science4ever

John Cuthber I don't think you will like my naive example from my own life. But it may be a rather close example of believing in something one know are not so. I where very shy towards girl when me a teen. When I got 20 I was fed up with being so lonely and decided to try to get together with a girl. None thought me to be the most handsome or sexy guy so I got turned down again and again. So the years went by and no good luck. so I decided to believe that I could make it by pretending to be not shy and not sexy and not handsome and not likeable. I pretended to be the opposite of what was true. I acted as if I where sexy and likeable and at first it did not work at all. They saw through it and even told me that it looked ridiculous when I pretended to be something that I obvisouly was not. I did not give up. I tried every day to find somebody that accepted that I was sexy and worthy to get to know. and after some 3 years of daily fruitless attempts it worked it did not work each time and not even ten percent it worked only at some one in 300 attempts. So after three fruitless years then for some two years I find at least a handful of girls that did not mind me pretending. they accepted me as I where the great pretender. Big surprise but they did not care that I pretended. I where still not sexy at all and still shy inside me but tried my best to not show that outward. I pretended to have not shyness. But after some 13 years of being together with two girls that I loved and lived with one of their best friends told my latest love that she thought that I where not worthy of being with my GF that I where just pretending and really a shy childish guy worth nothing. And she believed in her new female friend and wanted us to part and not be together. That almost killed me. Sure I had new all the time I where shy and worthless but not that where that hopelessly worthless that she did not want me anymore. So I where close to suicide and have struggled since then to survive and barely do survive. So one can believe in something even if one know it are not so. One just have to act on it and after some year the body get so used to pretending that it forget about it and one only get conscious of it when it fail due to some accident of getting aware of it. Cognitive dissonance may be a good explanation for it. Or personal confirmation bias.

just several hundred feet away and not higher than the tree tops ? Depends on what kind of tree? would that be just 200 feet away that would be 60 meter or so. that is very close but being an orb they are not bigger than a Tennis Ball so not much of a UFO is it? They could have retold it with better details and why don't they set up the mobile in a steady way to make a good picture? I trust it is kids playing with homebuild quadrocopters their electric motors can be rather silent.

Thanks for the link to social proof idea I think this one may have some importance too? Normative social influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_Social_Influence Experiments that Soloman Ash did on conformity and experiments by Stanley Milgram and Zimbardo made and all these and many others refer to factors that could be involved in how religions works from a functional perspective while atheists often concentrate on the lack of belief in claims made by the religious tradition. Ontology and such. Does God exist. My personal take is that one of the most important factor is feeling righteous and religion seems to have that built in. With God on your side you sure are righteous and the signalling theory display required makes religion as Us vs Them as they are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Religion_as_a_costly_signal Almost all behavior within religion looks incredibly ridiculous to those that have a lack of such belief. Believers are ridiculed as delusional and insane and if you are a "New Atheist" you are almost bound to ridicule them or else seen as an accommodationist and that is even more ridiculous than being a believer. Sure I can be wrong but the feeling of being righteous and accepting to display costly signals seems to be important.

As I get it the term supernatural as a word are a very late comer. Religion has been with us some 4 thousands of years or much more but the term supernatural maybe at most since the middle age and are some philosophical invention to be used in debates? AFAIK there are natural science and natural history and natural religion and the supernatural is a kind of construct that is rhetoric .There is no evidence for that there exist anything like what the term refers to is there? I bought a book that Bertrand Russell had been Editor to. The history of Western Philosophy or similar name. I looked up Naturalism in the index and it was nowhere to be found. I find that odd. I thought it existed since the old Greeks Atomists or something. These terms naturalism and supernaturalism is just words they only exist for philosophers.

What Knownothing wrote in another thread seems to be rather true. For to make a superstition to be effective it has to appear real. Seems to work for the believers but fail for us atheists. The believer see God as very real while an atheist lack belief in God. So as Knownothing writes. An atheist would need "true reasons to be satisfied" and would bark loud if one gave them something they know are not true or real. So it is a kind of Catch 22. You are damned if you lie about it and damned if you tell the truth? One would need to give the atheist a myth that is of such high value that it does not matter that it is a myth that just pretend to be real. A kind of secular art form like music or movies or similar? music often get's very close to appear real. But if one ask the musician they often admit that when private they play totally other music and what they do on stage is just a faked thing. They really don't like what they play it is a job they do. So their fans love it despite it is lie a kind of myth. AFAIK Bob Dylan got so angry on his fans wanting him to play something he was fed up with that he refused and turned his back to them and they booed him and he left for to never come back many times. He refused to fake it for their sake but they wanted the fake too. Even knowing he would have to fake it they loved those old songs so much that they wanted him to pretend he sang it with joy. Is it not odd? They valued these songs so much that they rather force him to fake it then to accept that he hated to sing those songs that he rather left the room.

