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Marat

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Everything posted by Marat

  1. My point about doubting Thomas, Peter's abjurations, and the Disciples inability to keep watch with Christ even though he wanted this is that this type of normal human response makes sense only if we are talking about the reactions of people to human authority figures. We don't always trust them 100%, we can't always be perfectly dedicated to them. But if you had really seen God incarnate before you and lived with him for some time, it is utterly inconceivable that you could doubt that he could do anything, no matter how miraculous; or that it was worth being murdered by an angry mob rather than offend him; or that it was worth staying up all night with him if he apparently needed this, no matter what the motivations for not doing so. This is supposed to be God we're talking about! Wouldn't you cut off your arm with a dull butter knife rather than do the most minor thing to disappoint him? I think the reason the Bible stories don't make sense on this point is simply due to a failure of imagination on the part of the human authors; if the stories were real people would have been struck speechless on seeing God incarnate in human form, rather than being able to doubt or mock him, as the members of the Senhedron did.
  2. It's a huge question to try to say when the modern scientific method actually came into existence. Bacon made a major contribution with his emphasis on empirical study, and Descartes made an important addition with his concentration on quantification and skepticism, but there is no one point where you can say that here we have a period clearly prior to the modern scientific method while here we are clearly within it. Elements of the modern scientific method were present or absent in various scientists at various times. Thus Hippocrates was already insisting on careful matching of hypotheses to observation, and in Ancient Egyptian medicine you can find excellent clinical descriptions right next to pure magic. Tycho Brahe was doing meticulous observational astronomy while operating under an outmoded hypothesis. His assistant, Kepler, was modern enough to insist that the greater accuracy of Brahe's data be more closely represented by a better hypothesis, but old-fashioned enough to be reluctant to accept that anything so 'imperfect' as an ellipse represent the planetary motions rather than a circle. The falsifiability criterion for testing scientific theories is an invention of the mid-20th century philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper, and was not identified as a methodological principle of science before then. It was even highly controversial for the first few decades after Popper stated it, though now it is coming into general acceptance as accurately describing what science does or should do. The use of the term 'natural science' rather than 'natural philosophy' was not in response to any sudden discovery in the history of science that the previous methods had been wrong and the new ones were right; after all, even Newton conceived of himself as doing natural philosophy. The full title of the 'Principia,' after all, is 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,' or 'The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.' I am not sure this discussion is really so much about the scientific method, since the whole theory of scientific revolutions as developed by Kuhn and his followers since the 1970s really doesn't focus on that, but rather, on how scientists using a valid scientific method respond to data which contradicts established theories. There is an essential tension here, since, as I mentioned before, normal science has two responses to data which don't fit the theory. One response is to reject extremely challenging new data as simply 'having to be wrong' because it doesn't fit the established paradigm of explanation. This is the response of scientists to reports of ghosts, levitations, perpetual motion machines, etc. Because they are off the scale, they are not even allowed to be true, and even if serious defenses are made of these things with measurements, observations, and experiments, the initial response is to try to feed the conceptual pressure which results generate away from the reigning hypothesis, which has to be preserved at all costs, and to explain them away as experimental errors, extraneous variables, inaccurate statistical methods, poor smoothing out of the curve, etc. Even if these results are admitted, their full revolutionary implications for the established theory are rejected, and they are built into the existing theory via ad hoc constructions which preserve the theory by assigning some sort of exceptional or non-threatening status to the recalcitrant data. But as these accommodations and their accompanying conceptual tensions accumulate, the theory starts to look so overburdened by these ad hoc devices (e.g., epicycles) that it is eventually but only reluctantly abandoned. Black was still using the material theory of heat at the beginning of the 19th century even though Rumford's result was decades