thinker_jeff
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Posts posted by thinker_jeff
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I actually believe in a higher power, but not in omnipotence (so I guess the God of Abraham is right out). To me, faith isn't about blind belief, it's about reminding me their are many things I don't know, that humans don't know. Science is about removing as much doubt as possible about what we know. I have faith that consciousness lives on after the body dies, but I don't let that faith excuse me for not learning as much as I can about this 3-dimensionally-limited life I'm living now.
Respectful.
Do you mean that you believe in the God who is not the ONE in Bible?
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Well, I feel something strange.
It seems that all of the replies are on the same side. In reality there are a lots of people, including some scientists, believing in God; however, there is no such kind of replies in this topic. Why?
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What if in the future it became scientifically proven that God exists?
(By God I mean the famous one, the omnipotent, omnipresent one etc)
How would you SFN athiests react in response to this revelation? How would your feelings about God change? Would you love Him or hate him? Would you worship Him or would you be neutral about the situation?
What questions would you ask God if you could talk to Him?
By the nature of science, it is never trying to prove if God exists or doesn't.
I have no feeling about God at all.
If God appeared on front of me, I would ask why he did not make the earthquake on the warfield. If he did so, the current earthquake could replace the atomic bombs in 1945 so that the today's Japenese were able to live peacefully.
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My general perception is that children usually mature to be a couple inches taller than their parents. If this would be a constant rate, human height would increase 1-2 feet every 12 generations. Presumably, this rate has increased - otherwise ancient humans would have been the size of rodents. Likewise, it is hard to imagine that average human height will be 10+ feet tall over the next decade or so. So what are are parameters of generational height increase and are we just in a period of history where rapid height increase is due to advances in nutrition and exercise/physical activities that influence growth?
This general perception may not be true. Some research indicates that Australians are getting shorter.
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Delete this, too.
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Please delete this post.
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This is, in my experience, untrue.
How are you defining "systematic"?
Let's define "systematic" first. I use this word as "presented or formulated as a coherent body of ideas or principles" (See http://www.merriam-w...nary/systematic ).
For example, if a person thinks that the reason we do what we do is just executing the instruction from God, he should believe that God runs the world all the time. Otherwise, his philosophy is not systematic.
When you charge on a scientific research, you should have a lot of things to consider, a lot of issues to resolve, and a lot of challenge to face. If you are qualified to be such person, you should know how to formulate your scientific ideas as a coherent body, which means you should have the systematic philosophy already.
By the way, I believe that all of the religions are systematic philosophies, too.
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I'm just wondering if people who go choose a career in science need philosophy.
The first, every adult has some philosophy evidently because there are always some general questions about the world and people you have to explain for yourself. For examples:
Does God exist or doesn't?
If God exist, how does God run the world?
If God doesn't exist, where does the world and people come from?
Why do we do what we do?
The second, when you are qualified to have a career in science, you must have a systematic philosophy of science already.
The third, some systematic philosophies have many theories contradicted to science.
Therefore, you don't need systematic philosophy before learning science; and in fact, that is good condition for your study in science.
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PhDwannabe,
You have many good points about neuroimaging. For example:
We are living in a biologically determinist age--we have been at least since Watson and Crick, and it's only accelerated with the development of high-quality neuroimaging and other biotechnologies. Somehow, someway, we've forgotten that things were real before we could see them on these scans.
It seems that you extend your opinion to conclude neuroimaging useless other than just "cool things". I agree with you that a lot of researches have not used such technologies wisely nor interpreted such data rigorously; however, neuroimaging does provide us more empirical data than before. For instance, how can we study "imagery" by behavioral data without help by neuroimaging? Of course, the data extracted from neuroimaging is still coarse and inconsistent. But at least it is some fact to help us to understand the brain better than before. Psychology needs neuroimaging and the improvement of such technologies.
