iNow

I know, and that's meaningless metaphysics that's ill-defined and too broad to have any use.

It has to do with accessing different parts of the brain. You'll also find studies related to people lying who looking up and to the left when they are accessing the "creative" side of their brains.

Conservapedia to form their own schism What I'm saying is that, to borrow a description from the great George Carlin, it's all bullshit anyway. What difference does it make whether you take a 2000 year old book and claim that it is infallible as written literally, or you retranslate it and claim that the translation is infallible, or you make up some entirely new bullshit and claim THAT'S infallible? It's all bullshit, and the beauty of this Conservapedia project is how close they come to flatly admitting that it doesn't matter.

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ap.html http://outreach.mcb.harvard.edu/animations/actionpotential.swf

I guess great minds think alike.

TAR, I'm just trying to wrap my head around your thoughts on this. I've looked over your contributions again. They seem centered around this idea of how people group together... How we want to be associated with "winners," and how we tend to see people who think/believe differently from ourselves as outsiders and possibly even enemies. Since the theme of this thread is how our brains predispose us toward belief in deities and provide us with a proclivity toward religious practice, is it your intent to suggest that... since we naturally group ourselves into like-minded groups and families... that this is part of the reason religion has been so successful through the centuries? I'm just trying to put this into neuroanatomical terms. My sense is that your suggestion is that our brains prime us toward group behaviors, and that religion is just a strong grouping mechanism. Is that an accurate portrayal of your intended point? If not, perhaps you can help to clarify so we can rejoin the same path in this discussion.

And that is part of the us/them... ingroup/outgroup... pack behavior which exists in all animals, and is just exaggerated in humans with our ability to name things ("that's a chair... that's a table... that's an orange..."). We are natural classifiers, so we naturally see other ideologies and skin colors and all manner of things as "different" and tend to dehumanize them. However, you're right... not really related to the subject under discussion.

But, by your own logic, there is no such thing as "different nows." There is just one now, and all of those nows which came before are included in the present... a present which is itself fleeting, ethereal, and non-tangible. Either way, that's all metaphysics, not Relativity.

30.

I'm trying to figure out whether or not I like or dislike being a lightening rod. My name has come up in this thread so many times it requires scientific notation to express.

I got a neg rep today which said this: you are a troll and a suck hole...DS It didn't effect me since the person had zero rep power, but I want to repeat my previous suggestions when this idea was being considered... months ago... that we not use neg rep at this site. It just creates more problems than we need. My two cents. EDIT: Ha! I just realized that dr.syntax used the term suck hole in his post above! You rock, dude! You also neg repped me in the "greatest moment today" thread when I shared that I had a hot chick hit on me in the grocery store (asking me to feel her melons). I love you, man!

Why not just spread it around a bit? Go rep one or two other people, and come back to the post you wanted to thank the original person for... If nothing else, this has the benefit of not requiring coding changes to achieve what you desire.

Hi Jimmy, I'm a little surprised that nobody really addressed these questions, but there were a bunch of creationists and other crazies running around the site this weekend, so I guess that explains it. You asked these questions in the "how religion hijacks neurocortical mechanisms and why so many believe in a deity" thread, but I pushed them here since they were a bit off topic there. Ever heard of autism? That's very much genetically caused. Here is a link discussing the differences in the brains of autistics which really covers this pretty well: http://autism.about.com/od/causesofautism/a/AutismBrain.htm There are definitely other cases of people struggling to understand the thoughts of others, but autism was just the most obvious example. I believe so, yes, but I'm struggling a bit right now to think of the proper search terms to find them. For example, there has been a lot of work which shows that primates tend to have an innate sense of "fairness," and how chimps will rescue and protect complete strangers if they see them in distress. However, I cannot recall at the moment who did that work, or what search terms to use to offer a link. Maybe someone else can comment? I agree with your conclusion that there is great overlap in the neural architecture despite cultural differences, but I would caution you against using hallucinatory experiences to quantify those. Hallucinations are very "loose" and nondescript... they tend to be vague and difficult to use in scientific comparisons. However, I do agree that commonalities in visions can often be associated with how our brains are primed to receive certain stimuli in specific ways, and that this priming transcends any learning or environmental differences. Yes, absolutely. As you mention, it is a spectrum, and for that reason we all land on it somewhere (either "off the charts," "not at all," or "somewhere in the middle."). Great question! The data certainly seems to suggest that schizophrenics are more likely to themselves be religious, but I am not familiar with any comparisons about the likelihood of schizophrenia between religious and nonreligious families. Part of the challenge here is that so much of religion is taught (indoctrinated), and while human genetics predispose us toward such practices, it's difficult to parse out the taught aspects of religious practice. In short, we can pretty easily identify schizophrenics and whether or not they are themselves religious, but it's a bit more difficult to identify a "religious family" or "nonreligious family" and then count how many schizophrenics are in their group and make broad comparisons with a valid sample size... although, somebody somewhere has likely performed such an survey (and this particular question does fit in the other thread, sorry for missing that).

