Prometheus

1 hour ago, Carl Fredrik Ahl said:

What could I do to make my reality checks work? Should I do my reality checks in another way, or do something additional? Am I doing anything wrong?

Lucid dreaming is a subtle skill, one that can take years to hone. I'd recommend just relaxing and enjoying the experience. Do something you'd enjoy, go for a fly or something. Pushing your finger through your palm sounds boring anyway. Don't try to force things.

May i ask why you feel need to test at all. Do you find yourself asking those questions when you are awake? Questioning reality can be a bad habit to practice, especially for people at risk of dissociation type mental health disorders.

There isn't much of a science of lucid dreaming, but there is a literature based on personal experiences, you might be better off asking these questions on a lucid dreaming forum.

1 hour ago, Bufofrog said:

If you ask yourself, "Is this a dream?" , then it is a dream, reality check complete.  I doubt any sane person mistakes reality for a dream.

This is true of a sane person awake. But the question doesn't work so well during lucid dreaming. I've been lucid dreaming and experiencing false awakenings for decades and i'm still sometimes be unable to answer the question. Except when i'm awake, thankfully. You'd think that having any doubt at all would be enough to confirm i'm in a dream, but the somnescent brain (at least my brain) doesn't operate just as if its awake. 

There are a number of misconceptions there, some of which have been addressed in this thread but let's visit them one more time.

17 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

try replacing strong fred with weak sarah. strong fred may not be a gym bunny but hes stronger simply because hes male. if sarah wants to put it over fred, she could go to the gym and become iron woman. may stil not be enough. but what if she also goes and shoots up on all these drugs that essentially make her male. she is no longer sarah, let alone weak sarah. the the question if sarah is stronger than fred is invalid because sarahs not here any more.

No one is disputing the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. 

18 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

so the average woman has more trouble reading a map than a man. 

How does this follow from men being physically stronger? Or is it a separate statement?

24 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

this could be some impulse/ learned trait that stems back thousands of years to hunter gatherer days

Or it could be cultural conditioning with nothing to do with neurobiology. Why do you keep skipping over this possibility?

25 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

but that is what makes her a woman. those intrinsic difference are what we (generally)love about the opposite sex. take those away and they wouldnt be the opposite sex.

Map reading isn't a defining characteristic of the sexes. But again, no one is disputing that there are biological differences between them. What we are asking of you is to try to disentangle those innate biological differences from cultural conditioning. That should be the starting point for any imagining of what a matriarchal society would look like.

Do you acknowledge that there are some purely cultural differences between the sexes - it seems you just assume every difference can only be purely biological. We know this isn't true, and you've been given links throughout this thread if you want to follow this up.

30 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

if we could scientifically calculate every difference between man and woman and go back in time to make the adjustments so that there are no differences, then there wouldnt be man and woman. thus making the question invalid.

No one's asking you to do that (or imagine that).

31 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

on the small scale little girls that get cars instead of dolls can be tom boys when they grow up. so by the mum giving them cars they slightly take away 'the little girl'. 

How do you know this? You've just assumed it's true. Provide some evidence to back it up. We don't have any societies that raise girls with boys toys so unfortunately it's not straight forward. I gave 3 types of evidence i would look for. There's probably more: for instance, there must be studies on child playing styles and toy preferences between the sexes. Have you tried to look for any of them?

But we do have historical examples of some of the more matriarchal societies being famously warrior-like. Again, why do you keep ignoring this?

40 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

so we have all variety from the most masculine men to the most feminine female, and every variety in between. we have men  that act more like woman do, and we have woman that act more like men. these are the few. of course there is no way to determine throughout history were various leaders/rulers whether male or female, a manly man or a womanly man, or vice versa. but statistically it stands to reason that the majority would have been within the normal range. what i mean is if you got every male leader from every time and lined them up, the majority of them would be manly men. but of course this doesnt take away from the fact that there would have been the opposite, even to the extreme (bad word i know) that there was probably some leader that was gay and spoke and acted very feminine and probably wanted to go shopping with the girls and look at handbags/shoes. but im talking averages, not particular examples. because there is always en example that bucks the trend.

I've only been talking in averages. There have been thousands of female rulers throughout human history across the globe, enough to give us the idea that they aren't so different to male rulers. There are also plenty of gay rulers, including Philip II, one of the greatest Greek (Macedonian) rulers and quite probably his son, one of the greatest rulers in recorded history: Alexander the Great. In the Greek and Roman golden ages, these weren't exceptions.

