Phi for All

Friday every day! Work till noon, then five hour lunch. Productivity!

This seems to define doubt as a 100% negative factor. It always reduces your figures on faith, which seems to be 100% positive. Sometimes doubt can be helpful. I left for a meeting Tuesday and had to turn around and come back home because I doubted I had locked the back patio door, and I hadn't. Doubt kept me from having an unlocked house all day. Doubt makes us question how we do things, makes us strive to do things better, keeps us wondering if what we're doing is best. Sometimes faith can be harmful. Lots of cases where folks don't get their kids immunized or treated for a disease because their faith tells them 100% that their god will take care of it. Faith can be fatal. Also lots of cases where folks were convinced the Rapture was about to happen, so they sold everything they had and gave it away so they could enter Heaven meek and poor like the Bible says. Before you reply to this part, read up on the No True Scotsman fallacy. You're starting to go off into the weeds here. While your mental state can affect the way you groom yourself, it does not rearrange any molecules to make you better or worse looking. You can hold the muscles in your face a certain way based on what you're thinking, but you're not changing anything physiologically. The mind has no mechanism to alter the body in this way. It's critical to the function of several systems, but none of them can do what you're describing. Studies have been done that show a correlation between how you hold your body and various mental states. There's an actual chemical reaction that happens when you smile, and quite counter-intuitively it makes no difference if the emotions behind the smile are real or not. Just the act of stretching those smile muscles sends a nice happy hormone cocktail to your brain. Here's a fun one to try. Stand up straight, arms relaxed at your sides, chin on your chest. Then look up as if at an imaginary audience who is applauding, then slowly raise your arms up into an overhead V and stand there basking. You don't even have to imagine the audience, it's the raising of the arms gesture that signals the release of the hormones. There is a really good TED Talk on this subject, but I couldn't find it in a quick search. I'll be able to look this up tomorrow. So far, your definition of faith covers the positive thinking aspect, but what concerns me most is how you apply it as a form of belief. If I explain a certain phenomena to you, and you believe my explanation, are you just going to tell yourself you really, really, really, really believe in it, or are you going to check into my explanation to see if it has merit? Because most of the things people tell me they have faith in are things they can't possibly know about, so I can see why you'd have to use faith, since you can't rely on evidence. Really? In all of recorded history, you don't think there was a single pious, devout, faithful believer who really thought his god could do anything, even grow back a lost leg? I made up Uncle Leo, so his leg doesn't have to be lost in a war. Let's say he lost it while helping to build the new church. And yes, regeneration is possible in some species, so it's not something that couldn't possibly happen, which makes it even more likely that someone would think an omnipotent god could fix it. The real point is that it calls all healing by faith into question. There are correlations between healing and positive thought, but not on the level many people think, like healing cancer or reversing disease. Again, since we're talking about things we can't possibly know ("God cured Aunt Cathy's cancer"), isn't it much more likely that Aunt Cathy's doctor did what she paid him to do? And while I like the idea of more research into embryonic tissue regeneration, I don't think it's going to happen because a bunch of folks think they can fix themselves with faith. Historically, when people think they have something all figured out, the last thing they want to do is spend more money to investigate further. That's actually one of the perks of working with science. The methodology requires you to think of problems in terms of hypotheses, which may eventually become full theories, but are never considered "proof". A theory is always being challenged by new evidence, something we wouldn't do if we thought we'd "proven" something to be true. IMO, your statements show that you value some explanations more than others. What is the source of that value? You say you "have faith in science and biogenetics", but are you basing your belief on the raw gut feelings of faith or do you believe so strongly because you could actually go check any evidence you want, run the experiments yourself if you felt it was necessary, review your results with peers to find out if they refute or support the findings? This is what I mean by trust as a form of belief. I trust science because I can actually check it against reality to see if it holds up. If so, it's a trust-worthy explanation.

So far, none have been mooooved enough to say anything.

I think our extremely sophisticated communication and cooperation are two of the basic traits that allow humans to thrive as they do. Discussion with others in so many varied fields and circumstances and education and cultures gives me perspectives I can't get at work or home. Every perspective teaches you something, even when shown to be wrong (maybe especially when it's shown to be wrong). Discussion allows us to gather data beyond what can be gathered in other ways, so we can make better informed decisions.

So if this technology is being used by Argentina successfully on their range-fed beef, which means it can't be adversely affecting the animals, where's the ethical dilemma in extracting yet another useful, sustainable product from our domesticates?

A fan app for your phone might fool the body like this wristwatch does, and would probably be free.

