bascule

I predict I will be very drunk on the night of December 12th, 2012

Article? That's a blog. That blog is claiming that research into photosynthesis in bacteria is applicable to neurons in animals. That's the first problem. The research they are citing is not applicable to neurons in the slightest. Tegmark's paper is explicitly about neurons, and its conclusion is that neurons do not exhibit quantum mechanical behavior.

But this isn't 1000AD. We have a comprehensive, scientific understanding of how the natural world operates thanks to physics. Are you suggesting that "telepathy", which can't be demonstrated under controlled conditions, uses something outside of present knowledge of physics? You do realize longitudinal waves are what our ears receive, right? Are you suggesting to fully "capture" the human voice we use a sense organ other than our ears? Okay, so you're saying the human voice has as-yet-unspecified additional properties which can only be explained by "telepathy". I don't know what to tell you, especially since you can't even name what it is you don't think can be explained. We hear with our ears. End of story. It sounds like you're conjecturing something which imparts emotion. Can people not be moved by a recording of a voice as they can by the real deal? Certainly no recording will ever match the fidelity of the source, but that doesn't mean recordings of peoples voices can't move people to tears.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you suggesting that if the Democrats pursued the public option, they'd be dickheaded sheep?

[This is the point in your post where you'd ordinarily provide your reasoning. The reasoning behind your statement was omitted from your post] What happens when a particular organism happens upon a novel use for an existing characteristic, and this characteristic gives them a survival and/or reproductive advantage?

I'm surprised no one has responded to this thread. Maybe I should've given it a more provocative title like "Democrats bungle healthcare". Jon Stewart tore the Democrats a new one the other night: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/stewart-destroys-dems-for_n_305948.html "Democrats couldn't get laid in a house [where people's] sole purpose is to have consequence and disease-free sex with legislators on finance committees."

Heh, reminds me of Primer.

What's odd is I experience this fairly frequently (once or twice a month), but always in my shower, which has yellow tiles, not blue. The explanation that this comes from blood flowing through the retina makes perfect sense though.

I would love instant runoff voting, particularly for president. This would allow me to vote for the person I really want to vote for without worrying about "wasting my vote" or depriving a major candidate of the votes they need to win.

The condition of your statement is that telepathy would have to be demonstrated under controlled conditions. Given that it hasn't, I think you've answered your own question.

forufes, you need to propose a mechanism. Otherwise everything you say is meaningless. For example: This is conveyed as electromagnetic radiation. We always know the medium by which sound is transmitted. The medium of sound is longitudinal waves in vibrating matter. Telepathy could be the same, if you proposed a mechanism. I believe earlier electromagnetic radiation was proposed as a mechanism. If so, what sense organ receives these electromagnetic waves? We have one sense organ that can detect electromagnetic waves: the eyes. However, the eyes only operate on the wavelengths of visible light, which doesn't work very well for transmitting information through opaque objects like the Earth. Humans could potentially be telepathic with the help of technology to provide the relevant "organs" for transmitting and receiving electromagnetic radiation.

None of these papers are from consciousness studies whatsoever. They are from biologists researching photosynthesis. The first paper is about photosynthesis in bacteria. Tegmark's paper is specifically about the brain, not "biological tissues" in general.

To reiterate yet again, and get back to the topic of the thread, the facts regarding the issues (namely healthcare in this case) are incredibly important, and a considerable number of Republicans are not choosing to learn the facts about the issue, instead propagating lies. At least in the case instance of the healthcare debate, much of the opposition is based on lies.

That's secondary to an EEG. Perhaps you should've titled the thread "Flashing strobes in my eyeballs gave me visions". That said I have flashed strobe lights in my own eyes, while intoxicated on certain entheogens, and do not have anything close to a long-term change in any sort of cognitive function, except on an extremely low level.

An EEG is a passive process which has no perceptible way to affect you, aside from having sensors stuck to your skin and the feedback of seeing your own brainwaves on a machine.

That's an apples to oranges comparison. There's a rather stark contrast when one side delegitimizes the argument with lies and the other side delegitimizes their opponents with facts. Much of the Republican opposition to healthcare reform is based on lies, examples of which can be found in the OP and are the topic of this thread.