earlier; phlogiston theories were still around a generation after Lavoisier's work; and in the 1926 edition of the 'Yale Medical Journal,' there was a paper arguing for digestive disorders as the true cause of diabetes, since this had been a leading theory before the work of Banting and Best in 1921-22, which clearly proved that a failure of the pancreas to produce insulin was the cause of type 1 diabetes. It is thus in the institutional reluctance to match hypotheses to startling new data that the unscientific nature of science emerges, rather than in any actual problem with the use of the details of scientific method. Even Aristotle thought that his theory should match the data, so the reluctance of Einstein to accept the implications of quantum mechanics for causality, and of modern scientists generally to accept the Michaelson-Morley result, the wave-particle duality of light, etc. is really not an issue of modern versus antique scientific method. I guess I explained badly my example of the reluctance of modern medical science to accept the new data challenging the hyperglycemia hypothesis of complications. No one doubts that type 1 diabetes is caused by autoimmunity, since that has been increasingly accepted even since the 1960s. Interestingly, the cause of type 2 diabetes is also now coming to be seen to involve some autoimmune factors, so the two disease subtypes may be more similar than once thought. But the problem now is with what causes the vascular and neurological complications as late sequelae of the diabetic state after the initial disease has already come into existence through genetics, some unknown environmental trigger, and autoimmunity (type 1), or genetics, perhaps some autoimmune effects, and lifestyle triggers (type 2). The existing theory has been that the sole cause of complications in diabetes is the hyperglycemia which cannot be safely corrected by insulin or the various oral medications now available. But what Duncan Adams' research shows is that the same autoimmunity which caused the patient's diabetes to come into existence in the first place by destroying the pancreatic beta cells which produce insulin also persists throughout the life of the patient and goes on to destroy other tissues as well, such as the retinas, the kidneys, the cardiovascular system, and the nervous system -- rather than hyperglycemia being the agent of this damage. (See Duncan Adams, "Autoimmune Destruction of Pericytes as the Cause of Diabetic Retinopathy," Clinical Ophthalmology, 2 (2) 295 (2008). If Adams is right, then the entire approach to diabetes treatment is radically wrong, yet his results are now three years old and no one wants to discuss them. No matter how good the underlying scientific method is, if the scientists simply look away from results which are too challenging to the reigning theories, then the method is all for naught. I guess
  3. I think that during the first half of our lives we look for joy, even at considerable risk of increasing our suffering, but then in the second half we seek to avoid suffering even at the cost of missing out on joy. Is it that we eventually notice that with an aging body the odds of things turning out badly increase? This may also explain why suicide rates among the old are so high. You raise some interesting questions about the locus of human identity. In one sense, since consciousness is private unless deliberately communicated, we are all islands shut up unto ourselves. If we focus on this characteristic, then we can readily say that if experience starts to be more negative than positive, and the future seems likely to be no better, or perhaps even worse, then why not commit suicide? But in another sense, since our consciousness is informed by and intimately linked to our surrounding society and culture, we can see our experience as having meaning only in its cultural context. Thus even if one part of this wider society, our own consciousness, becomes unpleasant to the person most intimately experiencing it, our entanglement in the emotional and social meanings and duties around us can induce us not to subtract ourselves from the overall human network, since our connection there may still be valuable. Shakespeare says in 'Julius Caesar' that "The good men do oft dies with them, while the evil lives after," so 'my life' in terms of its whole meaning context may well have a strange existence that goes beyond what I can actually experience. But does this matter to me if I can't personally experience it or have knowledge of it? Should I care if after I am dead I am hated by the world and my body is torn apart by dogs in the public square, with crowds gathered around shouting obscene exclamations and hoots of derision?
  4. The good news is that some people grow out of this, and for them it remains just an unpleasant memory from high school days.
  5. If this occurs while the vision seems temporarily to fade out it is probably the result of orthostatic hypotension. The visual images of sparks or flames, especially around the periphery of the visual field, are usually symptoms of retinopathy or some degree of retinal detachment or buckling. This apparance can be made more intense by activity.