OK, so that makes doubt quantifiable too. By that definition, is faith 100% surety, while doubt is anything less? I'm not sure I understand the part about envisioning routes of outcomes and using faith to alter them. How does faith accomplish this? And now we have "brain power" as another quantity. I'm trying to pin down some of the variables so the definition of faith is less vague and malleable. If it's to be meaningful to more than just yourself, your definition needs further editing. And it helps us all to nitpick our definitions of such things, to keep the foundations of our beliefs strong. For instance, I've found it necessary to separate belief into three categories. Hope, trust and faith. If I'm merely wishing that a certain explanation is true, like life after death, then I call it Hope. I have nothing to support this belief, but I like it anyway, so I Hope that somehow my consciousness (if it's separate from my physical brain) lives on after my body dies. If I can find evidence to support an explanation, I don't have to hope anymore, I can start to Trust. The more supportive evidence there is, the more I can Trust that explanation. This is how I feel about science. It gives me a way to quantize my belief that makes logical sense. I can build on Trust in a way I can't with Hope. I have no real way to increase Hope based on the parameters of that type of belief. Faith asks me to believe strongly, but requires me to do so without supportive evidence. Many people think requiring evidence is anathema to faith, that it should be a belief based solely on feelings. Faith seems to ask me to believe more strongly than I would with either Hope or Trust, and to base that belief on things I can't really know, like if there's a god or which religion is "right" or that Uncle Leo's cancer was cured by God but not the leg he lost in the war. So this is why I ask you to define faith. I want to know why you think it has a quantifiable power when it seems to have nothing to tether it to reality. Faith is supposed to be so strong, but it seems to float above a non-existent foundation. That doesn't sound right. Stronger by what measure? I'll check around, but I've never seen a study that shows a pessimist's brain is using more than the 25 watts of energy the optimist's brain uses. If it truly affected power by a couple of orders of magnitude, we'd all know about it. There have been studies about positive thinking affecting recuperative processes. I'm not sure they were able to conclude that there's a method for measuring the quantity of this effect. That particular Law is in regard to force. How do you measure the force of a thought, at least one that doesn't simply translate to lifting an arm to deliver the force? I know how powerful thoughts can be, they can have a huge effect on much of our lives, but I'm not sure this "power" can be equated to an energy or force. Certainly one can train one's mind to be more focused and efficient, but is that increasing some sort of measurable energy? Prayer is tricky. I mentioned earlier that Uncle Leo's cancer went away when his church group prayed for him, but that same group couldn't pray his amputated leg back. And while there are a million stories about faith curing cancer and other illnesses, nobody ever had their leg grow back after being amputated, whether prayer was involved or not. This should make us question whether faith is really at work in ANY of these situations.

And the person who wears this will need lots of hugs when they see what it does to their laptop as they type!

And I really have no problem with that angle. It's a market thang and should correct itself with the proper regulations. What bothers me is that regulation is the best way to force change when the market system can't, and THAT'S where corporations like GE are so huge they can lobby for legislation that bypasses the regs, or give themselves special tax considerations. Slowly, the government is able to phase out certain standards, like the T12 fluorescent tube, and ban further manufacturing of it, but it's being done on a corporate schedule, NOT on a schedule that factors in climate change. The lighting industry is 50 years behind TV and radio in getting rid of vacuum tube technology in favor of solid state electronics. There was much less push-back then about changing over. But in lighting, they've reached a plateau in efficiency. GE and others moved from the T12 tube to the T8 tube, and now they make a T5 tube that isn't even as efficient as the T8 (and yet they're really pushing it, and so are the utility companies, hmmm). And all the while, there is solid state technology that uses half the wattage and represents a much better cost/benefit ratio. There are banks that want to loan money to businesses to make the switch, since the payments are tailored to the utility savings, which are essentially guaranteed. If corporations like GE stopped meddling in favorable legislation, the market would most likely favor technologies that removed old developmental platforms like vacuum tubes and replaced them with more efficient, more sustainable and more environmentally responsible platforms, which would increase demand and drive the price down. IOW, I shouldn't have to argue so hard about major corporations resisting something as accepted and proven as solid-state electronics. They've put some heavy brakes on technology advancement we really need, in a way I feel thwarts the spirit of the market economy. It's not simply an "Oh well, that's business!"-type issue.

Ethically, who am I to deny any creature a good probing? "Invasive" is a human perspective, and not one that translates well to other species. Does the sheep feel better after all that wool weight is "invasively" removed? What if the cow feels better without all the extra gas? I'm not up to speed on the methodology, but it's doubtful people like the Argentinians, who rely on a reputation for great beef, would ever do anything to upset their cattle with anything painful or stressful, especially if it's attached to them most of the day.

Thanks for clarifying. Since I don't need the mod hat, I'll toss it aside and join in, if you don't mind. How do you define "faith"? Is it just a very strong belief, or is it an unshakeable, abiding, unquestionable belief? You talk about faith having power, as in, "...attaining power from anything else you put enough faith into." This suggests that faith is quantifiable, and I've heard people talk about it like that ("if you truly believe", "have a little more faith"). How do you increase your faith in something?