You might find something here: http://databases.biomedcentral.com/browsesubject/?page=1&init_perpage=20&sub_id=2011&x=20&y=19&perpage=38

Much of what you're bringing up relates to general psychological development in children, and is a bit peripheral to the topic of this thread. What you can do, though, if you're interested in better understanding those ideas is to look at the age groups identified in the earlier studies which have been shared and see how those align with things like the Erikson model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson%27s_stages_of_psychosocial_development I'm personally not too interested in exploring them here, however, since (as I mentioned) they are peripheral/tangential to the actual topic under discussion. Enjoy.

Also, in addition to issues with storing the waste and protecting it for 500 years... in addition to guarding against terrorist activities... in addition to the fear felt by the people, there is also the issue of money. It takes a metric assload of money, resources, and time to bring even a single plant online. The up front investment required makes it less attractive than things like solar and wind. There's a show called Focus Earth on one of the Discovery sister channels (Planet Green) that did an entire episode this weekend just on nuclear. Interesting approach. Check here to see when it's on near you: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tv-schedules/series.html?paid=237.15646.125013.36399.6 Nuclear Power: Focus Earth investigates nuclear power; where the technology came from, the obstacles it has faced, and what the future might hold for this controversial energy source.

No. Some changes are good. Some changes are not. No changes are intelligent. Don't we have like three of these threads already active?

He reinforced these points this morning on Meet the Press: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/ns/meet_the_press_online_at_msnbc#33163540

How do you figure? I never listed the six solutions, yet you assume to know precisely what they were and that I left out creation? Give me a break. Again, this is pure nonsense. The solutions have all been demonstrated very clearly to work... on their own... and to very adequately explain the origin of life on this planet. Creation never enters into the mix, and yet they work without fail. The ONLY lack of certainty is on which one actually took place... NOT that they could not work without a magic sky pixie. I find you incredibly hypocritical, lambasting science for not having evidence (which it actually does possess, but reality never got in the way of a creationist, I suppose), yet you propose creation and offer ZERO evidence yourself. The double standards and mental gymnastics required to hold your position are staggering. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedGood deal. Thanks, Mokele. Can this thread also be locked?

"Religious thoughts" is a very ambiguous term with a broad set of possible definitions. Can you be more precise in your language so I might have a chance at addressing your question accurately? As most of the first several pages of this thread addressed, we are all born with an innate tendency toward these types of thoughts. It's not like one day we're sitting there eating our strained peas and all of a sudden we become religious after spitting up all over ourselves.

Well, the links you shared might be put to use to suggest why one religion is more popular than another, but IMO are not relevant to why we tend toward religion in general. I'm not sure I follow your question. Yes, human youngsters learn a great deal from modeling others (see the work by Albert Bandura on social learning theory, for example). This is common across all primates, and can easily be found in many apes. One thing which sets humans apart is in the teaching. We actively teach our young, whereas most other primates tend to simply lead by example... letting the young pick up their knowledge simply from watching and repeating what they see. These tendencies tend to be selected via selection, and the make-up of our brains will certainly play a role in how they manifest during childhood. Does that address what you're asking?

Erm... yeah. My comments from the previous post apply to this one, as well.

Yeah... Maybe I'm a bit thick, but I'm still not seeing the relevance.

TAR - Just to be clear, I understand the reward/punishment mechanism rather well. My point is that it doesn't seem to apply to the neurological architectures under discussion in this thread... architectures which... when taken together... result in a tendency toward belief in deity.

Nonsense. We have roughly six different VERY workable solutions to this question. The ONLY uncertainty is in which one is most likely.