MonDie

It's grammatically invalid to hand you an adjective, but I argue that the adjective/noun distinction is artificial. I convey the same information whether I say that you're green or say that you're a green thing. If I handed you Kermit, I would be handing you a green thing.

I ran across this. Personality and Self-Insight in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder "Individuals with ASD were more Neurotic and less Extraverted, Agreeable, Conscientious, and Open to Experience." Given that autism is a strong hereditary component, I believe about 60 to 90% in the twin studies thus far, autism may account for some of the lessened agreeableness and conscientiousness. However this also suggests that non-autistic atheists may actually be even more open-minded.

I think I somehow missed the second half. Did you add it in later? Obviously it is the child's idea of the monster that is affecting him, and that idea exists. Anyway your physics is losing me since my physics is limited to what I learned in chemistry and astronomy textbooks. I'm going to have one more unresearched, crazy, maniacal philosophical speculation? It seems odd to ask whether an adjective has referents, but many adjectives can be made into nouns. Green is a property, and green things are a kind of thing. Conversely, to determine whether a thing exists I must have some properties by which to identify it. However to say that what exists is the thing which possesses the properties can give the impression that e.g. a boat would still exist even if it were no longer a boat, which is clearly wrong since it would mean that boats could exist in the absence of anything boat-like. I suggest that the word "exist" merely makes into an adjective the properties that define the noun. "Do boats exist?" really means "Is anything boat-like?" "Anything" is of course any instance of properties. Given that we understand the world empirically, detecting sensory properties, it questionable whether we can conceive of a thing apart from its properties.

This is what viruses do. See lytic and lysogenic cycle for how viruses use the cell's machinery to translate their own genetic material. Gene therapy involves modifying viruses to take advantage of this. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/genetherapy/gtsuccess/

Let's not single them out. Many Americans believe in gender and group disparity (see SDO) and capital punishment. Of course most of them don't even read The Bible that much.

Alas this could just be supply and demand, an indication of who buys guns and why. It might be linked to support for capital punishment. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1478601X.2015.1048546?journalCode=gjup20

I need a speedometer while I'm at it! Living up to my username unfortunately.

I'm trying not to post, but this is bugging me. Testing the ‘Extreme Female Brain’ Theory of Psychosis in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder with or without Co-Morbid Psychosis http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4466563/ They found lower empathizing bias (EB) scores for those with higher FSIQ (a measure of IQ), but moreso for the ASD-NP group than the ASD-P group (Figure 2). However their downloadable spreadsheet has five ASD-P entries with FSIQs of exactly 500 or 600. It also shows empathizers (Type E) scattered about the spreadsheet, whereas Table 2 reports that none of them were Type E. Perhaps the modulation by IQ wasn't quite significant, so they fibbed it. I suppose it wouldn't have had a huge effect since IQ was split into discrete categories anyway, but these fakes comprised 5 of the 13 in the ASD-P high IQ group. The fakes were mostly empathizers labeled "Balanced". Correctingly, there would have been 18 in total if they had been included. Alas their exclusion from the analysis could have been the intent. I'm just confused because their spreadsheet doesn't seem consistent with their findings at all.

Vegetarian diet and mental disorders: results from a representative community survey http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466124/ I ran upon this longitudinal study uncovering that adoption of vegetarianism tended to follow mental illness diagnosis. I haven't read it yet. Perhaps they're trying to manage their illness (unsuccessfully), or maybe it's an empathizing difference in people on the psychotic spectrum, which includes mood disorders.

On the pandorabots.com homepage I spoke with Mitsuku, who was at least good at defining words. Alas, she's a creationist. :/ Looking into AIML interpreters for Linux.

If your weakness is actually something that just doesn't interest you, it may be an inefficient application of effort. Effort goes a long way if you're interested.

Regardless of the proximal proximate explanation, some think the ultimate explanation is that your genes will fare better in an offspring of whichever sex is in short supply. Females are less likely to reproduce under circumstances where there aren't enough males, so natural selection will select for mothers who birth more males.

Males tend to die younger, which evens out the initially uneven ratio. Whether the uneven birth ratio is biological or artificial I don't know since I've never seen a good biological explanation. How much does the haploid human genome weigh with respect to the entire sperm? Maybe Y-carrying sperm are slightly lighter and thus faster.

I'm give up.

I have no clue how feasible a bot would be, but I think the responses of a bot would be perceived as less personal, allowing posters to focus on the arguments rather than perceived attacks. Of course the bot would only be an aid. It could serve more to provide relevant resources than to do the actual arguing.

Well, identifying good candidate genes might be difficult given that scientists still don't know what most of the genome does. Even polypeptides, the building blocks of proteins, don't match the gene perfectly because of the introns that are spliced out of the original RNA transcript (copy) of the gene. Then there are various regulating mechanisms. Transcription factors, which are often proteins themselves encoded elsewhere in the genome, bind to the promoter of the gene and influence how often RNA polymerase binds to that gene to create an RNA transcript. miRNAs will bond with the single-stranded RNA transcript to prevent its translation by a ribosome into a polypeptide. miRNAs https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/MiRNA.svg

Sasquatch doesn't effect our experience of reality because there is none in reality. Holes do. Electron holes do. Phonons do.

It shows that abstraction can be a matter of sense rather than reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_reference The word "hole" may refer to many things that are only superficially similar, but each referent is real. Talk to my psychiatrist.

We should consider age. Despite originally becoming atheist/agnostic through open-mindedness, some may become closed-minded if their brain loses its plasticity in old age. In fact, the only closed-minded atheist I've spoken was old in his avatar photo. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201003/creativity-and-successful-brain-aging-going-the-flow

I don't think that's necessarily true. We could make a formula for identifying holes, the output being an abstraction of the distances between the individual molecules. However it's much easier to define a hole as something I can stick my fist through. They can share the same referent despite the former being abstract.

Here you've invented a new meaning of real. To say a thing isn't real or doesn't exist is to say there's an absence of it. Hence in ordinary conversation you would take the non-existence of a hole to mean that a hole is absent, not that it consists of an absence. Many things consist in part of absences.

Why do you distinguish bewteen models and "the real thing"? If a model accurately describes a thing, then that thing is the model, is it not? Kant objected (in his Critique of Pure Reason, A596/B624-A602/B630) that existence is not a property. “Thus when I think a thing, through whichever and however many predicates I like (even in its thoroughgoing determination), not the least bit gets added to the thing when I posit in addition that this thing is. For otherwise what would exist would not be the same as what I had thought in my concept, but more than that, and I could not say that the very object of my concept exists” (A600/B628). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/ Please bring me something that's not real. I want to see what a non-real thing is like.

I wondered about strengths compensating for weaknesses, but I could come up with no good examples.

I say we develop a bot that gives automated responses to any creationist threads flagged as such.