MonDie

Darn, you're right. Clearly, I have forgotten what circular clocks look like. His post didn't appear before I had made my post. Then again, perhaps I didn't see an updated page immediately because I had opened the thread from a firefox bookmark. The button next to it has a textbox caption that says, "Remove Format," and the next one has a caption that says, "Special BBCode." The button I wanted has no caption. That's why I didn't think there was any way to do it. testing testing [acr=Laughing Out Loud]LOL[/acr]

Okay, then you cannot test my hypothesis. Thanks.

I didn't gather much from the OP, but it seems like they want to influence brains with an external device. If that's the case, they could use it to trick people who think they're telepathic. If it works, the "telepathics" weren't actually doing it, they were just attributing the effects to themselves rather than an outside variable.

I see, and I thank. No textbox appears when I scroll over the button used to toggle modes.

I really really hate how much I love the new setup. I despise whoever thought it didn't need improvement. Anyway, is there a way to change the quotes back to the [ quote...][/ quote] format for copying and pasting? As of now, a copied quote loses the box upon being pasted. Also, there seems to be a problem in this thread. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/71232-the-physical-and-mental-are-the-same/ Prometheus' last post = "Posted Yesterday, 12:40 PM" My last post = Posted Yesterday, 10:51 PM Why is my post after his?

EDIT: Prometheus, your post didn't appear immediately. That's weird. By the way, I think you're right. I finally came up with a good representation of the idea. If you didn't understand it before, you will understand it know. I also identified the specific part that seems to be self-contradictive, but I'm still grappling with it. I haven't taken a course in physics, so this model probably has no realistic application. Unconscious, Abstract Phenomena Imagine a rollercoaster. A rollercoaster is an abstract thing. It's made of various parts. Imagine that there is a man in the cart. There is a sign under a lever, and it says, "Pull This Lever." The lever must be pulled ever 5 seconds for the rollercoaster to function, but the man doesn't know this. However, he has a short-term memory problem. He forgets what he's doing every 5 seconds. Consequently, he pulls the lever every 5 seconds, and the rollercoaster keeps on truckin'. Thus he makes the rollercoaster go without even knowing how the rollercoaster works. This man is a metaphor for a particle. I think this is how particles could create abstract phenomena without being "aware" of the phenomena in any abstract sense. Consciousness Through Abstraction Perhaps what we call "awareness" is actually a specific kind of awareness. It's awareness of phenomena in an abstract sense. It's like there's a blueprint for the rollercoaster inside of your brain. Here is how I think this might happen. Imagine that you have a bunch of guys with short-term memory problems. In front of them, there are signs that say, "If you hear a letter, shout X!" When you've got a bunch of these guys together, you get a chain reaction that's something like this: x > x > x > x >... etc. However, the brain might have more complex "signs." The signs are like, "If you hear A!, shout B!. If you hear B!, shout S!" It might be the case that the signs all give the same message, and it's a complicated message. On the other hand, maybe each sign is unique. Either way, you get these guys spelling out words. a > b > s > t > r > a > c > t Then there's the unconscious matter right outside the brain. x > x > x > x > a > b > s > t > r > a > c > t > x > x > x > x > Those Xs can be thought of as "the door and the carpet" that I spoke of in previous posts. Technically, they may be part of your present mental state. We have no reason to think that they wouldn't be part of your mental state. The thing is, they're just a bunch of Xs. They have nothing thoughtful to contribute to conscious thought. 5 Xs are as worthless as 500 Xs. The "abstract" is what's going on in your brain. That's conscious thought. Isolated Consciousnesses Imagine that there is another consciousness in the room, but it's spelling something different. It's spelling "rollercoaster." Now you've got this: xxxxx rollercoaster xxxx abstract xxxx Because these consciousnesses are separated by the streams of "x > x > x >... etc.", they cannot interact. Here is one problem you might think up. These unanimous streams will occur within the brain. If the brain has: abs xxx stract, you technically have two consciousnesses. One consciousness is abs, and the other is stract. However, if there are multiple pathways, these disconnects might be overrided by the alternative, connective paths. The Paradox I stated that, even though your mental state may include "the door," the door simply has nothing to contribute to conscious thought. However, this idea can be extended to show that another person's brain is also part of your mental state. We realize that the other brain cannot directly impact your brain. Nonetheless, it's still part of your mental state in the same way that "the door and the carpet" are. Extend the idea even further, your mental state is actually the mental state of the universe. The thing is, "you" are your consciousness, and your consciousness has no way of coming to this realization. To solve the problem, you might assert that mental activity can be restricted by locality. But that doesn't work because there is a slippery slope. If this locality principle extends to the subatomic level, each particle is its own mind, thus there is no abstract thought. The slippery slope produces an all or onething dichotomy. While one option probably doesn't work, the other just might. EDIT: I thought some more about the empiricism issue. More appropriately, people shouldn't make judgements on issues they cannot judge. My argument could have been used to say, "Hey! Tons of people believe in a god, so why don't we make it a science!" However, there's nothing wrong with basing empirical research on an if statement. All empirical research is. If the natural world follows natural laws, we can observe natural phenomena to formulate hypothesese (Natural Science). If each person has a mind of a similar nature, introspection can aid in the formulation of hypothesese (Psychology). We cannot judge those ifs without getting entangled in metaphysics, but that doesn't discount the fact that the methods generate accurate predictions about what we should observe (empiricism). In this case: If the mental and the physical are the same, we can use philosophy to formulate hypothesese about the boundaries of consciousness (maybe not perfectly stated). I am not convinced.