Just to give an idea of the sort of things i was hoping you might submit as evidence i found this study. Turns out female rulers engaged in more wars than men.

If you can't or don't want to answer these questions and points then i agree it's probably best to lock the thread. 

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

so when i had this conversation with my daughter, i realized i had to clarify something that i didnt have to with my wife. perhaps i may need to here, but hard in a forum so i will try with an analogy.

if i ask who can lift more out of strong fred and weak john, everyone would say strong fred. however if weak john went to the gym everyday and trained real hard then mayby he could then lift more than strong fred, however he is no longer weak john he is now strong john. so the point is still valid that strong fred could lift more than weak john, because weak john had to change from being weak john in order to lift as much.

let me know if this analogy makes sense to you.

Not really. I think you're trying to say that male hippocampi are innately larger than females', but that's yet to be proved. You're assuming way too much. What do animal studies suggest? Are there any studies on how sex hormones affect the growth of these regions? Any studies on neonate brains? These are the things i'd start off looking at.

Even if we take something more obvious like the increased musculature of the average man and more aggressive impulses due to higher levels of testosterone, doesn't mean a matriarchal society would be less warlike (Sparta, perhaps the most famous warrior society in all of history, was also one of the most matriarchal). It might mean you'd still be sending men off to be cannon fodder, but the strategic decision to go to war could be made by a matriarchy. Decisions to go to war take months, balancing many factors, meaning impulses have less of an effect. I'm not convinced a matriarchy would be any less inclined to war than a patriarchy. There are historical precedents for this - female rulers have popped up quite often and didn't seem less inclined to war - but then they were still operating in a patriarchy. So that's another place to get clues: compare the number of wars engaged by kings vs queens.

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

so if woman have smaller hippocampi that may affect their ability to navigate. this may be a factor in all the main explorers throughout history being me. just an idea?

Or men have larger hippocampi because they were encouraged to explore the world as boys, as girls were encouraged to domestic play (recently came across this with my niece who wanted a remote control car as a present but the mother over-ruled her to get a cooking toy). If we're imagining a society starting from scratch we'd need to know the direction of causality, at the moment we have only correlation (as far as i know - haven't delved into the literature). 

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

this makes me wonder, are there other physical difference within our brains that may affect the way we think. there are obviously other differences though. hormonal etc that can play a role in our thinking.

i agree with your point about sending men into battle. from a physique and breeding point of view. but how about a marcho thing? men would probably think because they are the protectors of their woman it is their duty to go and fight for their woman. society says its the right think to do.  a bit like letting woman(and children) off a sinking boat first. (dont get me wrong here im not suggesting we dont do this)

Again, how much of this is biological and how much cultural conditioning? My impression is that any biological differences are exaggerated by cultural norms. To imagine a truly matriarchal nascent society we need to strip away this cultural element, leaving us with a biological case from which to proceed (although it probably isn't as easy to separate culture and biology as i suggest given one emerges from the other). Maybe there are animal studies that could give us some clues?

2 minutes ago, wallflash said:

. Otherwise it’s like going to your doctor and being told your blood pressure is way too high and that this will have bad negative effects on your future health . 

I think a closer analogy is:

Doc: I'm afraid you have COPD.

Patient: Smokers lung? What do I do about it?

Doc: Let's start with stopping smoking.

Patient: OK doc... how do I do that?

5 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

There should be abundant carbonaceous chondrite materials in asteroids that could be a raw material for making polymers. Given carbonaceous meteorites can have significant amounts of nickel-iron - mixed in as grains or chondrules - as well as oxides and sulphides, they have hypothetical potential for asteroid mining

So they have the carbon and hydrogen to make polymers but how difficult is this process: is it already established or would it require new technologies (aside from doing it all in space)?

While female and male brains have differences, it would be difficult to pick apart what is truly biological variance between populations and what is cultural conditioning. 

I vaguely recall a study that found female hippocampi were on average smaller than in males, which was said to explain why men were better navigators. But we also know parts of the brain less used will atrophy. So is it a case of their hippocampi being intrinsically smaller, or a result of gender roles directing its use (or lack of)?

