bascule

Engineering or General Discussion seem like two likely places

Why is this thread in biology? This post brought to you by a long-time transhumanist. That said... Of course transhumanism is right. It's already happening today. Are your eyes bad? Get glasses, and you can have cyborg vision... 20/15. Superhuman! Glasses not your style? Get contacts or laser surgery. Missing an arm? Get a robotic replacement. Heart going bad? Get a simpler one that doesn't even need to "pulse" to pump blood. Humans can build better pumps than biology. What if you make a backup copy of yourself?

I like how he no longer touts the show as being a "No Ideology Zone"... The difference is the other news stations are news stations, whereas Fox News is little more than a propaganda machine spouting nothing but far right-wing opinion. But don't take my word for it, take the word of Fox News Senior VP Michael Clemente: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,565581,00.html Are you kidding me? Nowadays CNN bends over backwards to pander to a conservative audience. Right wing nutjobs are juxtaposed with people in relevant fields to the news at hand, the two are given equal time, and at no point does the moderator step in and go "no, that's wrong". I challenge you to find a recent CNN clip which you think exhibits "liberal bias". I won't defend MSNBC, since clearly they are actually going for a more liberal audience. However they're ratings are a drop in the bucket compared to Fox. You think 5 "slightly biased" stations add up to one really biased one? Apparently you're not paying attention to Fox's Ratings... http://themunz.blogspot.com/2009/08/don-surber-blog-archive-boycott-boosts.html Glenn Beck draws more viewers in his 5PM slot than CNN and MSNBC do in prime time... COMBINED. Speaking of prime time, Fox is now #2, with MSNBC and CNN at #24 and #26 respectively. Bill O'Reilly attracts a larger audience than the CBS Evening News. I think you need to check your math.

Did I really post this in "Suggestions, Comments and Support"? If so, it should go in Politics...

Fox, the right-wing propaganda machine, has reached a new low... Approximately one month after running this ad in the Washington Post and two other newspapers: CNN's Rick Sanchez responded, asking if Fox really thought CNN failed to cover a massive protest in Washington. After giving you a run through of the total amount of coverage CNN had for the event, he addressed Fox directly, saying "you lie." Over the weekend, tens of thousands of gay rights protesters descended on Washington. And did Fox "WE COVER ALL THE NEWS" cover it? Kind of... they rebroadcasted ABC's footage, briefly. They didn't even send their own satellite truck. They gave it 3 minutes and 42 seconds of total airtime. As usual, Jon Stewart rips into them.

It's very hard to gauge, but I wouldn't go saying that statement is wrong, per se.

Dawkins needs someone to remind him to smile. He looks so unhappy. Echoes of many threads I've seen on SFN, particularly the idea that if biologists can't explain the origin of life, nothing they say matters. Hey physicists, figure out what caused the big bang yet? Nope? Well then, who needs Newtonian mechanics?! Unless you can explain the gestalt nothing you say can be trusted!

My advice: read a book, or preferably many books. I don't care if you read crap. Reading crap is better than not reading at all. However if you do read regularly and enjoy it, but only read crap, try to space out your crap. Throw a work of substance into your reading queue here and there.

The problem is the EU is made of separate states which can have separate leadership and laws. In the US this isn't possible. The Europeans are moving to a more federated system with the EU, and that's a good thing for improving trade, especially having a common currency. The US still has the advantage that we all speak the same language

Without reproduction there would be no evolution. If evolution came up with optimal solutions our retinas would be on the right way around. But evolution doesn't come up with optimal solutions, because it isn't intelligent. Evolution comes up with "just good enough" solutions that are better than the available alternatives.

Americans are a large and diverse group of people. You can't pigeonhole their values/beliefs/dispositions into a single category. After traveling to Europe I finally realized just how big America is. We are huge, seriously.