Fanghur, the X and Y (the sex chromosomes) are only two of the 46 chromosomes. The rest are called autosomes. Models of mitosis or meiosis often show a lower number of chromosomes for simplicity. I can teach you the basics right here if you would like. These 46 chromosomes can be divided into 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes. In each pair, one chromosome came from each parent. The X and Y (or X and X) are one pair of homologous chromosomes. It's important that you don't confuse chromosomes with chromatids. The X shaped structure is still one chromosome; the two intersecting strands are the chromatids, and they contain identical DNA (unless mutations occurred). The sister chromatids are separated in mitosis. After mitosis, each new cells has only one chromatid for each chromosome. The new cells have to copy those chromatids before the next cell division. This is how the cells in your body keep dividing. Unlike chromatids, homologous chromosomes have dissimilar DNA sequences. One contains the DNA sequences from mom, and one contains the DNA sequences from dad. These are what you are looking at when you look at a karyotype. Google images that word. Notice that the chromosomes are X-shaped. Sometimes you have to look close to notice it. They are X-shaped because they have two sister chromatids. However, the numbers denote homologous pairs of chromosomes, not individual chromosomes. Meiosis is the cell division that results in sperm and egg cells. Unlike mitosis, meiosis separates the homologous chromosomes. Meiosis has two phases: meiosis I and meiosis II. In meiosis I, the homologous chromosomes separate. In meiosis II, the chromatids separate. Meiosis results in haploid cells. A diploid (di- Greek two) nucleus contains pairs of homologous chromosomes, so it has all 46. A haploid (hapl- Greek simple, single) nucleus, which only contains 23 chromosomes, has only one chromosome from each pair. Fertilization, the fusion of a sperm with an egg, involves the fusion of two haploid nuclei into a diploid nucleus. When I considered that we might do a nuclear (nuc- Greek, as in nucleus) transplant on a sperm, I was only speculating. As far as I know, nuclear transplants are for eggs and zygotes. You might want to look at a simple model of the cloning procedure to get an idea of what iNow is talking about. I was looking for a good diagram of the process of (non-theraputic) cloning, and I found this. http://www.clonesafety.org/cloning/facts/process/ Apparently, you can clone by removing the nucleus from an egg cell, then fusing that empty egg with a diploid somatic (soma- Greek body) cell. Thus the offspring could have the mitochondrial DNA of one lesbian and the nucleus DNA of the other lesbian. (Note to Fanghur: I only described the DNA in the nucleus. There is also DNA in the mitochondrion, but I don't know much about it. Mitochondrial DNA is a subject for students who go deeper into cell biology.) Wouldn't such a procedure be problematic? When clones are born from surrogates, they often have health problems. If I recall correctly, it's because the DNA isn't totally compatible with the surrogate mother's DNA.It might also be argued that deleterious epigenetic changes occur in the lab. Your last post gave me another idea. If females didn't have limitied numbers of eggs, we could harvet a bunch of haploid nuclei from the father, insert the haploid nuclei into eggs of the mother, then fertilize the dinuclear eggs with sperm. Eventually, one of them might fuse with the inserted nucleus rather than the sperm's nucleus. The egg's that don't work out could be harvested for stem cells... Ahh, the miracle of not quite life.