  6. I agree. By 'civilized society' in the post above I just meant 'all of the developed societies in the world today.' I would accept that almost everything, no matter how offensive in any particular culture at any particular time, has been legal, approved of, or even required elsewhere. Thus to have been a mature male in Papua New Guinea a while ago who had not yet killed someone from a neighboring tribe would have been a personal failing. But still, my general point remains, which is that all or nearly all societies seem to want to forbid things with the power of the criminal law even though what is forbidden is physically harmless, but simply violates some disembodied social norm or value. Given this, we can't give Mill's Harm principle -- that society should only forbid acts which are harmful to others -- as much strength as we would like, since people won't approve it without exceptions for incest, bestiality, Wayne Newton imitations, etc.
  7. But how do you explain 'doubting Thomas' and Peter denying Christ three times after the crucifixion? I would think that if a person had ever been in the presence of God, even embodied as a person, he would be so overwhelmed by the pressingly obvious divinity of the person that doubt would be out of the question. And how could his disciples be insufficiently motivated to stay awake with him on the night before the crucifixion? "Hey look, God-in-human-form over there is schmitzing because he has to die tomorrow, but I'm so sleepy I can't really be bothered staying up with him." It just doesn't seem to be a plausible response of people who had actually been in the presence of the divinity.
  8. It is not possible to hypnotize a person without the subject's active cooperation; it is not a passive process. Rather, the subject has to play along with the hypnotist in relaxing himself into adopting the voice of the hypnotist as his own for the period of the hypnotic session and giving it the authority the subject's own voice or thoughts normally have, which is why having a better imagination makes people more hypnotizable. This voluntary transferring of authority to another voice is very clear in self-hypnosis, in which the hypnotic subject is also the hypnotist, and he simply transfers authority to an internal voice constructed in his own head which he then uses to convince himself of what he already wants to do (e.g., stop smoking, lose weight, etc.). People 'go under' to varying degrees when hypnotized, and experiments have shown that people don't go so far under the control they have given to the hypnotic voice that they will accept and act on commands which are utterly contrary to what they are willing to do. This indicates that the subject is still ultimately in control of the situation.
  9. But I thought that growth rates in India and China were 6% and 8% respectively. I have an option to invest in either or both countries, so I thought both would be the best option. Are you suggesting that India is not a good place to invest?
  10. Moontanman: I was interested by your remark that after having kept some paddlefish for a while you had a number of observations to report which contradicted established theory about these fish. This reminded me of my observation when I was a child that earwigs fight each other using their back pincers as weapons. About 20 years after observing that I was stunned to see a scientific journal article debating whether earwigs ever use their back pincers as weapons. It's amazing what the hobbyist sees rather than the professional sometimes.
  11. I agree with you entirely that the modern Green Movement fails to consider the scale of lifestyle adjustments that are going to be required to achieve its goals. The chief economist of the British Green Movement actually said that people would come to be satisfied with 'green benefits' in place of the commodities that the current economy had gotten them used to needing. So even if you now had to live in a cave and use a wax candle for illumination, you would be fine with that because of how much you'd enjoy the fresher air, the cleaner water, and the greener vistas. While that is of course foolish, if you accept the hypothesis that further industrial development is going to destroy the planet through greenhouse gas production, how do you resolve the tensions between the need to downsize the economy and the lifestyle expectations of the population?
  12. While that is a good statement of John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle -- that nothing should be made illegal unless it can actually be shown to harm some other person -- no society actually has the courage to be so liberal as to adopt it. For if they did, what could they say about things like bestiality using large animals in heat, so even the animal is not harmed, or incest where birth control was used, say where conflicts with other family members could be avoided (e.g., the father is dead so the son and mother have a torrid affair). Things like these seem horrid, and no civilized society would permit them, but the exercise of freedom in such examples certainly does not demonstrably harm anyone, and criminalizing these acts arguably creates unnecessary harm for those who want to do these things.
