> If you cut open a living brain, you don't see the picture the person sees. So where is that located?
If I cut open my computer (and don't die of electrocution), I can't find any of my pictures in there either. I'm going to come up with the revolutionary hypothesis that sometimes when you open something up and submit it to a visual inspection, you can't immediately figure out how it works. That doesn't mean the inner workings will forever be a mystery, and it doesn't even mean they are complex, it just means you're doing it wrong.
You yourself said ketamine (or the mechanism that produces ketamine) could be the mechanism that god uses (I assume you mean the mechanism would bring us to heaven, else I think we can conclude that NDEs are unrelated to heaven?). How would triggering that mechanism (possible if it is nonmagical) not bring a person to heaven?
And what if we find that the the mechanism that triggers the ketamine is, let's say, lack of oxygen, would you conclude that heaven produces hypoxia? What if we find the hypoxia is caused by lack of circulation and/or breathing? Would we conclude those things are caused by heaven? The whole thing sounds absurd to me.
Did this god of Abraham come to you personally and tell you all this or did you get those rules from a book... like the wikipedia article you link to suggests? As for the other link, I won't bother disproving those logical arguments as I'm sure that's been done a hundred times (I almost stopped reading when I noticed the page started with the man that gave us the stupidity that is known as Pascal's Wager...) and we'll both end up throwing URLs at eachother. Agree to disagree?
> Since our experience of the world is due to chemical reactions as well, does this mean that the world doesn't exist either?
Maybe, but if we are unable to notice the difference between a 'real' world and the illusion that we live in, there's little we can do about it. So we might as well assume the world is real and act accordingly, we don't have anything to lose.
> No we can't -- that would be a basic scientific and philosophical blunder. The "(nonmagical) mechanism" could be "simply the mechanism that God uses". You can only conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven if you have already concluded that God does not exist, and I think I can see the makings of a circular argument.
If there was no magic involved, then surely an argument could be made that anyone who uses high amounts of ketamine experiences heaven? Would injecting someone (even 'evil' people) with ketamine just before they die ensure they go to heaven? Do people who are unable to produce enough ketamine have no afterlife, or do they go to hell?
I'll go there right after you explain to me why I should believe this ancient book of yours, why all the other old books are not true, and why I should support a system that thinks it's okay to throw people in a lake of fire.
> They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine,
So now all that's left is finding a (nonmagical) mechanism that causes ketamine to be produced/released when the brain is dying, and we'll be able to conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven, regardless of heavens existence or lack thereof.
> The fact that we happen to know what that chemical action is says nothing at all about the validity of the experience
The chemical reaction itself does not. The circumstances surrounding it do. If you were to inject me with some chemical that makes me feel hungry, the chemical reaction may be indistinguishable from 'real' hunger, but we both know why and how. If we would only measure my brain to see if I was hungry and conclude on that basis that I need to eat more, we would be wrong (although in any other situation we'd probably be correct), but if we measure the whole thing (you injecting me, my brain getting hungry) we would understand that while the experience of hunger is real, the conclusion I would be tempted to make ('I need to eat!') would be wrong.
With NDEs, the same thing. Measuring ketamine in the brain of someone having an NDE doesn't prove the experience isn't real, but finding out the mechanism whereby the brain, when in the circumstances associated with dying, produces/releases ketamine would (assuming those circumstances also have a non-supernatural explanation). If you have an exact chain of events that lead to an NDE, and nowhere in that chain it says *heavenly magic triggers X*, that pretty much proves NDEs are unrelated to the afterlife (if any).
> People who declare someone wrong before hearing them out have already failed Science 101 in the most fundamental way possible.
Like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don't think not investigating very unlikely claims is that bad. If all scientists were immortal and had infinity patience we could afford to examine every claim. Until that happens ignoring the unlikely ones that have zero evidence is very reasonable imho.