And not just oil companies. Heavy hitters like GE are also resisting efforts to replace old gas vacuum tube technology with solid state electronics, not until they've squeezed every last dollar from the incandescent and fluorescent lighting infrastructure (*cough* frikkin' CFLs *cough*). Changing to smarter, more efficient systems that don't add to the climate change problem is being resisted by every industry that has a sizeable stake in an old technology.

! Moderator Note If you're unwilling to discuss a subject, then you're preaching or soapboxing, which is against our rules. You should probably start a blog, or find someplace to teach. Everyone else is here to learn through discussion. Shall I close the thread? If your beliefs are fragile, sacred things that can't stand being examined, there's no point opening a thread here. Nothing personal, but we're a discussion forum.

Mods can check to see if a sockpuppet account is being used, and over the years among the staff at SFN it's become sort of a barometer for intellectual dishonesty. We watch these posters who are so desperate to win arguments patting themselves on the back and we just want to puke. It's not something we'd really want to be good at, and as swansont said, who has the time? Admins could pull it off, but they have even less time than the Mods do. I've been here 10 years this month, and I don't think any of the staff I've known in that time would ever jeopardize the site's reputation by sockpuppeting, not to win arguments or gang up on another member. I suppose it's possible an admin might be posting under an alias to remove the intimidation factor of discussing things with admins, but I could never imagine one of them using both accounts in the same thread. ROFL, timo.

I'm skeptical about how those extra few feet of visibility are going to benefit me based on the extra cost (whatever that may be). Is it really that common not to know which way your wheels are turned when four-wheeling? The extra reaction time might be worth it, but it's clearly designed for off-road action where you aren't going that fast anyway. I've done a lot of off-road driving, but I'm not out there every weekend either. Perhaps this is something professionals who spend a lot of time four-wheeling have been yearning for, and it's interesting, but my first thought is that it's an option that sounds great but may not be worth a lot of extra cost.

I remember commenting years ago that some trolls probably grew up pulling the wings off flies. Kids love when they can see the direct effects of their actions, like tossing rocks in the lake to watch the ripples they create. Trolling seems like most attention-getting ploys, where the cause is not as important as the effect. If you won't pay attention when I'm being good, maybe you will when I'm bad. And then they find out that bad is often easier, and it gets MUCH more attention than good.

Easy. Wait another day. The smell will be out of the carpet because the carpet will be disintegrated. The smell will still be in your house, but that's OK. Wait another week....

Why jump to such an extreme conclusion based on an almost 90-year-old diagnosis of an isolated case? Symptoms like this are common to other disorders as well. Asthma, for one, which might also be exacerbated by the cold. Do you see what you're doing here? You don't know anyone who has been outside longer, so it can't happen? That's an argument from incredulity. Then you have to speculate ("it must've been like half an hour or something") to make your argument fit. The article just says he "went to his barn to do his chores, and, on feeling his breath being shut off, rushed back to the house..." Why do you think "it must've been like half an hour or something"?

It's an acronym. *your-dad-on-a-Pogo-stick* So I say "Why Dopes?"

Hah! Like anyone could even catch a Thrungbeast after day five when all its feet inflate. That's a quiillat of trouble I don't need!

What about this for an experiment: blindfold yourself, and have an assistant nearby with a laser pointer aimed at your special spot. Your assistant should also have a stopwatch and a couple of dice. He rolls the dice while you're blindfolded. This tells him how many times he's going to shine that laser on you in a one minute timeframe (how long does it take for you to "feel" the laser, a second or two exposure?). He records the results and matches them to how many times you "felt" the laser. Do this sixty times and you'll have some data to work with. edit to add: Ideally, after you do this sixty times, you should switch places with your assistant and do it sixty more times. Then do it another sixty times with someone who doesn't know about the laser, as a control.

I'm still a bit skeptical about a lot of stuff I trust as the best explanations, so losing a strong belief in things I can't possibly know isn't a hardship.

I can see the point, but my lack of comprehensive knowledge in most areas means I'll always have a lot of empty space in my bag of "things you know".

Creationism (can ydoaPs come out to play?) has five syllables. The rhyming haiku is comparatively new to you few who do. The triplet rules! Crafting three such lofty lines is called a High Coup.

We change according to a very short list of priorities, and "intuitive systems" didn't make the cut. It's not enough benefit that our calendars are made more rational, we need a whole lot more to make a change of this magnitude. If they gave us the extra day each year as some kind of uber-special capital-D Day of Something Outrageously Awesome, we could change pretty quickly. Something along the psychological lines of opening up the fire hydrants on a hot day, but for adults.