  13. In connection with the original churches being houses of prostitution, there still are temple prostitutes in religious shrines in India. The girls work there for a few years to collect enough money to help their families or finance their own later endeavors.
  14. I think the answer is that the Jewish Sabbath started on the evening of Christ's execution, which is why they were in a hurry to break his legs so that he would die, thus allowing them to wrap things up before the Holy Day.
  15. Religion is stuck in a paradoxical situation. If God attempted to present himself, communicate his message to humanity, or represent himself in a human form, and did so adequately, then there is no way that anyone could have doubted that what they were encountering was divine, as even some of the Apostles seem to have done. So in this case there would have been no room for free will and thus no room for blame or sin, since everyone would have accepted the self-evident validity of what they saw. They could only doubt it sufficiently to retain room for free will so that they could get credit for faith and belief if God presented himself inadequately or deceptively, but then why would he bother with the presentation at all? To trick people by doing a poor job of it?
  16. Ptolemaic astronomy, just like modern astronomy, was based on empirical observations! It was just using the wrong orientation point to characterize the relative motions observed. The change from Ptolemaic astronomy to Copernican astronomy can be found in every history of science text: Ptolemaic astronomy was not simply magic, such as, for example, Renaissance medicine was in its doctrine of cures by similars, astrological calculations, precious gems, etc. I think the reason why professional reputation and careerist calculations which are properly external to science can still have a major influence in the acceptance or rejection of new scientific results and new theoretical paradigms is that experiments are seldom entirely clear and decisive. Consider for example Galileo's discussion of the demonstration of 'Galilean relativity' of motion in his example of a knife dropped from the mast of a moving ship, which still lands as the base of the mast rather than behind it. The contemporary Aristotelians, whose doctrine was still being taught at universities into the mid-18th century, could argue against it that the result Galileo observed was too small to refute their position. The case was even less clear for Copernicus, who lacked the physics at the time of his theory (which he presented only as a hypothetical) to provide a physical basis for it. According to the physics he was using, his theory of the solar system, if true, would have meant that the birds would fall out of the trees as the Earth moved around the Sun, given that he was writing ca. 120 years before Galilean relativity. This would give plenty of room for the defenders of the Ptolemaic theory to refuse to accept Copernicus' account and still seem to have good scientific theory on their side. Or even look at the situation today in diabetology. Duncan Adams has proved that changes in the retinal pericytes of diabetics can only have been caused by autoimmune processes and not by hyperglycemia, and yet this is so far off the mainstream, which tries to explain all the vascular and neurological changes in diabetes by hyperglycemia, that almost no one accepts Adams' result, and in fact most researchers in the field have never even heard of it. So Dr. Adams in New Zealand is recommending that patients be treated with immunosuppressive rather than hyperglycemia normalization, while everyone else is confined to the hyperglycemia route. Why is this result simply being neglected? Logically it should start a panic or a revolution, as Adams himself noted in his paper, but there is just general silence, as though it never happened, because it is simply too disrupting to deal with. To me this looks like the start of what historians of scientific revolution call 'abnormal science,' when there is a clearly stated challenge to the existing explanatory paradigm but no one has yet tried to deal with it. In theory, there will now ensue a period of attempts to accommodate this discomforting result, either by challenging the empirical validity of the study or trying to contrive odd devices to fit the result into the existing explanatory paradigm. Only if the existing paradigm accumulates sufficient conceptual burdens from these efforts will scientists finally decide to abandon the paradigm and adopt a new one. But what this model, developed by Thomas Kuhn and extended by Imre Lakatos, suggests, is that scientists don't always behave like good scientists and just respond neutrally to each new empirical result as it emerges, but instead they borrow from their existing theories to add or subtract weight to what is reported and direct its pressurs either away from the theory or perhaps eventually permit them to operate against the theory -- but only after considerable resistance. You wouldn't say that physicists were operating with a pre-scientific natural science in the 1880s when their response to the Michaelson-Morley experiment was to twist and swirm out of it to save the aether hypothesis at all costs.