About your sig, how should we distinguish between magic and divine power? Is the latter not simply a subset of the former?
I'm afraid I'm one of the "just brain chemicals" people. In fact it's why I never trust my parents when they say anything positive about me as they don't really have much of a choice in liking me anyway... shut up mom that's just the "my-offspring" chemicals speaking!:p
> As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Yes... and by that logic every lightning strike that we don't measure may have been magical and thrown by Thor, and it's just that sometimes lightning is caused by electricity and those are the only ones we've measured.
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly. They're free to pump some people full of chemicals that instantly break down ketamine and then almost kill those people (that'd be an interesting if somewhat immoral experiment) and see if any NDE's occured.
> Well, so can hunger -- does that mean that food doesn't exist, or that we don't need to eat?
Well, I believe there is a lot of evidence that suggests not eating causes those chemical reactions, and no evidence that it is caused by some supernatural afterlife. Obviously we could use chemicals to make someone hungry even if they eat enough... but I fail to see how that proves food doesn't exist.
> Looking at science, if science was good to humans, ms windows wasn't such a pain to use...
You're free not to use a computer, or to use another operating system.
> We are living in a culture, were we can't live without science, yes you are right, but if you look where it is heading. At the moment it isn't heading in the nice star trek direction... It is more heading in direction of big calamities, terrorism (without science no boms), diseases, war....
Without science no medicine either. Science can cure diseases, and sometimes completely eradicate them (currently only smallpox, but I'm sure we can do it again). Sure, the virus is still held in a few labs somewhere, but it hasn't killed anyone in decades.
> Why wouldn't I have been born without science ??? People have been born for thousands of years without science... Science says we come from apes ? There is even proof we have been walking strait up for millions of years, and still science says we come from apes.
It's quite likely that without science many of your ancestors would have died long before they were old enough to reproduce, but I admit GP made a lousy argument (unless your mother required a C-secion I guess). I don't know about your walking straight example, but the specifics are not really relevant: whenever science discovers it is wrong is becomes MORE accurate, not less.
> so you say science killed Christ, I rather lived without science then...
You claim not to be a christian, so honestly what do you care about some guy who supposedly died 2000 years ago? Besides, it wasn't science that killed him, just people. If the cross hadn't been invented yet, they'd just have beat him to death with a rock. Science merely enabled the particular way they killed him.
> And yes I am using a computer, and use it for work... If there wasn't one, we would live different, doing other stuff. You can't jump from one situation in the other, people are not used to it...
But you ARE free to do other stuff. Go live naked in the woods! You CHOOSE to use the fruits of the very science that you claim to dislike. There is a word for that: hypocrisy.
> The same when you grow up in a big town, you probably don't want to live some where without people, and the same way around.
So what are you trying to say? You don't like science but don't want to live without it? Or that we like science but only because we grew up with it?
> This is a discussion were we can go on for ages, you believe your stuff, I believe mine.
Yes, if only this were science, so we could use objective data to come to a conclusion.
> I just think science makes our lives more complex and slowly destroys our surroundings... Because money is involved, and moral isn't looked at...
Seriously, stop doing that. Want GPs post to get modded up? Don't post in this discussion (Oh dear! Too late now) and hope you get modpoints in the next few days. Every "Mod up parent" post I see when I have modpoints is one point lost to '-1 Offtopic'.
A '-1 whining about modding up or down' moderation would come in handy.
If NDE's can be explained by chemical reactions, that means there's no evidence for heaven right? And even if we assume heaven exists, there is no longer any reason to believe we actually go there when we die (since obviously you can't be experiencing a NDE and be in heaven at the same time, since the NDE is all in you brains).
Surely this research says something about heaven: it tells us that an NDE is not part of heaven (when previously some people believed it was).
Now we just sit back and relax until a physics geek helps us out and calculates the maximum amount of information that could be contained 0.311 cubit foot. I'm sure he's out there somewhere!