When women have risen to prominent historical roles they have pretty much done as men have done - Wu Zetian, Boudicca, Hypatia (but maybe that's because they emerged in patriarchies). There is also evidence of early societies that while not matriarchal, were more balanced. The Spartans are a probably the best documented example, and weren't significantly different from surrounding societies.

I've also heard it said men more readily pursue risky pursuits, perhaps leading to voyages such as Colombus'. Assuming this is a neurobiological difference, it wouldn't necessarily preclude risky behaviour from men. Remember Colombus was sponsored by both Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, with the former willing to sell some jewels to fund it (thoough she didn't need to).

War would still be conducted by men on the field; aside from differences in physiology making men on average more suited to those demands, sending women to fight would be a flawed strategy. The Romans lost ~300,000 men to Hannibal in the Punic wars from a total population of ~3.5 million - thats a huge proportion. If they had all been women of child-bearing potential Rome would almost certainly have fallen.

Overall i don't think there'd be gross changes to the patterns of war, economic cycles, spiritual practices, technological development etc -  just a lot of changed details which are impossible to guess at.

They say men are from Mars and women from Venus, but we all know they're both from Earth.

How common would plastics be in an off-Earth economy? I've had a quick look around and it seems that plastic manufacturing heavily relies upon organic materials, from hydrocarbons to bioplastics.

How hard would it be to make plastics from the materials found near Earth? Apparently Titan has an abundance of hydrocarbons, but i couldn't find anything closer to home.

3 hours ago, scuddyx said:

...but he has been influenced by a wide range of spiritual works including Buddhism (Wiki).  Tolle's philosophy is based on the nature of time. 

Hard to comment without knowing his work, but it sounds like he was talking about the conscious experience of time, rather than the actual physics of it. If you want to study the physics of it, then do so. And if you want to use your experience of time in your spiritual practice, then do so. But chasing them both, thinking they are the same thing - it looks like you're chasing your tail - which is fine as long as you know you're not going to get anywhere. 

I'm Buddhist. I've not heard of the philosophy/power of Now. Is it perhaps a Western interpretation of some Buddhist principle?

It's interesting that the Buddha refused to answer questions regarding the nature of the universe. We don't need to know much about nature of time to strive towards a more wholesome life.

8 hours ago, Cynic said:

— Correlations, where they can even be demonstrated at all, mean little to nothing because correlation does not mean causation. Only actual experiments can verify whether a correlation is in fact the result of some cause and effect.

— However, no truly accurate, controlled experiments can be done to verify or falsify any observed global correlations because it is impossible to even establish a control for a planetary climate experiment. Ideally, we’d need an exact copy of earth, minus humans.

Medicine, particularly epidemiology, suffers from these same restrictions and is yet able to proceed. There are interesting parallels between the accumulation of evidence that inhaling tobacco smoke causes lung cancer and AGW, but one point of departure is that the basic physics seems far more well understood than the basic biology was for tobacco related lung cancer.

4 hours ago, Null said:

So I'm sure I am making an error in my thinking somewhere, but in my head when I look at the technological progress of the last hundred years, much lesthe last thousand. It seems there is a gap.

I think what is skewing your eye is that the nature of exponential growth is not intuitive: over a human life span we only see a small interval of the curve . Over geological times though, the nature of that curve is apparent. It started shallow, but now we're seeing just how steep it is: societies and landscapes changing within single lifetimes. It's an old story.

Sounds like a plan. Just some general comments that may or may not be helpful.

Find something to love in the subject otherwise it will become a grind and you may end up resenting the subject. Understanding Euler's identity and writing a programme to generate the Mandelbrot set captivated me. If you're interested in history, you can tie any of the maths you learn to its historical context. If you're interested in science it should be easy to tie in some maths.

Join a community. You already have by joining this forum, but there might be local ones too.  Ask questions. Vent frustrations.

I'd add exercise and meditation to the regime and adjust diet if needed. Look after yourself; the brain and body are a single functional unit, neglect one at the cost of the other.

I'd also sprinkle in a few weeks off to allow your brain to fallow. 

5 hours ago, Raider5678 said:

Stroke: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2637395/

Asthma: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5629917/

There was a study for cardiac arrest/heart failure I remember reading, but I can't seem to find it. You can take my word for it or discard that example.

Whether or not this is actively practiced/put in use in a hospital, I can't prove. I had a friend of mine who told me things like this are used at her hospital, but anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much. 