So people find these cool things (and they are cool things, by the way) they start frothing at the mouth and yell "HARD-WIRED!" As if we're so neatly separable into hardware and software. The next time you hear the phrase "hard-wired" in the popular science media, put your hands over your ears, close your eyes, and scream at the top of your lungs.
The terminology of "hard-wired" is misleading in popular science media. It seems that should be replaced by "plastic-wired".
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Left-lateralized early neurophysiological response for Chinese characters in young primary school children
Abstract
Adult readers consistently show an enhanced early event-related potential (ERP) response, N170, for visual words compared with other stimuli at left posterior electrodes. Developmental studies with words in alphabetic languages showed that this neurophysiological specialization for print develops rapidly from 6 to 10-years of age and becomes established around 10–11 years of age. Here we report for the first time the development of the word-related N170 in Chinese children learning to read Chinese, a logographic writing system radically different from alphabetic scripts in visual and linguistic features. We recorded ERP responses elicited by Chinese characters and line drawings of common objects in three groups of primary school children at 7, 9, and 11 years of age as well as college students. Results showed that the amplitude of N170 evoked by Chinese characters in the 7-year-old group was significantly larger than that in the 11-year-old group and the adult readers. Remarkably, all four age groups – even the youngest group – showed an increased and left-lateralized N170 response for Chinese characters, as compared with line drawings, suggesting that a relatively specialized mechanism for processing Chinese characters is already emergent by as early as 7 years of age. Our results, combined with studies of non-Chinese child readers suggest that the developmental pattern of word-related N170 is highly similar across different scripts, possibly reflecting increased visual processing expertise that children acquire through everyday reading.
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I have a little problem with this article (not the paper, because I haven't seen it.).
Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.
To receive $16 tomorrow is not immediate reward, so that there is no time pressure on the subject.
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What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst-psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women. If this man were able to suppress his sexual desire in this situation, would his hunger also subside? This is the sort of question Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, sought to answer in the laboratory.
Tuk came up with the idea for the study while attending a long lecture. In an effort to stay alert, she drank several cups of coffee. By the end of the talk, she says, "All the coffee had reached my bladder. And that raised the question: What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?" With her colleagues, Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen and Luk Warlop of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tuk designed experiments to test whether self-control over one bodily desire can generalize to other domains as well.
In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes-the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder-the researchers assessed participants' self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.
The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.
"You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder," Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder.
The results were a little surprising from a theoretical point of view; a lot of research in psychology has supported the concept of "ego depletion"-that having to restrain yourself wears out your brain and makes it harder to exert self-control over something else. But Tuk says this seems to work in a different way, maybe because bladder control is largely an automatic, unconscious process.
© Association for Psychological Science
Link: http://www.utwente.nl/news/full-bladder,-better-decisions
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I think - this is commercial for toys instead of scientific discussion.
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Is there a way to read the article without paying, or does it have to be bought?
I guess that you have to pay to read the article, that why the line of copyright follows.
I have a question - Is consciousness really an established concept in scientific paradigms?
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Abstract
Scientific paradigms have a tendency to rise fast and decline slowly. This asymmetry reflects the difficulty in developing a truly original idea, compared to the ease at which a concept can be eroded by numerous modifications. Here we formulate a model for the emergence and spread of ideas which deals with this asymmetry by constraining the ability of agents to return to already abandoned concepts. The model exhibits a fairly regular pattern of global paradigm shifts, where older paradigms are eroded and subsequently replaced by new ones. The model sets the theme for a new class of pattern formation models, where local dynamics breaks the detailed balance in a way that prevents old states from defending themselves against new nucleating or invading states. The model allows for frozen events in terms of the coexistence of multiple metastable states.
© 2011 American Physical Society
Link: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v106/i5/e058701
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There's no point. If not even a single sentence or phrase caught your attention enough to ask about it specifically, I doubt I could summarize anything in a way that works for you.
Did my question cause offense to you? If so, I am very sorry.
