd be a little more fun if he actually responded to some talking points, especially ones prefixed with "ATTENTION SHINBITS!" Guess we'll never get an explanation why your average CCD designing electrical engineer can come up with a better design for an optical sensor than... God.

But conversely, many who were salaried with benefits are now working part time. While more may be employed, they're at Wal-Mart style "rape our employees out of benefits by replacing one salaried employee with two part time employees" jobs...

ATTENTION SHINBITS! Will you please answer Mokele's question? If we are the result of intelligent design, then why is our retina on backwards? All the nerve fibers are on the front, and the rods/cones are on the back. Because of this, we have a blind spot where all the nerves come together and have to pass through the retina. Plus all the light has to go through a ton of nerves/other crap before it actually reaches the cells that do the sensing. That's just dumb. Can you imagine a CCD manufacturer wanting to put all the circuitry for transferring information off of the CCD on the top, and then having to drill a hole in the middle of the CCD to run all the wires through? They'd get fired in a heartbeat for their stupidity! And yet there are creatures in nature who have their retinas on the right way around, so all the sensory elements are on the front and all the nerves are on the back. If our retinas worked this way then they'd stick better to the back of the eye than they do to the vitreous humor. As we're "designed", it's really easy for trauma to the eye to detach or tear the retina. Why is our visual cortex in the back of the brain? Wouldn't it make more sense to put it up front, next to the eyes, rather than running cabling all the way from your eyes to the back of the brain? Aren't you more likely to hit the front of your head than the back considering we walk forwards, not backwards, and thus shouldn't the frontal lobe, center of reason, be in a place where it's less likely to get hit, not more? Why do we have hangnails? Was that another side effect of the fall of man? If there is an intelligent designer, he must've flunked out of college...

This guy seems to be quoting this Chick tract (almost word for word) left and right... Compare to Chick! I think the funniest thing is that his link for Nebraska Man goes to talkorigins...

Bill Kristol reminds me an awful lot of Emperor Palpatine

You know, pretty much everything you've said has been straight out of that Chick tract... Debunked here... ...and here.. ...and here... This guy wonders if he's satirizing his own followers...