Thanks for the articles. 

I can only speak about UK practices. Here are the NICE guidelines for stroke, one type heart attack, a more dangerous type of heart attack, asthma and the Resuscitation Council's guidelines on cardiac arrest. The only explicit mention of sex in any of these documents was is in the MI document: 'Immediately assess eligibility (irrespective of age, ethnicity or sex) for coronary reperfusion therapy...'

Which is not to say that there aren't differences in the sexes in how these present, only that at present they are not considered relevant: any differences are far too small to be relevant to emergency situations (emergency medicine is a blunt tool compared to the precision medicine in some other fields). That could change in the future, but i doubt it for one particular reason.

The holy grail for medicine for some time now is personalised medicine, where treatments are tailored to the individual, as opposed to the one size fits all approach still prevalent. You might think using sex to guide assessments and treatments would be a step to this end, but the opposite is true. For instance, the asthma article you provided talks about the impact of sex hormones on asthma. One day emergency medicine may be good enough to take these into account when making treatment plans. However, human variability being what it is, if we just assume women and men will have a certain levels of relevant sex hormones we could be doing more harm than good - the fact is that men and women as populations exist on a distribution, and without more information we do not know where on this distribution they exist. We can only treat based on averages, which is the antithesis of personalised medicine. If emergency medicine is good enough to be able to take into account sex hormones in asthma treatment it should be good enough to directly measure these sex hormone levels, via a blood test for instance. In this case, sex would still be irrelevant as we have the direct measure of the pertinent factor - circulating oestrogen and  progesterone levels in this instance.

If you know of different practices outside the UK let me know, i find this interesting, although perhaps off-topic here.

Chest pain is one of the most common presenting complaints in A&E (~5%). You'll get assessed by a triage nurse or doctor ASAP, get an ECG, and your pathway determined based on those.

Most UK departments still rely on The Manchester Triage system. It's old, but has been well validated. Not a single presenting complaint includes sex as a factor.

14 hours ago, Raider5678 said:

How you treat and/or diagnose different medical emergencies, like stroke, cardiac arrest, asthma, heart failure, etc, is often different between males and females in subtle ways. But, subtle differences can sometimes mean life or death in the medical field.

How?

I never came across that in 6 years of A&E nursing. There's a difference in the presentation of abdominal and associated pains, but for the ones you have listed i can't remember any instances where knowing the sex made any difference to the patient's outcome. 

On 12/7/2019 at 6:26 PM, John Cuthber said:

In general cutting someone's leg off is banned.

But removing a gangrenous leg, to save the patient is permitted.

In both cases, harm is done- the guy loses a leg.
But in one case the intent (even if the operation fails) is to help them.

False equivalence. Cutting off someone's leg is not the same as boxing. The former always increases morbidity, and quite possibly mortality. The latter sometimes increases morbidity and mortality, though sometimes improves it (through cardiovascular effects), although, as has been pointed out, the evidence isn't clear either way. For instance, this 2007 study on the life expectancy of professional boxers between 1870-1930, when the sport was far more dangerous than today, concludes:

Quote

...this study indicates that LE in top-level athletes is unaffected by the type of discipline, and not related to physiological demand and intentional contact.

You've shown consent doesn't always justify actions that include some intention to harm.  Now can you show why it is relevant to the particular case of boxing?

On 12/7/2019 at 6:26 PM, John Cuthber said:

Also, if this"Society will ban something if the health risk >= b. Therefore Y is banned." was right, the drugs policy would be utterly different.

I would like to see a more rational drug policy, but that's a different conversation. Does the fact some drinkers go out specifically to 'kill a few brain cells' mean alcohol should be banned?

4 minutes ago, Cynic said:

What value is any experiment if it isn’t controlled?

In medical science it's not always possible to conduct a controlled experiment due to ethical and practical issues. In this case non-controlled experiments might be employed, like case-control studies. However, they need to be interpreted carefully, under the auspices of something like the Hill criteria. This article explores the history of tobacco and its link to lung cancer and shows the roll such studies had in establishing causation.

What? Sorry, i just don't know what you're trying to communicate. Maybe someone else who understands your point can try to articulate it in a different way.

X increases health risk by a. Y increases health risk by b.

a < b.

Society will ban something if the health risk >= b. Therefore Y is banned.