  17. I don't think it is necessary to be able to frame every experience by continuing to live before, during, and after it for the experience to have any value. That would only be the case if what we were seeking was the pleasure of the experience per se, so we would want to enjoy anticipating it, living through it, and then savoring it afterward. With suicide, in contrast, the point is not either to enjoy the experience of killing yourself -- which would really be unpleasant in itself -- or to enjoy the sense of self-satisfaction afterwards which would come from the feeling of having exerted some measure or control of or defiance against an unendurable life. I think the proper view is that the whole point of suicide is just to bring an end to life, which for some people in some situations can be terrifying, hideous, or monstrously painful. The cessation of all sensation is the goal, not the enjoyment of the experience of suicide itself.
  18. You can buy gingko biloba at any health food store. Vinopocetrine can be purchased online, as can sulbutiamine.
  19. The historian of science Derek Price said that genius arises from the ability to synthesize results from two or more disparate areas of knowledge to make a significant new advance. It is essentially a process of triangle construction, with the base of the triangle defined by the conceptual distance between the insights in the two different fields synthesized, and the apex being the new theory. He posited that as science grows, fewer and fewer people will be able to command different areas of knowledge sufficiently to be able to synthesize them, so there will be fewer and fewer geniuses. How much did Galileo, Kepler, and Newton have to read and learn in order to be able to make a significant advance relative to what was already known? Contrast that with today and you can see why it seems as though genius is becoming rare.
  20. The case almost looks like a joke, given the similarity of the defendant's name, 'Coffeen,' to 'caffeine,' which is the substance in Red Bull that would make him act strangely. The basic rule in criminal law is that you can't be found guilty of a true crime (more than a regulatory offense) unless there are two elements -- the actus reus (you actually did the act that matches the definition of the crime) and the mens rea (you had the requisite mental state to intend the act and to be responsible for it in the legal sense). The legal sense of sanity, which is a test used to determine whether the criminal was responsible for his criminal act so that he can be punished, in most jurisdictions comes from the old McNaughton Committee's 1842 definition stating that you must "know the nature and quality of your act and know that it is wrong." So if you kill your wife in a stupor because you think she is trying to murder you with a knife, when in fact she is just offering you a spoon, you are not guilty because your act, as you understood it in your delusional state, was an innocent act of self-defense, which does not provide criminal intent. In this case it seems that the judge is referring to the language of the McNaughton test, so the court must have determined that the accused was acting under the influence of the right kind of delusion. For intermediate cases where the accused is just befuddled by the influence of alcohol or some stimulant like Red Bull but is not delusional, usually the law will say that in killing someone the defendant didn't have sufficient mental capacity to form the 'specific intent' to bump his mental intention up to the high level of clarity required to constitute the required mental state to be guilty of murder. The killing is then defined as manslaughter, since manslaughter does not require 'specific intent,' but only 'general intent' for conviction. The distinction between specific and general intent crimes is arbitrary, since it is not evident that your intention has to be any more specific to murder someone rather than just to commit manslaughter, but this labeling device is used to recognize that drunks are less responsible for their actions than normal people, but still not as free of responsibility as insane persons.
  21. It has long been clearly established that if schizophrenic patients are returned from treatment to so-called 'high EE' families -- that is, families where there is extreme, vocal expression of negative emotions -- their relapse rate is very much higher. In contrast, schizophrenics returning to 'low ee' families where critical emotions are not verbalized tend to do much better. Even in 18th century psychiatry it was a rule at the famous Tuke Clinic that mental patients should be isolated for the initial period of their treatment from their family and friends so that they would not be exposed to what we would today call the schizophrenogenic effects of their friends' negative emotions. The stereotype of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' has existed for a long time, both in psychiatry and in popular culture. With the rise of feminism and political correctness, public cultural values required these scientific observations to be suppressed (cf. Galileo and the Church), just as the long-established observation of 'female subjectivism' also had to be revised out of existence in the 1980s, but now the old insight has been dressed up in acceptable form by the construct of high EE families being schizophrenogenic. This latest study has apparently slipped in under the radar and will soon have to be refuted.