Depends what you're after. For biologists/neurologists, something like BlueBrain is incredibly useful. However, for those trying to recreate consciousness in software, something like NuPIC is absolutely essential: we need to abstract away the underlying biological implementation of consciousness and figure out what functions particular brain structures are actually performing. Both BlueBrain and NuPIC are effectively doing the same thing: recreating neocortical columns in software. The difference is that NuPIC has no use to biologists, but runs fast enough to be used for useful software applications such as a configurable video recognition system. Oi.... Reading that within the frame of my newfound eliminative materialism, that makes my head reel. Consciousness is the result of physical systems, not the cause. In a true reductionist / eliminative materialist conception of consciousness, there is no dichotomy. Physical systems are the only reality. Consciousness is, as Hofstadter puts it, a "hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination". Aieeeeeeeee! Kill it with fire! This site is a bit more down to earth (one would hope for a bit more objective approach from an accredited university's consciousness studies program). Lots of quantum mind mumbo jumbo. It's not bad from a purely hypothetical perspective, but that's all it is, a purely hypothetical perspective. For what it's worth, the only attempts I have seen to advance a specific hypothesis about how quantum mind would work, proposing an actual mechanism, has been torn apart in peer review. That hypothesis is the so called Orch-OR hypothesis put together by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. Penrose is a respected scientist but has not made much headway advancing this proposal in the fields of physics, biology, and neurology. Specifically Max Tegmark's calculations show it to be untenable in his paper The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes:

I used to think "consciousness" had a meaningful definition, perhaps one that could be explained by concepts like neutral monism. Espousing a empiricst view, I sought to reason about consciousness as something which cannot be eliminated from the method by which we understand anything, because consciousness is the basis of our understanding. But, screw it. I have finally be convinced that the idea consciousness holds some special place in the universe, even if only a metaphysical one is not useful, and finally espoused eliminative materialism. If we hope to understand consciousness, it will only come as understanding firmly rooted in other sciences. I would argue that the advancement in the discourse has continually been away from Cartesian dualism, which was effectively the de facto position, towards functionalism/materialism. Pretty much. The only position I see remotely defensible at this point is Cartesian dualism, and that's certainly not a scientifically defensible position. Roger Penrose has tried, and failed, to find a quantum bridge between the physical world and the Mystical Magical Land of Consciousness. No one else is even bothering to put up an effort, besides Searle, who can only throw out strawmen in attepts at a reductio ad absurdum. That's precisely what projects like BlueBrain and NuPIC are trying to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/health/policy/30health.html?bl The Senate Finance committee has rejected two amendments which include a public option. Committee chair Senator Max Baucus cites his fears that such legislation would fail to get the 60 votes necessary to bypass an inevitable Republican filibuster. Oddly enough, the main issue with the public option doesn't seem to be cost. In fact, the CBO estimates the public option would actually save $50 billion over Max Baucus's current bill, which would spend $774 billion over a period of 10 years (i.e $77.4 billion / year) Republicans are fearful that the program wouldn't be fair to private insurers and could eventually grow into a single-payer system: I agree with their concerns, except I see them as positives rather than negatives. Such is the political bizzaro world we live in. What's deeply unsettling though is that the key concern that the bill was rejected over was that it would not get the filibuster-proof 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. That means there are Democrats as well who would only support a more expensive bill without a public option. I really wish I knew who they were. They are assholes and should be called out on it. I guess this is what happens when the majority of the members of the "liberal" political party in our country would be considered conservatives in pretty much any other developed nation. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedIt would seem the Democrats responsible are: Conrad, Lincoln, Nelson, Carper. Also I've learned that the House bill would save $150 billion over 10 years. Le sigh.

Okay, I think I finally have a clear understanding of why this doesn't work now. Thanks.

You can certainly say that about me, however applying it to Democrats as a whole is a composition fallacy. Your conclusion is the strong partisanship here is due to arrogant Democrats who regard Republicans as their mental inferiors? I don't think that's a particularly defensible position. Perhaps the issue you're not getting here is that the latter is a conclusion reached by the inability to accomplish the former. These are generally not people easily convinced by things like facts, evidence, and logical reasoning. In your statement is the tacit assumption that there is no discussion going on. I frequently change my opinions when convinced otherwise. Many American conservatives do not. Hmm, for some reason I thought you were going to link Penn & Teller. Their segment on getting the results you want from opinion polls is much better. Have you seen this? lUPMjC9mq5Y It's hard to have a dialogue with people who have such a limited understanding of how government actually operates.

I predict the universe will implode when the Olympics are filmed for the first time in 3D.

There's a rather profound difference when talking about language as used elsewhere in the animal kingdom and language as used by man. Man uses tree-structured (i.e. context-free) language. This allows us to express multiple different levels of abstraction. We can talk about a particular symbol in increasing detail. Whereas other members of the animal kingdom may have a symbol of some sort for "danger", going into increasing detail becomes increasingly less possible with the way they communicate. Can they express "distant danger"? How far? Can they express "danger we can avoid if we move in this direction now?" Not really. Even in chimpanzees while they can accumulate a fairly substantial vocabulary word ordering, and the tree structures particular orderings of symbols can express eludes them. Conversing in context-free grammars seems to be a uniquely human trait.

Just one?

Okay, seems like my scenario is starting to unravel now... what other properties can be entangled? So the result would be the interference pattern would be destroyed on the screen with the "which path detector" but would continue to appear on the other screen?