The local Belgian/European life-extension non-profit Heales is giving away prizes for whoever can make an interesting short movie about life extension. The first prize is €3000 (around $3386 as of today), other prizes being various gifts. You more or less just need to send a link pointing to the uploaded...
(This is meant as an entirely rewritten version of the original post. It is still long, but hopefully clearer.) Theism is often bashed. Part of that bashing is gratuitous and undeserved. Some people therefore feel compelled to defend theism. Their defence of theism goes further than just putting the record...
The purpose of this site is to help building a rationalist community, and helping individuals to fulfill their potential in that domain. We have a lot of discussions going on, and a lot of material is being, and going to be, generated. At some point it may become difficult for...
The local Belgian/European life-extension non-profit Heales is giving away prizes for whoever can make an interesting short movie about life extension. The first prize is €3000 (around $3386 as of today), other prizes being various gifts. You more or less just need to send a link pointing to the uploaded media along with your contact info to info@heales.org once you're done.
While we're at it you don't need to be European, let alone Belgian to participate, and it doesn't even need to be a short movie anyway. For instance a comic strip would fall within the scope of the rules as specified here : (link to a pdf file)(or see this page on fightaging.org). Also,... (read more)
(This is meant as an entirely rewritten version of the original post. It is still long, but hopefully clearer.)
Theism is often bashed. Part of that bashing is gratuitous and undeserved. Some people therefore feel compelled to defend theism. Their defence of theism goes further than just putting the record straight though. It attempts to show how theism can be a good thing, or right. That is probably going too far.
I would argue several points. And for that I will be using the most idealistic vision of religion I can conjure, keeping in mind that real world examples may not be as utopian. My intended conclusion is that fairness and tolerance are a... (read 874 more words →)
The purpose of this site is to help building a rationalist community, and helping individuals to fulfill their potential in that domain.
We have a lot of discussions going on, and a lot of material is being, and going to be, generated. At some point it may become difficult for any single individual to follow all of it. Even taking the karma system into account, interesting contributions may be missed by any particular individual. Furthermore, the sum of what would be elaborated upon here would not be as concise or even easily available as it could be wished to be.
To the point : would it be a good idea to try to summarize... (read more)
So yes, you'd likely lose the fun of normal dreaming - experiencing weird stuff, letting the insane flow of your dreams carry you like a leaf on a mad wind and not even feeling confused by it, but rather feeling like it was plain normal and totally making sense, having lots of warm fuzzy feelings and partway formed thoughts about your experiences in that dream.
Yet you might on the other hand gain the fun of being able to, for instance, capitalize on your dreaming time to learn and do some thinking. Not to mention the pleasure and sense of security derived from knowing your rational mind can work even under (some) adverse conditions.
Agranarian is the new vegetarian.
Yes I would. Why the acute interest ?
Is it because by admitting to being able to believe that, one would admit to having no strong enough internal experience of morality ?
Experience of morality, that is, in a way that would make him say "no that's so totally wrong, and I know because I have experienced both genuine guilt and shame, AND also the embarrassment of being caught falsely signaling, AND I know how they are different things". I have a tendancy to always dig deep enough to find how it was selfish for me to do or feel something in particular. And yet I can't always help but feeling guilt or shame beyond whose deep roots exist aside from my conscious rationalizations of how what I do benefit myself. Oh, and sometimes, it also benefits other people too.
Now we have a lot higher GDP
Yes indeed. Do you expect that to remain true after a nuclear war too ? More basically, I suppose I could resume my idea as follows : you can poke a hole in a country's infrastructure or economy, and the hole will heal with time because the rest is still healthy enough to help with that - just as a hole poked into a life form can heal, provided that the hole isn't big enough to kill the thing, or send it into a downward spiral of degeneration.
But yes, society isn't quite an organism in the same sense. There you probably could have full scale cataplasia, and see something survive someplace, and perhaps even from there, start again from scratch (or better, or worse, than scratch).
Well, kidding aside, your argument, taken from Pearl, seems elegant. I'll however have to read the book before I feel entitled to having an opinion on that one, as I haven't grokked the idea, merely a faint impression of it and how it sounds healthy.
So at this point, I only have some of my own ideas and intuitions about the problem, and haven't searched for the answers yet.
Some considerations though :
Our idea of causality is based upon a human intuition. Could it be that it is just as wrong as vitalism, time, little billiard balls bumping around, or the yet confused problem of consciousness ? That's what would bug me if I... (read 378 more words →)
From the popularity of the "Strangest thing an AI could tell you" post, and anosognosia tidbits in general, this topic seems to fascinate many people here. I for one would find it freakishly interesting to discover that I had such an impairment. In other words, I'd have motivation to at least genuinely investigate the idea, and even accept it.
How I'd come to accept it, would probably involve a method other than just "knowing it intuitively", like how I intuitively know the face of a relative to be that of a relative, or how I know with utter, gut level certainty that I have three arms. Considering that we are, well, rationalists, couldn't... (read more)
What ?
There's no such thing as an absolute denial macro. And I sure hope this to trigger yours.
Hi, could anyone help me obtain
"Limits of Scientific Inquiry" by G. Holton, R. S. Morison ( 1978 )
and
"What is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable." Brockman, John (2007)
Thanks in advance
This, applies more generally than to anosognosia alone, and was very illuminating, thank you !
So, provided that as we grow, some parts of our brain, mind, change, then this upsets the balance of our mind as a whole.
Let's say someone relied on his intuition for years, and consistently observed it correlated well with reality. That person would have had a very good reason to more and more rely on that intuition, and uses its output unquestioningly, automatically to fuel other parts of his mind.
In such a person's mind, one of the central gears would be that intuition. The whole machine would eventually depend upon it, and to remove intuition would... (read more)