  22. Perhaps I phrased that remark badly. Essentially I am referring to truths that were already long ago regarded as sufficiently well-established with epidemiological, experimental, and clinical results that they were part of routine clinical practice. Then suddenly the media will 'discover' these truths because a new and entirely superfluous 'flogging a dead horse' study is published that reconfirms the old truth by additional data. Suddenly what every new fellow in the discipline already knew as common knowledge since 1957 appears in the headlines as a 'breakthrough.' Through this technique, medical 'progress' can be manufactured to fill any slow news day, and the same old results can be dressed up and trotted out every few years to make it seem as though things are actually getting better in medicine.
  23. While the private sector just seeks to maximize its own profit and thus neglects externalities (the costs of its profit-making on the surrounding population, social infrastructure, and biological environment), governments are supposed to protect their citizens against these externalities. Unfortunately, with the rise of neoliberalism, governments have adopted the corporate agenda as their own, so the damage corporations do to their infrastructure, environment, and population are simply discounted. Thus you get absurdities like Margaret Thatcher privatizing the British coal mining industry so as to maximize profits for those who became the private owners of it, while the cost to the nation in terms of abandoned mining towns where churches, roads, schools, libraries all became suddenly useless because the industry had moved to Portugal where the labor costs were cheaper was just written off as unimportant.
  24. The population of Europe and much of the Caucasian world is already spontaneously declining, so no population reduction measures are necessary there. There used to be Malthusian pressures to keep populations low enough so that some minimal level of prosperity could be maintained in poor countries, but since the world now intervenes to prevent mass starvation in the Third World, these pressures against population increases outstripping resources and infrastructure no longer operate. I wonder if the world the Gates Foundation is doing to wipe out communicable diseases in the Third World is eventually only going to make problems worse by the resulting population increases. Even though wealth transfers from the richer to the poorer parts of the world will not create the basis for a long-term resolution of poverty, they will if they are continued forever. Wasn't the Tobin tax on pointless, speculative currency manipulation supposed to generate sufficient funds to wipe out hunger in the Third World? Too bad the speculators have sufficient influence with the various governments of the world that their interest in being able to speculate tax-free trumped the interest of the world's poor to eat. Estimates of the costs of the various pointless wars the U.S. has recently conducted vary considerably, but I've seen ball-park figures of $1.5 trillion for the mistaken invasion of Iraq (if only we could have afforded to wait another few weeks for the Blix Report showing that there were no WMDs!) and another $1 trillion for the invasion of Afghanistan, to which the Taliban and al-Quaida will return after we withdraw over the next few years. So just from those two useless invasions we have $2.5 trillion, which at $3 a day required to keep a poor person in the Third World from starving adds up to 250,000,000 people kept from hunger for 10 years. Not a bad result to achieve at the cost of merely losing the joy of having ruined Iraq and Afghanistan, killed hundreds of thousands of the local people, plus many thousands of our own troops -- all to prevent as many Americans dying from the repeat of a terrorist incident which killed as many U.S. residents in 2001 as died from accidental drowning that year.
  25. Nicotine use is a form of self-medication to reduce anxiety. If you have ever seen a group of schizophrenics, you'd astonished at how many of them are chain-smokers. But as necessary as some people might find that addiction for self-sedation, it is one of the most offensive to other people, not just because of second-hand smoke but also because the stench of it spreads everywhere around the smoker, getting on books, papers, clothing, and even food. Also, kissing a smoker is like kissing a full ashtray, which detracts a bit from the frisson. Also, when you consider that a lobster is a type of undersea insect, that should cure anyone of a seafood addiction -- to say nothing of the hepatitis risk with most shell fish.
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