gib65

Everyone knows that octupi change color. The theory behind why this is is because this allows them to camouflage. However, I heard from a source that this is also used to communicate - that one octupus can go through a quick series of color changes and another octupus can see this series and confer a meaning from it.

I couldn't disagree with you more. Why couldn't a metaphysicist have a full understanding of the mechanics of the brain and still feel there is something missing? I'll agree with any materialist insofar as the brain being physically deterministic, and that this explains behavior, but that's as far as I'll go. I don't subscribe to the reduction of phenomenological experiences to neurons, chemicals, and electric impulses. I will agree that they are perfectly correlated though, but that's it.

There is the String Theorist's explanation for the weakness of gravity. They say that gravity is actually on equal par with the other forces of the universe except that 99.99% of gravitons leave our universe almost immediately after they are emitted from mass. This leaves an infinitesimal amount to account for the effects we feel from gravity. String Theory is not accept by all though, and it might not even be falsifiable. So don't take this to be "the answer" to your question.

It's gotta have a biological component to it as well. I mean, don't anorexics have lower apetites? I know that if I tried starving myself, I would cave in less than a day.

I've got a half eaten sandwich on my desktop. It's been there for a couple days. Really should throw it out.

Are there any good mp3 modifying programs out there? I'm looking for something that will, at the very least, split mp3s into smaller partitions - that is, take one mp3 file and make 2 out of it, one that consists of the first half of the original, and one that consists of the second. Something similar to "Sound Recorder", a simple wave file manipulator that comes standard with most Windows OS's. I would convert the mp3's to waves and play with those in Sound Recorder, but the particular mp3 I'm dealing with won't convert in any converter program I download. I don't know why. It plays fine and all. Can anyone help me?

Yet another thing I wasn't aware of about quantum consciousness. This keeps getting better every time.

Yes, but this is a different kind of memory than what I intended to convey in my diagram. "Object Recognition" is a type of memory for what things are. The box labelled "knowledge and memory", however, means to convey the storage into memory of specific events or instances, such that I can say "Yesterday, around 4:00, I was looking at my blue coffee cup."

Not necessarily. It depends on what you mean by "travel". If you mean to go from some point A to some point B and pass through all points in between, then yes, instantaneous travel would be impossible. But if you mean teleporting from A to B without ever having been to any of the points in between, then I think this could be possible. It sounds like the latter is what Transdecimal was talking about.

So you mean no arrows between the circles? Each feature of the cup gets processed individually and directly? Well, you may be right about the four arrows going directly from the cup to each of the circles, but based on what I know about the neurology of vision, the arrows linking each circle to its neighboring circle are correct. Information coming into the primary visual cortex first gets processes as points, and then that information is passed on to "line detectors" and then certain collections of lines are recognized as shapes, and then this shape information is passed on to "object recognizer" that associate the shape with a label like "cup" or "tree" and so on. However, I don't think the visual system can recognize the raw incoming data as a "cup" or "tree" right away - that is, without some lower level processing of the lines, colors, shapes, and so on. I think what the neurolgical sciences tell us is that the brain identifies the objects it sees based on its components like lines, shapes, colors, and so on.

This may seem like a really odd question, but I need to know the answer for a paper I’m writing. My question is also hard to articulate so I hope no one minds if I make it rather lengthy. I’m wondering about how signals in the sensory cortexes of the brain, and particularly in the visual cortex, are relayed to the cognitive centers. Specifically, I’m wondering if the linear processing of information (from simple feature detectors to more complex features to abstract features to concepts and so on) is completely serial or is there some parallel processing, and if there is, how much? For example, the diagram below shows the a simplified model of how information is processed from the raw visual input to the cognitive centers: I’ve used the example of a cup in this diagram. Even though this is general how it works, something doesn’t make sense to me. If the information was purely serial, as it is depicted here, then we would be able to gain knowledge of the fact that we are seeing a cup, but all the details of the cup (lines, colors, shapes) would be lost. In other words, we would be able to say “I see a cup” but we would not be able to say what color it was, what shape it was exactly, whether the handle was on the right side or left, etc. The reason it seems this way to me is that the only information that is relayed to the cognitive centers is the recognition of “cup”, but not the information of shapes, lines and colors you see in the previous steps of this serial process. Therefore, what I’m wondering is how accurate this alternate diagram is (neurologically): In this diagram, the recognition of a cup is still relayed to the cognitive centers, so we still see a cup, but all the information in all previous stages is also relayed directly to the cognitive centers in parallel. In this way, we can also say what color the cup is, and shape it takes, and so on. So my question is: Has there been any research to show that the second diagram is more accurate than the first in a neurological sense?

Can somebody please explain to me, in plain English, what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is. I read it on wikipedia and I couldn't understand a word of it.

Yes, it's Godel (thank you). With the correct spelling, I was able to do a search and I found this quote: "In the late 1940s he demonstrated the existence of paradoxical solutions to Albert Einstein's field equations in general relativity. These "rotating universes" would allow time travel and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory." from this site (near the middle of the page). So how exactly do his "rotating universes" entail time travel? Is it indeed time travel into the past? I understand the basic principles behind SR and GR, so is it explainable in these terms (please, no math, just concepts)?

He's the guy who proposed this method to travel back in time in 1948.

I heard of a theory about how to travel back in time. My sources say it was proposed by Kurt Gurdal in 1948. You would need to spin a disc half the size of the solar system at near the speed of light, then take a spaceship and travel along its transverse axis. If you do this, supposedly you would travel back in time. Is this real science or pseudoscience?

The size of the moon and the size of the sun on the human retina are equal. They are both about 0.5 degrees. I was wondering if there was more to this than mere coincidence - like is it somehow essential that they are the same perceptual size for life to evolve on Earth. Is it important, for some obscure reason, to have perfect solar eclipses now and again?

I've reached minus 30 celcius. Damn, that was a cold day!