Know nothing what you wrote sounds very true to me And such sure exists. Aliens that come in big Mothership and will rescue the belivers. Ancient Aliens that built the old civilisations and such myths and political conspiracy superstitiouns like lizzard people that run this world behind scene using our leaders like puppets. So us humans at least some of us are very vulnerable to wild ideas. Sad is it not. The bad thing about placebo is that it gives false hope of being a real cure. so why does not us secular set up a good reliable placebo for those that there are no real cure? Why let the criminal get all the money on false hopes.

Words like supernatural is a kind of code word? A word that points out expertize Science is not supposed to be able to say anything reliable about the supernatural. the word makes it taboo for scientists to deal with it. Priests and Paranormal and alternative Medicine and New Agers and maybe MythBusters are seen as the experts? Science can only deal with what is natural. "Natural Science" What can be measured. So the supernatural is a kind of social tool for saying that you need other experts. A ghost buster or a medium or channeler or a priest or pastor or a wicca person or ... They have tried to carve or digged into a niche where they can be left alone from criticism due to how they define their supernatural myth it either belong to a known religious tradition and then people react with categorizing. Baptistis do such things I am this church and it is not in our tradition. A kind of division of labor. They try to find their niche. A kind of market strategy. so supernatural becomes a "noa" word. A No No for science. we do science we don't do Gods. SJGould is famous for his support that it was two different things. Science deal with measurable things and religion with the non-measurables. New Atheism wanted to point out it was non-compatible instead. So it was a kind of cultural war going on.

What kind of definition do you have for that consciousness? The self consciousness that the mirror experiment is solved by very few animal. Most animal fail to recognize that they see themselves in the mirror in front of themselves. You seems to refer to something other that what we usually refer to as human self consciousness. Some that have ASD fail to know how they come through in the minds of others or they claim they know that but don't care. that is another aspect of being aware that makes the whole notion of consciousness not so clear cut. So give me the defintion of what you talk about.

Doesn's seem that we have that wood plancks here locally. They are double size so I got curious on what if I make it oval/eliptic diameter instead of round circle so it is say 22mm in height but 35 or 40 in width? that way one could get same air volume area and that way have strong walls and same aucoustic properties? Would that maybe work out well?

Yes sorry I most likely missremembered Lynn Margulis. sounds more likely then. I do apology for misleading those who did not know about Lynn Margulis.

I am most likely not logical enough to get it but to me personally it is a great mystery that something exist at all. How am I suppose to find that even likely? I refer to existence as such. Sure now we exists but that the fluctuations that created the Big Bang why did there exist anything at all in the first place. I mean is that not a great mystery? where do I go wrong logically? My poor logic tells me that there is no reason for something to exist. Now I don't believe in "creation" because that only place the question further away. Who "created" the Creator and so on Creators all the way down.

I trust that it is most likely that all gods are fictional myths but that some myths has the claim that their God is real as one of the features of that particular God. Because some or many of the believers really need a real God. If their religious tradition would only have mythic gods then they would lose faith in it. God has to be real they say and why would they then not include a myth that say their God is real? Seems very likely to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology Fictions are not exactly myths because most fiction do admit it is fiction while myth often claim it has something real that it refers to metaphorically. Here is a philosophers that ask if it is possible to believe in something that one know is not true? From an interview with Simon Critchley. link here http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/atheologies/6246/simon_critchley__atheist_religious_thinker_on_utopia___the_fiction_of_faith/ My thread is about ths things idea that if one know that God is a fictional myth can one still decide on that one want to believe in it and somehhow make that happen consciously without feeling that one fake faith?

TED talk has a two hour talk with Lawrence Krauss and he try to answer something very close How can somethign come out of nothing? He has also written a book about his views. Not exactly what you ask Why questions tend to be philosophy and what can they know about such things? I trust physics more than phil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_Cosmides she had an idea that where very similar. she named it Gaia. She thought that it was basically self regulating But I have no good link to her detailed views. I did not get motivaed enough to trust it to be a good model.

knownothing I like your TLDR but I wonder about this. Do we have any scienctific research on how this work out in practice. I wanted to become a believer since 1983 but fail to trick me into the delusion. I find it too far out and not possible to support. But I know I can be in delusion by pure accidental habit. When I where ten years old I started to trust all those that reported about UFOs but that was maybe a sign of my gullibility I did find it too unlikely that all of them lied. Fortunately I happen to read a book by Jaques Vallee that pointed out that humans seems to have these kind of expereinces for as long as we have written history so it is a common human delusion. there are no Aliens it is all in the head of those that retell their experience. so based on your take on delusion. Is the following reasonable idea? Can one decied to believe in something one know is not true?