Tell me where intention comes into this equation. 

1 minute ago, John Cuthber said:

Because, though you repeatedly fail to accept it, there is a difference.

You do not set out to brain damage your opponent when you play Rugby.

Do you accept that there is a fundamental difference between boxing and other sports?

I can only presume that you don't understand the difference.

The difference is that of intent.

I get there's a difference (though you greatly exaggerate it - 99% of a boxers time is spent outside the ring ), but you fail to address why it is relevant.

9 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

The difference between pharmacology and murder is intent.

What has pharmacology and murder got to do with boxing? This equivalence is stretching credulity. 

9 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

I understand that there is consent.
I also understand that the law doesn't  always recognise consent.

So sometimes consent is valid and sometimes not. What you have still failed to address is why consent in boxing is not valid, and consent in rugby, say, is.

9 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

That sort of decision making is, essentially, what I do for a living.

Then you should be able to explain your reasoning, not argue from authority.

9 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

You have made a common error.
You have  only got half way to the well established idea of a "risk/ benefit" analysis.

By your "logic" we should ban cars- since they kill more people than rugby.

Except i'm not advocating banning rugby, or boxing - you are. So no, i'm not advocating banning cars. 

9 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

The "benefit " of boxing is, largely, the entertainment of the people.

And the cardiovascular and psychological wellbeing boxing (yes, some people gain confidence from it). Most boxing actually happen at junior levels, with little 'entertainment' (and smaller risk).

9 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

If the crowds were big enough, would you think it was "right" to feed Christians to the lions?

I wasn't aware that Christians consented to that. Learn something new every day.

6 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

They don't hit themselves; they hit each other.

That's the point.

So? Why does that make rugby OK even though it has a higher risk of mortality and morbidity than boxing?

6 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

You seem not to understand that it's other peoples health they actively seek to damage.

And you seem not to understand it is done with the consent of the other person.

6 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

You seem not to understand that it's other peoples health they actively seek to damage.
But the answer is obvious. your point is  a strawman.

There is a precedent for banning things have health risks (illicit drugs). There is also precedent for allowing things that have health risks (alcohol, tobacco). The question then is where we decide to draw the line. Surely the rational approach would be decide what level of risk society is willing to tolerate. In which case swimming, rugby and ice hockey would need to be banned before boxing, as the evidence i shared suggests they are more harmful.  

3 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

Unlike any other sport, where harm to the opponent is incidental to the process, the primary goal of boxing is to brain damage your opponent.

The euphemism they use  is "knock out".

So, if those involved want to make the "sport" safer, they have to reverse the rule; a KO should lose the match.

 If your concern is really the risk of damage these people are doing to themselves, then the intention behind the sport is irrelevant, only the damage it actually does.

Surprisingly hard to find stats directly comparing various sports for head injuries, but in this Japanese research judo, rugby, baseball and swimming all had higher deaths and severe disability than boxing in school aged children over a 13 year period, whereas this research finds ice hockey has the highest rate of concussion in adult  male sports, Taekwondo in adult female sports.

If you want to ban boxing you should ban swimming, rugby and baseball to be consistent, or offer additional reasons it should be banned but not the others.

3 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

Fundamentally, this is grown men (in the ring or the audience) doing something they should have  grown out of while at school.

That's your opinion. You need a better reason than you think it's childish in order to stop consenting adults from participating in an activity - otherwise i'll have to stop playing dungeons and dragons.  And more generally, why do you get to dictate how much risk another adult should take with their health?

56 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Sports activities (in the US at least) used to lean more heavily toward a bunch of kids getting together, working out rules, working out disputes amongst themselves, with a major emphasis on 'fun'.

Depends what they're doing: if they having 'boxing' matches in the playground i think intervention is reasonable. If they've set up some jumpers for goalposts for a game of footy i think we can leave them to it.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

In other sports  something similar has already been done and in US soccer, heading is banned for children under 11, for example.

I remember the first time i headed football as a young kid. I didn't even try again for about 10 years.

1 minute ago, swansont said:

Boxing, and sports in general, are activities available to kids/young adults who can't realistically make a determination about risks. We already know that even adults are generally bad at assessing risk.  

That's why childrens' sports activities should be closely supervised - that determination can be made based on current evidence and measures taken to minimise risks (e.g. headgear). And if we are talking risks then the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle should also be taken into account.