Note that I never did that, it only appears I did thanks to your selective editing of my comment. What? Quantum mechanics, and our scientific understanding of quantum uncertainty, is very much empirical. At least these are extensions of empirical science and must fit the existing evidence. And, to reiterate, there is no such evidence. It's a towering mountain of hypotheses, none of which are supported by evidence: 1. Neurons exhibit distinctly quantum mechanical behavior that cannot explained by classical mechanics 2. This behavior is significant to cognition 3. This behavior has transcomputational (i.e. oracle-like) properties which cannot be duplicated on a Turing-machine style computer 4. The above set of assumptions, if they hold, could provide evidence that consciousness is an intrinsic part of the universe (i.e. quantum dualism is valid) Indeed it would be entirely possible for neurons to exhibit quantum mechanical behavior significant to cognition, but behavior that could be reconciled as a purely computational process, i.e. our brains act as a quantum computer, not a quantum hypercomputer. In such a case, quantum mechanical behavior would not be a necessary ingredient of computation, just how our brains chose to implement it. Of course, there's no evidence any of that's true, but that just goes to show that even if it were it's still not indicative that quantum mechanics has anything to do with the actual act of cognition. Science cannot define consciousness. Consciousness is metaphysical, and science is the study of the physical world. I have to say I find this a bit patronizing. I've read Penrose's book Shadows of the Mind, where he takes a variety of approaches to argue for a quantum mechanical element to consciousness, including Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Perhaps you might do the same and read a work from the "other side". Might I suggest one of Hofstadter's books, such as I Am A Strange Loop or Godel Escher Bach?

Look at the rate at which humans have evolved societally and technologically versus the comparatively glacial pace of evolution by natural selection. That's intelligence at work. Heredity and selection events are both outside factors. There's no intelligence behind it, they're just things which happen. Intelligence happens from an internalized process, whereas evolution is all outside factors. There is one exception: artificial selection. Here you have an intelligent entity controlling the selection process according to their will. With this process you can see significant changes in far shorter timespans than what it takes for natural selection to bring about such changes. Just look at what we've done to the poor gray wolf (as Mokele noted earlier).

According to one representative of the Nobel award committee, the award was given "primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament": http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1929553,00.html?xid=rss-topstories ...although I still think nuclear disarmament is a worthwhile goal, unlike the article states.

Yes, but to reiterate, certain entheogens were involved.

Surprised no one has posted this one yet... Carl Sagan on Autotune: zSgiXGELjbc

Evolution is not predictive. That's my entire point. If anything, it's experimental, and the experiments are determined at random, not through an analysis of input data to determine a prediction.

Probably should've posted this here, but apparently because of this, Obama is going to make it snow.

According to the experts at AccuWeather.com, whenever a US President is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize there's severe snow in the Northeast US: http://weblogs.marylandweather.com/2009/10/obama_nobel_prize_snow.html The somewhat skeptical weatherman reporting this lulzy press release notes: Coincidence sounds about right.

This is an argument from personal incredulity.

The universe isn't expanding, but something else is, and it's in my pants.

Yeah, let's just move on... They hypothesize potential mechanisms that would shield biological structures from decoherence. They provide no evidence of such mechanisms. This thread is called "Evidence of a Conscious Universe", but so far all you have is a tower of assumptions piled upon assumptions: 1. Neurons exhibit distinctly quantum mechanical behavior that cannot explained by classical mechanics 2. This behavior is significant to cognition 3. This behavior has transcomputational (i.e. oracle-like) properties which cannot be duplicated on a Turing-machine style computer 4. The above set of assumptions, if they hold, could provide evidence that consciousness is an intrinsic part of the universe (i.e. quantum dualism is valid) There is no evidence that any of these are true. In short, there is nothing close to evidence of quantum mind ideas. These people can't even provide evidence that neurons exhibit distinctly quantum mechanical behavior, much less that consciousness is somehow tied to quantum mechanics. Quantum mind ideas are no more valid than a "quantum waterfall" hypothesis which states that quantum mechanics are essential to understanding the behavior of waterfalls and that quantum decoherence is what gives waterfalls their "waterfallness". If you were to try to build a model of a waterfall inside a computer, it might appear to be superficially similar to a waterfall but would lack "waterfallness". Such ideas are unsubstantiated nonsense. I entertain ideas that are supported by evidence. There is no more reason to suppose a quantum mechanical explanation for consciousness than there is to suppose a quantum mechanical explanation for "waterfallness".

Isn't the Nobel Peace Prize something you get for... doing something significant to contribute to world peace? What did Obama do, exactly? Did I miss something? Maybe it's just a bunch of meetings I didn't really care about that added up? I don't get it. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged "America Celebrates Obama's Peace Prize by Bombing the Moon"

No, to continue reiterating myself conscious systems predict from possible futures and use those predictions to make decisions about their activities. This is goal-driven behavior. Evolution does no such predicting, it merely plays out.

Excerpted from New Order / Thieves Like Us