Be honest, I am a new member and still learning the culture in this forum.
Personally I like to think based on the facts, especially on the facts supported by research. Of course, I want to hear the novel opinions as far as I can catch the points.
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I can't tell if by "dissonances between cultures," you mean ideological conflicts or social conflicts. First, it would help if you would distinguish between culture and people/individuals. Individuals have/practice culture but they are not culture itself. Culture is learned and practiced. In order for "cultural dissonance" to be interpreted as such, there has to be a cultural basis for 1) distinguishing them as being different in the first place and 2) recognizing difference as conflicting/dissonant. This, of course, presumes that everything it culturally-situated, including the perception of culture itself. One culture may recognize cultural difference between, say, Catholicism and Protestantism while another culture may see them as part of the same culture of Christianity. Dissonance from one cultural perspective, thus, might appear as consonance from another. Which culture do you then validate? Or are they equally valid in their relativity?
I am sure there are people of every national citizenship who have more or less knowledge of "other countries." The interesting thing is not to compare which country has more or less awareness of other countries but rather to study how awareness of national difference influences human behavior. Imo, people who learn a lot about multiple countries also learn to differentiate themselves more strongly according to the differences they attribute to national difference. Someone who doesn't even understand that global nationalism divides the world according to national lines is more likely to simply be confused why someone they meet wouldn't speak in a way they understand, yet they would have no basis for attributing national difference because as far as they are concerned the whole universe has only people like them.
Now, the ironic thing about this is that while global cosmopolitans would call that view naive, it is actually the material reality. All humans are actually the same species and it is entirely possible to look at all linguistic and cultural differences as cultural distinctions within the same population. In other words, you can as easily look at the world as a single multicultural society as you can look at it as multiple national societies. Ultimately, I think it is confounding to view it as multiple nations/societies, because this requires multi-level analyses. I.e. you can look at, say, Germany and France as interacting as national units - but you can also analyze Fritz and Jacques working together to fix up a flat in Barcelona, for example. Imo, it makes far more sense to part with the national-unit level analysis and just view global interactions as having nationalism influencing them in some ways. But you can't ignore that the national-units are structuring metaphors at the cognitive and institutional levels.
I feel a little lost. Could you summarize your points in a few sentences?
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"Troubles between countries" are mostly caused by collective identity (ego-identification) that is propagated in discourses of national vs. international relations. E.g. if you look at most news websites, they divide the news into national and international or world news. The implication is that there is a national sphere that is separate from the global sphere. Then, nationalism is narrated using the pronoun/adjective "we/our" consistently in discourse. This promotes a form of collective egoism by stimulating people to constantly identify themselves as being part of (or excluded from) a national "we." Promoting this sense of collective identity/unity allows for discourse about "our culture," which promotes the idea that culture is collectively homogenized and that individuals identifying with the collective/national identity have no choice but to be defined by the culture that supposedly naturally defines them as subsidiaries of the collective. This is of course all arbitrary cultural ideology, but people experience it as naturally factual because of the way it is propagated.
Thus, when people are sub-consciously ideologically convinced that they are part of a cultural body that makes their nation distinct and separate from others, it is not a far stretch to characterize different nations as collective entities that interact in ways similar to how individuals interact with each other (e.g. conflict, cooperation, etc.). This discourse of global social life as the interactions of national giants, i.e. collective entities as individuals, has similar mythological function as religions where multiple gods interact with each other in a sort of complex yet comprehensible narrative. These mythological narratives have the function of 1) promoting social solidarity among people ascribed the same national identity 2) structuring interactions between people ascribed different national identities. In other words, it makes people feel comfortable to have national relations to structure their interactions with strangers. That way, they don't have to take the risk of thinking independently and assessing people they meet on the basis of interactional information. Instead, they can rely on stereotypes about the global discourse of international relations they are familiar with. E.g. "you are part of an imperialist nation and my nation is victimized by yours therefore I must distrust, dislike, and otherwise hold you personally accountable for the things I attribute to your nation." This logic is central to many global minoritarians, imo. Without it, many would be completely lost in dealing with global social complexities.