I'll do some speculating. I'm only a student. Why would they replace one chromosome rather than perform a full nuclear tranplant? A nuclear transplant is the removal and replacement of the nucleus of an egg or zygote, and it's used in cloning. In the case of a sperm nuclear transplant, it would be a haploid nucleus from the father's egg. The engineered sperm would then fertilize the mother's egg like normal. In the case of a zygote nuclear transplant, the two egg nuclei might have to be fused artificially outside of the cellular environment. This option seems like it would be quite feasible. I considered whether they could insert the haploid nucleus directly into an egg, but I don't know if they could get the egg to complete meiosis II without a sperm cell. Hold on... Why does meiosis II necessary? I think I need to read up on this some more

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't think I'm thinking the same thing as Berkley, but reading his work might facilitate ideas. Abstraction might be a key concept. Maybe conceptual representations of the abstract enable internal communication, just as they enable interpersonal communication. If the assumption logically leads to a conclusion about the physical boundaries of consciousness, it might be testable. To test it, we'd need to make various prosthetic brain parts, then ask whether the effects of the parts on the brain are interpretted as conscious (intentional) or unconscious (beyond their control). Then again, I am interpretting the imagined results with the assumption that the mental and physical are the same. But, under such skepticism, one shouldn't accept that other consciousnesses exist at all. I just formulated a strong argument for what I'm proposing. Most people think that we can infer the presence of a mind on the basis of physical phenomena. They see a human acting alive, and they assume the human has a mind. This is inference of a mind on the basis of empirical evidence. However, people also assume that there can be physical things that lack mental activity. They see rocks, and they assume there is no mental activity in the rocks. This assumes cartesian dualism. However, if cartesian dualism is true, the presence of mental activity cannot be inferred from empirical observations. As you can see, these two beliefs are logically inconsistent. What I'm proposing seems to be the only idea that would imply that mental activity can be inferred from empirical observations. I considered what PeterJ said, that both the mental and physical reduce to something else. However, empiricism focuses on the physical, not that "something else." Thus my idea is the only idea that can make us logically consistent. It's true that is a question science cannot answer, and any decision is based on assumption. However, empiricism has always operated with assumptions. For example, it operates on the assumption that the natural world follows natural laws. Somebody could argue that God is tricking us into thinking the natural world follows natural laws. We wouldn't be able to refute their claim, but we might observe this same person using empiricism in everyday life. We would tell them, "Hey! It's one or the other! You're being logically inconsistent!" I rest my case. I had another interesting thought. According to this idea, your consciousness can be physically connected to another person's consciousness by means of sound waves (speech) and electromagnetic radiation (visual cues). It's real telepathy!

This is close to what I was proposing in the OP. Thank you for introducing me to the word "qualia" (singular quale). I was proposing that matter, energy, time, everything actually is qualia. The problem is that most qualia follow the laws of cause and effect without leaving behind any trace of the past. Someone might wonder how a qualia comprised world could follow natural laws without the qualia being aware of those natural laws. The mistake is in assuming that natural laws are irreducible things. Natural laws seem to be abstract concepts, thus they are reducible. Although everything is qualia, not everything is consciousness. As a result of natural selection, the brain's qualia (matter) responds to certain physical interactions by forming concepts, and these concepts correspond with what exists inside and outside the brain. This is consciousness. Even though consciousness is restricted to the brain, it's still possible that "your" present mental state includes the qualia of the carpet or the door. However, since the carpet and the door aren't conscious (i.e. unlike the brain, they don't write things down), there is no way for your consciousness (you/your brain) to have an intuitive understanding of the carpet and the door. Your consciousness can only record features of the door if you direct your senses to the door. Keep in mind that attention is an aspect of consciousness. Your consciousness can only direct its attention to parts of itself. I am trying to determine whether this idea is logically consistent. This reduces consciousness to a mere physical phenomenon. If the argument is logically consistent, it leads to the conclusion that we are all "zombies" within the mental state of the universe. I once assumed that physical things must be something other than qualia. I'm proposing that physical things actually are the only metaphysical thing that certainly exists, they are qualia. The alternative is that physical things are something other than qualia, and that other thing is beyond human intuition. I was proposing that everything reduces to qualia. I just learned that term, "qualia." Why doesn't it work to suggest that one reduces to the other?

