TheVat

These movies are evidence that people are imaginative and some imaginative people become screenwriters. Regarding soul, this seems to be a prescientific concept from the ancient world when the nature of living things was not understood. When a person stopped breathing, ancient people saw that final breath as some essence leaving the body because it provided a simple explanation to them of life as some animating force.

True. What I meant is that IIT has been a sort of centerpiece for a lot of recent discussion and debate on how the mind works. Just today I was browsing Vox and noticed yet another article on IIT. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/15/24001424/consciousness-complexity-neuroscience-mental-health There are some strong rival theories out there, the one of Changeux and Dehaene comes to mind, often called the Global Neuronal Workspace. It's a model that may be useful in understanding consciousness as an emergent process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehaene–Changeux_model

Even church potlucks? I love what the Lutherans do with macaroni dishes. Never mind the need for prompt angioplasty right after eating them. No, really, I agree. However, human social structures being what they are, I suspect that the old Abrahamics will slowly evolve and morph and strain out garbage in a long and painful process. But I remain an optimist that the long arc will bend towards compassion and consciousness raising and away from a giant angry bearded guy who will toss you in a flaming pit run by his former employee if you touch your johnson.

All consciousness chats on a science forum tend to arrive at Tononi. -- Vat's Law 🙂

I think people have a craving for metaphysics, whether philosophically grounded or based in a spiritual framework. Children tend to be indoctrinated in the religious forms, and those that reject that (or grow up in secular oriented households) sometimes gravitate towards options like the paranormal, UFO lore, panpsychism, meditation, the matrix, fringe physics etc. For many, psychological growth and maturation means losing one's parents as wise, protective beings that create a moral order and home, and then trying to fill that void with a supreme being operating on a universal scale which also offers protection, comfort, and a moral order. Some religions appeal to people with prepackaged answers and emotional comforts. Others more austere, like Zen, leave it up to you to work towards some illumination. And yes, some sects offer intolerance and harsh judgments of others - the hell with them.

It wasn't. I appreciate that you have sympathy for the plight of Palestinians.

Gaza is under a multidecade land, air, and sea blockade. Not conducive to beautiful resorts or letting oil companies or other developers in. Gaza airport was demolished by Israel. Border restrictions mean very limited access to Palestinians main urban center, East Jerusalem, or its agricultural resources in West Bank (what's left of them). This is not really "newfound freedom." All this in spite of the terms of the Oslo Accord being that Israel must treat Palestine as one political entity. On what planet would such gross violations of international law result in a prosperous economy for a small enclave effectively torn away from its other pieces and primary urban center of banking, education, foreign consulates and other services? Even if Gaza were run by people better than the Hamas cretins, they would have no shot at the rosy alternate universe you paint.

Not typical of my music tastes, but it's interesting to learn that a mystery regarding a background song on The X-Files has finally been solved after 25 years. I remember the episode, but hadn't the slightest idea that a background song in a bar scene was specifically composed for the episode. Or that it had an ET theme (the second video, at the end of the article, has the full track minus bar noise). https://www.npr.org/2023/12/13/1219137444/x-files-missing-song-mystery-music-lost-media

I think we agree on this. Having friends and a spouse who gain something from their Abrahamic practices, I will offer my observation that not everyone is shackled. Individual people aren't binary where either they attend church and wear cognitive shackles or they are enlightened freethinkers soaring grandly over the intellectual landscape. The problem with stereotyping believers is that not everyone who attends a service has signed on to every page of dogmatic boilerplate. Stereotypes can also be strawmen. I fear a hypocritical douche like Mike Johnson, but I didn't fear a Daniel Berrigan or a Thomas Merton.

Nope. You are seemingly denying the words and actions of Bibi and his Far Right coalition. Bibi has said on multiple occasions that there is no two state solution with Palestinian sovereignty, or any return of stolen land. That's not someone seeking peace or justice for all parties. His position is a radical Zionist position backed up with harassment and killing of West Bank people, fomenting vigilante murder done by illegal settlers, massive and indiscriminate bombing that has in the current war killed over 18,000 civilians, half of them children, use of white phosphorus, starvation of civilians, murder of POWs and surrendered soldiers, etc. These are the actions of an unlawful and immoral regime. There is nothing liberal about them, and my sympathies to the Israelis who have broken free of their national news bubble and realize what their government is doing. So yes, I will compare the illiberal actions of both Israel and Hamas. Look up "Israel War Crimes" on Wikipedia - it's a real eye-opener.

A student of field ornithology Did a GPT search on ontology; When the AI inferred That Kant was a bird He blamed, not the code, but zoology.

I'm astonished that there can really be so much debate as to whether Gaza is a place of inhumane confinement or not. Numerous posts have documented this reality. Few people could leave, except for maybe half a percent who had work permits (also a feature of some prisons). Food and water constantly rationed. Normal trade and economic opportunities blocked. Every few years, jets pass over and destroy part of the infrastructure and housing. Who gives a FF what it's called, it is still inhumane and strips people of basic sovereignty over their own lives. Weird that members here who could easily grasp the miseries of places like East Berlin or the Ghetto of Warsaw, find it difficult to empathize with the 99% of Palestinians who are not Hamas militants and are simply trying to survive. Both Israel and Hamas are at fault, each feeding the endless cycle of vengeful hatred and reprisal, each dominated by an illiberal and miltant faction in a part of the world where liberalism is most sorely needed.