Impressive theory. I am interested on how many theories in political science backed by researches in psychology.
Perhaps we can grant Lemur's point but still accept that there is some role for purely linguistic factors in accounting for the dissonances between cultures that seem to resist all efforts to build bridges by finding a common rationality.
Based on my personal experience, generally people in U.S. have less knowledge about other countries than the foreign people's knowledge about U.S. I guess that is the reason of the low efficiency of U.S. diplomatic resources.
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Well put, but what do you want to discuss about it?
I always think that many troubles between countries are caused by cultural difference. The people in one country interpret the motivations of the people in another country in the way different from each other, especially when they are in different languages and cultures. This research supports my thought, that why I post it here.
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Abstract
The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make “well-informed” decisions. Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems: differences that are larger, for example, than pre-existing differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans.
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016782
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Airlines don't stop everything do they? Some times sicknesses sweep through nations, like Cholera in Hati, or in Mexico. The population of Mexico is resistant to Cholera since in very recent geological time their ancestors drank water which contained Cholera. But, not every process of evolution is driven by resistances to germs either, which should be obvious. There's also this article to provide yet some more evidence http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4643312.stm that natural selection is still at work, and once again, here's this http://www.time.com/...1931757,00.html
Is Hati a modern country? Is Mexico a modern country? No, they are not!
If you question why different people is asking you a similar question again and again, the answer should be obvious that they do not understand your point.
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LINK: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/70/70ra14.abstract
Abstract
Evidence from behavioral and self-reported data suggests that the patients’ beliefs and expectations can shape both therapeutic and adverse effects of any given drug. We investigated how divergent expectancies alter the analgesic efficacy of a potent opioid in healthy volunteers by using brain imaging. The effect of a fixed concentration of the μ-opioid agonist remifentanil on constant heat pain was assessed under three experimental conditions using a within-subject design: with no expectation of analgesia, with expectancy of a positive analgesic effect, and with negative expectancy of analgesia (that is, expectation of hyperalgesia or exacerbation of pain). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record brain activity to corroborate the effects of expectations on the analgesic efficacy of the opioid and to elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms. Positive treatment expectancy substantially enhanced (doubled) the analgesic benefit of remifentanil. In contrast, negative treatment expectancy abolished remifentanil analgesia. These subjective effects were substantiated by significant changes in the neural activity in brain regions involved with the coding of pain intensity. The positive expectancy effects were associated with activity in the endogenous pain modulatory system, and the negative expectancy effects with activity in the hippocampus. On the basis of subjective and objective evidence, we contend that an individual’s expectation of a drug’s effect critically influences its therapeutic efficacy and that regulatory brain mechanisms differ as a function of expectancy. We propose that it may be necessary to integrate patients’ beliefs and expectations into drug treatment regimes alongside traditional considerations in order to optimize treatment outcomes.
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It hasn't been "stopped" by any means, which if you read any of my other posts you would know, but its a way to prevent deaths.
I agree with SMF that you are trolling.
Please explain why in modern society the Natural Selection still continues in human beings if they are lived in the way to prevent deaths.
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Why do you think air-lines are so against letting any sort of contagious person into another country even if the disease isn't that big of a deal in the home country? It's because the other population of a country they are going to might not have a natural immunity since their ancestral populations might have never been exposed to the pathogen and therefore could have never evolved to be more resistant to it.
This is another example to see how the process of Natural Seletion has been stopped by public heath care in modern society.
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What if it became scientifically proven that God exists?
in Religion
Posted
I tell you the truth - Your attitude causes me unhappy, even though I am a guy with happiness and joy in daily life.
Every one should respect others in this forum, despite of the disagreements about religions and other thoughts.