This is an innappropriate application of Occam's razor. In the sciences, a form of Occam's razor is used, and it goes something like this: When two hypothesese make such similar predictions that there is currently no way to distinguish between them, it is more likely that the simpler explanation will turn out to be true when they finally can be distinguished. This has been proven empirically. Your claim is different because it is totally outside the domain of empiricism. Occam's razor has not been shown to apply to metaphysical claims. There is no way to test whether or not it applies to metaphysical claims because there is no way to test metaphysical claims. Thus the idea that Occam's razor can be applied to metaphysical claims is itself a metaphysical claim. So, although we might refute your claim on logical grounds, we have no other way to determine the probability of its truth. In conclusion, the claim that they are the same and the claim that they are different are both claims for which the probabilities are unknowable. You might as well be claiming that there is a metaphysical god, or that we have a metaphysical obligation to abstain from sex. Furthermore, Occam's razor is actually useful in empiricism, where it is a means to some other end. Even if Occam's razor did apply to this claim, we'd still have no way to test it. Thus your contemplation was for nothing other than the realization that it was for nothing. Now, please, complete your "assignment." We will be pleased to be rid of you.

We could use two different sorts of categorization here. The heterosexual-homosexual system of cetagorization is gender-binary. That is, a man who desires women is heterosexual, while a woman who desires women is homosexual. The heterosexual-homosexual categories are convenient for referring to couples. In contrast, the androphilia-gynephilia system of categorization is not gender-binary. This categorization system is more useful when you are talking about individuals, not couples. When we are talking about genetics, we are talking about individuals, not couples. On top of that, men and women share most of their genes. If natural selection is to restrict gynephilia to men, it will have to cram all those gynephilia "genes" onto one tiny little chromosome, the Y chromosome. Likewise, if it's going to restrict androphilia to women, I imagine that it would have to put some sort of anti-androphilia genes onto the Y chromosome. However, as long as same-sex sexual behavior isn't too maladaptive, I see no reason for why nature would make us heterosexually inclined rather than bisexually inclined. Another interesting consideration is the mating system that has dominated human recently. Correct me if my anthropology is alittle off. The agricultural revolutions were occurring about 15-20,000 years ago. After these revolutions, family units were more cohesive. Individuals could no longer choose their mate, it was their family that made the choice. However, there probably were illegitimate children that nobody knew were illegitimate. Nonetheless, selection for a heterosexual orientation would have been weakened. EDIT: I had another thought. Excessive heterosexual desire might be selected against if the parents would produce too many offspring. Humans must give great amounts of care to their offspring to ensure their success. Overbreeding might diminish the amount of care they provide to each offspring. Wooh! I think I just joined the kin-selection explanation with the sexually antagonistic selection explanation! Excessive heterosexuality would probably be maladaptive for females unless they have nonreproductive, gay relatives to help them raise the extra offspring. Without those gay helpers, the excess female fecundity (heterosexual desire) may have been selected against. However, this concept would be less significant to patrilocal mating systems, unless the gay brothers relocated with their sister. The idea of patrilocality could be extended beyond the post-agricultural-revolution mating systems.

LSD helps alcoholics stop drinking.