The believers tend to act based on their belief so that makes such faith important because of the impact on all others living in same society as the believers. they vote on politicians that seems to be closer to their religious views. Such have effect on abortion and other things like blasphemy laws. People debate it because it directly affect their personal life.

What I ask is this: Are there two kinds of believers? And can one somehow measure this using science Maybe using those fMRI scans that are so popular? I also ask why these two different kind of believers need God to be something real. Why can they not accept that God is a cultural social psychological idea that is a kind of human tool. Humans are tool makers and God is one such tool? I am not good at finding good words for these questions but I only trust that science can answer them so that is why I am here.

hypervalent_iodine I care about Moderators view so I leave this thread. I don't trust I know how to be on topic based on OP No big deal.

I have not been able to ask the question in a concise way. So my question is maybe too direct or specific about using fMRI so suppose I retrack to this "Could these two kind of believer belong to different personality types?" I claim there are atleast two types of believers. literal Fundamentalists that read the text to say what it say and then the believers that read it seeing the text metaphorically to be like a story pointing to the real but unknown God? So seen from atheism not much difference but to the first category they see the mythers as atheists. so it does not help the mythers they say myth refer to the real. My interest is are these two belonging to two difference type of personalities. and and why does God has to be real? Okay Einstein is very real. Some of those living today has even met him. but compare with George Orwell who is a famous author of "1984" book he did never exist but the name refers to another guy that actually wrote the book but used a pseudonym for some reason. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell So they use "pen name" as an explanation for why he used another name. Could he maybe have realized the Press would chase him like Celebs today not being able to get out without paparazzi chasing them all over the place. Maybe too different ways to exist either using real name of "pen name". so applied to God would be the myth about God and what the myth really refers to. The fundies then trust that the Myth is the real God and the Mythers realize that it is Eric Arthur Blair who just used a pen name like George Orwell.

When I trust that the OP meant it on a more everyday reasoning level then I find it very likely to be true. Sure it is not a scientific theory or worked out hypothesis or anything on an academic level but it was not meant to be? Sure one can say he start with too young kids too early. When this really happen only science can answer. Paul Bloom when he wrote his book that suggests that we are born as dualists is close to something like what OP suggests. here is his latest book http://bigthink.com/Picture-This/essential-reading-paul-bloom-on-how-pleasure-works that one takes it one step further from Dualism to Essentialism. Both can help humans to intuitively see Agents in things with no agent like the Universe or spirits that survive death. Sure the details are often learned but the reasoning can have been dormant and get easily triggered. I agree that one can criticize detail in the OP text but seen generously it is right on the money.

When I read OP as I guess he wanted to be read it makes sense to me. what is wrong with his reasoning in your opinion?

I did buy the book when it got published as soft cover pocket. I trust that I read it .Being an atheist I am used to his style so did not react as strong as the OP did. My problem is more with this idea that is common for both believers and disbelievers. A god that is a delusion is not a real god. AFIK both theist and atheist looks down upon such gods. Dawking as Agnostic atheist does look down upon made up gods and the True Believers also look down upon made up gods. The True Believer assert that their God is very alive and real and not a God made up by humans. That is even in the Bible that the made up gods are false gods. So both theist and athist agree upon that a God has to be real or else that God is a false god and thus no god to trust at all. I am neither theist nor atheist because I want to have faith in a human made God. to me that would be the most honest and true to reality one can act. To tell it like it is. "I made up this God myself and that is why my God is believable and true because I made it to be true to me for my needs and my purpose. Yes I know it sound totally far out but how else to do it? If there are no gods and one need at least one god then one have to build God as good as one can.

Cornetto Zink is a lip vibrating instrument blown almost identical to Trumpet but with a conical instead of cylindrical bore for to allow one to have both the lower the overblown higher register in tune and to use just plain fingerholes with no mechanics. So it is seen as a very primitive instrument now not easily integrated in modern music. To me it would be a huge improvement over the Cowhorn and Goathorn used on Folkmusic which is my main interest. these instrument play only in lowest register and don't make use of overblowing.

Yes the exponential seems to have been known when they did the Cornettos/Zink too the tapering is not linear but I have to start with something that is at least close to ideal Some say that the first bore to the thumbhole is almost cylindrical and then it is conical. Others say one need to do two such with different tapering after the other so they should have different climb for to get the overbklown right. I will be happy if I get an instrument that at least sound each note even if a bit false it is just a proof of concept that I make one for to later maybe buy a real one?

studiot yes that explains why a sax or Tuba has such wide horns. And why the instrument that I will try is named a "muted" horn? Itlack that loudspeaker that one are so used to see on brass instruments .