Apparently this company gets involved if we don't ask.... https://www.curicaltech.com/ I think this discussion could benefit from a dichotomy between religion as a hierarchical dogmatic system of population control and as a personal spiritual practice. I see considerable difference from a Zen practice seeking inner peace and enlightenment, and a power broker banging a Bible or a Quran. I know scientists with first rate brains whose spiritual practice may embrace something like the former while rejecting the latter. Religion may not be hardwired (though a tendency to believe in unseen things may lurk in our wiring, as Sagan noted, in Dragons of Eden), but a desire to understand oneself as part of something larger, as connected to all life, may be somewhat baked in, both genetically and memetically. I think it's possible humanity can embrace reason and science without discarding spiritual acts like meditation, contemplation, and some seeking after metaphysical questions. Any utopia that discards all such activity would seem to risk a totalitarian cliff edge.

There's some variation in the menstrual cycle - 21 to 35 days. The moon's synodic period, however, is 29.5 days. So the correlation is kind of weak. And mammalian estrus cycles show wide variation among species, a range which is not at all centered around the lunar month. So those cycles look to be controlled by biological factors not astronomical ones.

And the individual level we can see people interacting many different ways with a religious framework. My wife is Catholic, and derives great spiritual value and comfort from that without taking on some of the more dogmatic and intolerant baggage that some of that faith might do. Her experience is such that I am unable to dismiss the value of a spiritual practice for some people, even if it differs from my own (more buddhistic, with a small B) or I see some members of a group acting badly and without compassion. For her, it's a path of compassion, patience with others, tolerance, and support of personal freedoms (including, yes, medical freedoms for women) in life. The ugliness and manipulations of organized heirarchical religions that alienate @Phi for All and many others here is something I understand, while at the same time recognizing that some people are adept as "taking the best and leaving the rest" in their religious practice. So I find myself falling short of the Hitchens position - religion poisons a lot of life, in a lot of places, but it doesn't poison everything. For some people, their religious practice is a way to codify and issue self-reminders to love, care, show compassion, withold harsh judgments and work for peace. For every religious nut who wants to send women back to the middle ages or squash LGBT folks or violently smite their enemies, there is a religious person who hasn't forgotten what great teachers like Jesus and Gautama taught. And are better people for it.

Thanks, this stresses the coherence problems of epiphenomenalism which as a metaphysical naturalist I reject. Everything either supervenes on the physical, or reduces to it. The relationship of consciousness to the physical is definitely the first one. And consciousness then becomes, in a physicalist view, a certain sort of relationship between collections of matter. E.g. consciousness is not a thing like my brain, it is the relationship between the body, its brain, ("me") and the external world. Sort of like the novel is not ink on the page but the relationship created by those inked pages between a storyteller and a reader. (don't hold me to all this, I'm still working it out....)

I think of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil when this topic comes up. https://philosophybreak.com/articles/hannah-arendt-on-standing-up-to-the-banality-of-evil/

Please tell me you're pulling our legs.

I don't see a clear line of evidence that geomagnetic storms directly cause CV problems. There is a more direct causal link between GM activity and levels of PM 2.5, and the latter is a definite influence on CV problems due to particulates of that size passing through the alveolar membrane and entering the bloodstream. I find no evidence that the pineal gland has anything to do with this, outside of various pseudoscience theories. If the pineal gland does anything besides respond to day/night cycles with melatonin production, no one has found evidence of it. If it were so easily "messed up" by magnetic fields, then I would think power plant workers, physicians, particle physicists, auto salvage yard workers, and anyone receiving an MRI would be in SERIOUS trouble!

I accidentally clicked on the oldest page of the quantum theory subforum, p. 85. https://www.scienceforums.net/forum/9-quantum-theory/page/85/ Why are there all these threads, with zero posts, and the threads are dated Dec. 31, 1969?? Fascinating. Seems "Guest" was quite prolific 54 years ago.

For that three minute period when Nikki was explaining why America should send troops into Mexico, I was able to view Trump as slightly less insane. Then the moment passed and I went back to hoping Trump wins the nomination and makes Biden's job much easier. Trump is his own best Democratic political attack ad.

None needed - I was being grumpy. And my bad for not proofreading. I don't need to be giving math students topological nightmares.

EU is one of the world's largest markets for digital goods and services, so its regulatory moves are influential on companies around the world. Somewhat analogous is California when it enacts regulation on automobiles - automakers pay attention due to the size of its market and its influence on other states.

Per MSM, a deal was reached on Friday, so it looks like the EU act will become law. How much it furthers the EU's existing laws on digital privacy is still not clear to me. The Post reports... The deal on Friday appeared to ensure that the European Parliament could pass the legislation well before it breaks in May ahead of legislative elections. Once passed, the law would take two years to come fully into effect ...

Not to sound grumpy but I think a benefit of the doubt that my autocorrect turned cuboid to cube would have been welcome. Of course I know it's not a cube. Cheers.