In Response to TAR: I didn't see your post while I was editing my previous post, but it says that my last edit was made an hour after you made this post. Anyway, after I read your post from November 29th, I edited in a response to it. That response is in my previous post. EDIT: Okay, immortal's post definitely wasn't there when I made this post. Something is causing delayed post appearance. The presentation is 50 minutes long. There should be a time bar below the video screen. You'll spend over an hour watching it if you really want to understand what's going on. In the beginning, he is talking about various ways religiosity was measured when social psychologists were first discovering that religious people actually tend to be more prejudiced. Sometimes it was measured by church attendance. Later, he begins talking about the intrinsic religiosity scale. The idea behind it was that these people are the true believers. Their beliefs don't serve any other end. They are also probably compulsive attendees of church because they are true believers, but it is the personal approach to religion that is measured by the scale, not church attendance. However, Dan Batson has a bone to pick with the guy who made the intrinsic religiosity scale. The guy who invented it thought it measured a better form of religious belief. However, Dan Batson thinks the intrinsic religiosity scale might be a scale of religious fanaticism. Fortunately, I can show you sample questions from an intrinsic religiosity scale. They are from an article iNow showed me in another thread several months ago.

Wow, this is still going! The link I posted a while back might have been misleading. That video was part of a conference, and Dan Batson also spoke at that conference. He spoke about evidence suggesting that intrinsically religious people are actually more prejudiced than the extrinsics, but they try to hide it. In the experiment that provided that evidence, he also used a quest religiosity scale. He found that quest religiosity people truly are less prejudiced. Here is the presentation. iNow might enjoy the statistics in the beginning. Anyway, the various measures used for measuring religious belief suggest something. Religious belief is multi-dimensional, and each dimension has a different relationship to how you think and behave. This implies a lesson about analytical thought. You can argue that a particular aspect of religion might account for some behaviour observed among religious people. However, when you observe a correlation involving a vaguely defined variable (religiosity), you should pick apart that variable to figure out what it is about the variable that is relevant. Anyway, I would say it is broken to be prejudiced and in denial about that prejudice. It's a sort of personal inconsistency. Then again, hiding your prejudice isn't the same as being in denial about it. It keeps changing my devil emoticon into the grinning emoticon. So, if there is an inappropriate grinning emoticon, it's there because of a software malfunction. You're right if holding an irrational belief is brokenness. Brokenness is not objective. Thinking something can be broken implies a preconceived concept of what it means to be in working order. Ahhh, but here is a question. Is it ever conducive to a functioning society that some people hold irrational beliefs? If that is ever the case, how can part of the machine be considered broken if it's doing what it needs to do for the machine to function? Imagine this. Somebody wants to blow up a bunch of people with their own self, but you tell them they will go to hell after the explosion. Granted, the religious belief might make them do some malfunctional things in the future, but I think such harms would be outweighed by their beneficent decision to not blow everyone up. The evidence suggests that, compared to theists, atheists aren't any less motivated to behave ethically. However, this doesn't say anything about the cause-and-effect relationships between religious beliefs and ethical behaviours. There is evidence that people who believe in angry gods (as opposed to friendly gods) are less likely to cheat at a game. I'll concede, that's the only cause-and-effect suggestive evidence I know of. Nonetheless, maybe us atheists could become even more ethically inclined by believing in gods. You were misinformed, not broken. You were simply doing your best (or not) with the information you had. Alternatively, we could say that you were broken, but through no fault of your own. I am digging this post. Yes, it is beneficial for people to understand where others are coming from. Alienation is bad for everyone. If I understand correctly, you are saying that people need to share common understandings to avoid alienation. The benefit of this is that people are more effective as a group. You say that belief in God can serve as a common understanding. You also seem to imply that the human perspective is a common understanding. I don't know whether or not a shared belief in God provides a greater sense of common understanding. The same result might be achieved be emphasising that we are all human. Actually, emphasizing the human perspective could actually yield better results because it has more potential for inclusion. i.e. everyone is seeing from the human perspective, theists and atheists alike. However, something important to note is the phenomenon called group-think. Profound disagreements can create the friction that drives progressive thought.

I thought it was accepted that animal life begins at fertilization. Wait... There are animals that reproduce asexually. Was I a dupe?

