Phi for All

! Moderator Note Welcome to internet forums! Discussions take place in pockets of mutual attraction and opportunity. All those you accuse of following you around are simply replying to the latest topics for discussion, which you yourself are doing. We try not to make things personal here. Nobody is following you, they're following the discussion you're following. Of course, that's just what I would say if I were following you around....

It's not people who should support your argument, it's evidence. Adding more people to your arguments won't help. A key principle in science is falsifiability (or, "Is it even possible to show this is false?"). If we did an experiment with fruit flies in wildly different environments for several generations and didn't see any signs of changes in allele frequency, it might show that evolution is false. Evolution is therefore falsifiable (it's not wrong, but there is a demonstrable way to show it could be). God(s) however, have unobservability. If we can't detect something, we can't measure it, we can't know anything about it, so we can't do science with it. This also means you can't falsify them, you can't show that they don't exist. And I think that's also why they've lasted so long, because people believe with their emotions, and think with their brains.

Well yeah, but getting called immature?! That's like getting carded at the liquor store for guys our age. More compliment than affront. Repulsive, that's a judgement call. Some folks think Basset Hounds are ugly. We know better, Moon.

Oh, aye.

I don't think the Bass paper is talking about shared consciousness, or a single mind, when he talks about the plurality of the conscious mind.

Oh, I agree! I used to mark scripts in English like that when I had to speak in public. Have you ever noticed they can change your facial expression in a speech, when you know you're about to ask a question? Your eyebrows might go up, your head might tilt. I think it helps convey more meaning, or at least aid in understanding when you give/get prompts like that.

3x5 cards aren't as smooth as teleprompters.

Can you link to what you read? It sounds like popular science that was taken out of context, then misinterpreted, and finally misquoted for good measure.

He's always been just one lab accident away....

Faith seems to require me to use my strongest form of belief on something I can't possibly know about. How is that smart? That's not meant to be rhetorical. I've asked this question here many times. Since I can't do anything to verify whether or not god(s) are real, faith is simply strong belief in things nobody really knows anything about for sure. Why is that smart, why is that logical, why is it reasonable?

So right there are two admitted possibilities that have absolute mountains of evidence and documentation as to their manifestations of images that weren't there, over a large time frame and involving hundreds of thousands of individuals. It's much more rational to suspect one of these two phenomena are at play than it is to suspect a deity manifested itself to your grandfather. That's not saying it's impossible, it's just saying it's much more likely to be something natural.

Instead of those lighted scrolling signs that have stock prices constantly being updated, we need the same thing with political fact-checking. Put them wherever people have to wait on line, like grocery stores and banks.

Pareidolia.

Perhaps it's not higher intelligence, but rather our primate sense of justice and cooperation that needs to label some things evil, for acts or behavior that are irredeemable. In fact, I would say you need to be highly intelligent to be truly evil. It seems all about intent. A lion can naturally hunt down a gazelle and start eating it while it's still alive. But it's not doing that to enjoy the suffering, or anything else we'd call evil. However, if we were to do the same thing, it would be unnatural, and because there's no good reason for causing such avoidable stress and suffering, we would most definitely label that act evil.

That makes sense, especially for reading. It might make reading aloud a bit more difficult, since the comma often gives the speaker a little advance notice about a pause, or a chance to breathe.

Too wishy-washy, imo. There are stronger proposals left. But I really wish Parliament would squish this because of the lies. This case shows there's a need for a more nuanced approach to the conflict between truth from politicians and the protection of free speech. Politics isn't held to the same regulations as advertising your goods or services to the public. There are good reasons why not, but surely there must be better ways to let EVERYONE know when a campaign's promises aren't true. Unfortunately, the way our news is aggregated for us, many people aren't exposed to the information every voter should have. Why should our leaders be allowed to lie, and why is it important to allow them to? For a system like this to work, doesn't there need to be a better way to reach more people about fact-checking?

C'est magnifique! Congratulations!

I think sentience, and more importantly the heightened intelligence we gave up so much to get, are definitely responsible for what we call evil. I always come back to early man, guarding his tribe/group from the terrors of the dark, and imagining tigers in the shadows, evil you can't see until it pounces. It's that imagining of something you can't sense with your normal senses that would be highly prized. Predicting which shadow has the evil predator would have seemed like magic, and would have led to imagining many more unseen, unheard entities, including deities that protect as well as those who hunt humans.

Abraham's god always sounded this way to me. The perfect god, imo, would have set things up exactly like this, counting on human intelligence to see through the BS to figure out that learning to deal effectively with our own evil is the only thing that matters. Then the god shows up, restores all the lost limbs from every amputee, rings the moon like a gong and says, "You got it right! Now forget about me and go explore!" Well yes, but he also did that passive/aggressive BS where he made us imperfect, and then berates us for it, to the point of making us spend eternity in Hell if we don't go out of our way to please him. Seriously, that's a very messed up move. "I'm all powerful, could have made you any way I wanted, decided to make you sinful, which is the one thing I can't tolerate. Oh well." Which one of the 9000+ sects do you belong to?

Clearly a template is needed. Mistaking corporate manipulation of fear for actual conservatism seems to be a common factor. Ditto bigotry leading to intolerance and racism. And a lot of the worst ones in the US revolve around the fact that the People can just go fuck themselves if a decent opportunity to make the Dems look bad crops up. Of course, most of this is due to the decision to underfund public education in order to promote privatizing it.

I nominate those Americans who were too poorly educated to understand exactly what Donald Trump meant when he said, "I love the poorly educated!" and are voting for him because of it.

I watched a small pod of killer whales play with an exhausted seal. They could have killed it at any time, but spent most of the hunt tossing it with their tails playing keep-away, until it wasn't fun anymore. I've also seen a pod spend hours separating a baby whale from it's mother before tiring it out and then drowning it, and then they only ate its tongue (there were 14 killer whales in the pod). If any other creature besides man could be called evil....

What if a body, ending between the second and third cervical vertebrae, were cloned in a tank from your own cells, then attached to your old head if your factory body goes bad? You aren't creating life, you're using your own cells.

What a gift! Hey neighbor!

I'm completely against the cabbage patch procedure, for ethical reasons. Same with using stork methodology. These may sound natural, but as life creation processes they fall short in several key areas.