I thought that was a biological fact, but it would be believable that I was misinformed. Either way, it's still irrelevant. I'll post the link again. http://jme.bmj.com/c...7.full.pdf+html It was published in 1998. I don't know what has changed since then. The section titled "Brain Birth" gives some very good information. EDIT: The personhood debate goes to a core issue in morality. When we follow moral obligations to respect others, what are we actually respecting? Is it the body, the mind, the wants, the pleasures, etc.? These things don't exist in unison. We can anticipate the wants and pleasures of future generations even if they don't exist yet. Likewise, we can anticipate the wants and pleasures of that potential person inside a woman's womb. Unlike pleasures, wants can remain relevant beyond the lifetime of the body. This explains why we respect coma patients and the recently deceased, but it doesn't explain why people respect preconscious fetuses. Also unlike pleasures, wants can be fulfilled deceptively or honestly. Since many wants involve rational thought, the capacity for contemplation could be relevant. It depends on how you define "want." ;D However, a want-based morality would have problems to work through. Wants often contradict one another, especially if they remain relevant long after death. A maximum pleasure principle would be more straight-forward. Someone aiming for pleasure would focus on the baby's ability to feel pain, not its ability to want. Aside from those issues, many people claim that the presence of a body is relevant. They claim that there is no body until conception has occurred. However, I really don't see how this argument can be made to work. I think they would be better off comparing abortion to consented necrophilia. In both cases, everybody is happy, but a body is treated in a way that people consider to be grotesque. I think it is the wants that are relevant. If a fetus cannot want yet, the fetus has no more right to life than a sperm swimming up a fallopian tube. FURTHER EDIT: Chilled flourine's argument that it would develop without human interference was something I haven't seen yet, but I'm not sure about how well it could be upheld. It doesn't seem to rule out unfertilized eggs and sperm. Each egg or sperm has some chance of beginning development into a human child. Let's apply this to real people. I think it's still murder even if there was only a 1/20 chance that somebody would die. It could be argued that the coitus, which will grant the egg and sperm that potential, is an instance of human interference. Now we're getting into the issue of killing versus letting die. Let's suppose a tree toppled onto Mark. John could call 911, but John just watches Mark die instead. John didn't interfere, but John is still guilty. If it's accepted that John is guilty, it should be accepted that a woman who isn't engaging in coitus is guilty. Thus the argument is reduced to absurdity.

Who here is getting their ideas from books? I thought the idea that the soul should be infused at conception was decided by Pope Pius, not any book.

I'm still reading the thread, but I wanted to point this out. I like your reasoning here. Let me try this out. The sex itself wasn't very enticing to her, but he told her he wanted to raise a child with her. She wanted to be injected with the sperm of a man who would help raise the child. However, he ran off after they got into a fight. She did not want to be injected with the sperm of a man who would ultimately run off. Thus the sex act was technically rape because she didn't actually want it. Fetus rights aside, she should be allowed to abort for the same reason we should return money given to a con-artist. While I'm here, I'll drop off a few informative links. http://www.freakonom...ld-you-believe/ This was mentioned earlier, but only a wikipedia link was given. It's not as long as it looks, those are the comments. http://jme.bmj.com/c...7.full.pdf+html

I was contemplating the mind-body problem. I don't know the current arguments. You can tear apart my argument if you would like to. Here it goes. It might be more consilient to think of "mental substance" and "material (physical) substance" as the same thing. For example, we typically think of the experience of color and the accompanying brain phenomena as two separate things. I'm proposing that they are the same thing. There seems to be two problems with this idea. I thought of a strong solution to the first problem, but my solution to the second problem is weaker. The first problem is how we are aware of time. It seems like a useful metaphor to think of the brain as a program that edits its own code. For example, when you stub your toe, your brain rewrites some code. As a result of the rewritten code, you will avoid stubbing your toe in the future. In our evolution, fit functioning of the code-rewriting ability was selected for. However, there seems to be a problem, and I'll do my best to articulate it. What I described above is simply cause and effect. You stub your toe, and the effect is that your brain rewrites the code. The effect of the rewritten code is that you behave differently in the future. The laws of cause and effect that your brain is obeying are the same laws that all other matter obeys. Furthermore, if substance exists within moments, how could any substance be aware of time, which involves being aware that there is something beyond the present moment? Finally, it is not fit to be aware of time. Biological fitness only involves perpetuation-promoting responses, not awareness. The solution is that we are not actually aware of time itself, we are only aware of a concept that we call "time." Here is a comparison. When you see the color red, you aren't seeing the electromagnetic radiation. Rather, the electromagnetic radiation hits your eyes, the brain begins a series of cell signalling, and your brain runs code titled "red." Likewise, your brain seems to have code titled "time." It is the code for dealing with issues involving time. However, awareness of that code isn't actually awareness of time itself, it's only awareness of "time." However, this idea wouldn't lead us to care about non-living matter, namely whether or not some non-living matter is in a good or bad state. "Good" and "bad" have no meaning without comparisons. Making comparisons requires a conceptual understanding of the things being compared. For example, if I think that my current mental state is better than my previous mental state, it implies that I have a concept of time and past mental states. It also implies that I have a concept of my identity throughout time. Because it was favorable to our perpetuation that we knew how to manipulate the environment, the potential for conceptual understandings was coded into our brains by natural selection. That is how we came to know what good and bad are. Of course, we could apply our concepts of good and bad mental states to non-living matter, believing that non-living matter should be of a good mental state. However, the aim seems trivial because the non-living matter, lacking the ability to make comparisons, cannot think that its mental state is good or bad. The second problem is the spatial problem. The argument implies that there's no barrier between the state of brain matter and the state of surrounding non-conscious matter. However, we must distinguish between the mental state and the conscious state. As I use the term, "consciousness" involves recording information about structure and history. Since the surrounding non-conscious matter doesn't record its state, information about its state is only recorded if it interacts with the brain matter via the senses. Here is the really weird part. Without any boundary between substances, there is only one mental state. That one mental state encompasses every consciousness. However, since there are barriers between the consciousnesses, the consciousnesses are not aware of the functioning of one another. The thoughts of one consciousness are only recorded within that individual consciousness. Your mental state includes all consciousnesses, but your consciousness (you) cannot record the thoughts of another consciousness, no matter how hard it tries to. In order to make this argument stronger, I would probably have to go into the nature of attention as a part of conscious thought. However, that seems like it would be quite difficult.

I came across this video, which gives good social psychological insight into religion's relationship to prejudice. http://thesciencenet...-nick-southwood Here is my summary/spoiler: Highlight the text to view it. Although religious people are also vulnerable to mortality salience's affects on out-group/in-group prejudice, their religion actually provides a buffer against these effects. This is most likely because religion teaches that there is an afterlife. However, the guy in the yellow shirt asks a good question. How often are people mortality salient? Also, the speaker mentioned the idea of living on symbolically. Although this wasn't considered in the experiment, such an idea might provide a irreligious defence against the effects of mortality salience. However, religion can also indoctrinate prejudices, and these prejudices are always present in the religious followers. But once again, relative to the non-affiliated, mortality salience only slightly strengthens the negative prejudice of the affiliated individuals. But the experiment still shows the Social Dominance Orientation (defined in the video) is a strong predictor of prejudice for the affiliated and non-affiliated alike. It also strengthens older correlations between certain types of religiosity and levels of prejudice, reminding us that there a many dimensions to keep in mind. I think I won't be back on for a while again. I just thought this would be something interesting to share.

That's interesting. I asked my Bio teacher how we classify species of bacteria, and he gave an unsatisfactory answer. Maybe I'll understand the significance of evolution soon. I've taken thorough notes on one-fifth of my Biology textbook, and I will continue unimpeded by this forum (note the new avatar).

Thank you for helping me correct my mistake.

Furthermore, although I only know of Xittenn through a forum, I don't think of her as any less feminine than any other woman. I thought that, if anything, the song would convey that and not anything to the contrary.

Response to next post. Distinction understood, but I failed to anticipate the song being harmful in any way. I just don't understand all the hubbub about what gender or sex people are. If I still don't understand the real problem, you can remove the unedited post from your quote.