> The problem is that in many states, judges are an elected position. Do you want people able to vote out someone because he oversaw their trial?
Like I said, are criminals so common they wield signifigant political influence? And why shouldn't someone have a right to vote out someone who oversaw their trial? The actions of elected officials affect us all the time, why should judges be the only ones who have zero accountability to those whose lives they affect most?
> But considering the fact that we have become such money whores that girls sell their virginity [foxnews.com] to the highest bidder, why should we be even surprised that some douche is willing to sell his kid's names? At least he'll get reelected if he pulls it off, and maybe fiber to the home.
How is this worse than 'normal' prostitution? The 'girls' you speak of is a single person and is 22 years of age. The highest offer mentioned is about $3.7 million, I think she's getting a pretty good deal for giving up something worthless.
> So if you found out one of your employees was a member of the KKK, you'd keep him on the payroll?
Odds are such a person would blatantly discriminate some of the other employees, which is a good excuse to fire someone in most places in the world, including those that do not have at-will employment.
There's a very large grey area between "let's roll some dice to decide who to fire today!" and "I can't fire anyone for any reason!".
> States are still free to impose certain restrictions (ex-cons can't vote in many states for instance) and those restrictions vary between the states
That always seemed strange to me. Are criminals really so common in the USA that, were they able to vote, they would wield significant political influence, outvote the poor honest people and take all their stuff? Could the lack of influence (ex-)criminals have over their government have anything to do with the fact that the USA has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world?
> He [the president] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
The key is not to have any Senators present, or just 1 who supports ACTA;)
> At that point we're dangerously close to racism.
Dunno, sounds more like conformism than racism to me. Just wanting other people to be more like you (or wanting yourself to be more like other people) doesn't make you a racist.
> We had this problem 50+ years ago, when being left-handed was considered a defect; and an impediment at times since so many tools are designed for right-handed people only. Teachers would try to correct/punish students who tried to use the "wrong" hand, to no avail. Eventually people realized that being left-handed was perfectly normal and you can easily get tools that work for left-handed people, and that no cure was necessary.
I actually got corrected for that. Can't say I regret it. An interesting detail is that when I try to write with my left hand my handwriting is very similar to what it was just before I became right-handed. When switching I went through a period of semi-ambidexterity, but I'm afraid I stopped training my left hand and and am not significantly different from a 'natural' right-handed person.
But anyway, I don't see a problem with the handedness-correction thing.
Slashdot Mirror
> If you cut open a living brain, you don't see the picture the person sees. So where is that located?
If I cut open my computer (and don't die of electrocution), I can't find any of my pictures in there either. I'm going to come up with the revolutionary hypothesis that sometimes when you open something up and submit it to a visual inspection, you can't immediately figure out how it works. That doesn't mean the inner workings will forever be a mystery, and it doesn't even mean they are complex, it just means you're doing it wrong.
You yourself said ketamine (or the mechanism that produces ketamine) could be the mechanism that god uses (I assume you mean the mechanism would bring us to heaven, else I think we can conclude that NDEs are unrelated to heaven?). How would triggering that mechanism (possible if it is nonmagical) not bring a person to heaven?
And what if we find that the the mechanism that triggers the ketamine is, let's say, lack of oxygen, would you conclude that heaven produces hypoxia? What if we find the hypoxia is caused by lack of circulation and/or breathing? Would we conclude those things are caused by heaven? The whole thing sounds absurd to me.
Did this god of Abraham come to you personally and tell you all this or did you get those rules from a book... like the wikipedia article you link to suggests? As for the other link, I won't bother disproving those logical arguments as I'm sure that's been done a hundred times (I almost stopped reading when I noticed the page started with the man that gave us the stupidity that is known as Pascal's Wager...) and we'll both end up throwing URLs at eachother. Agree to disagree?
Peace upon you, too.
> Since our experience of the world is due to chemical reactions as well, does this mean that the world doesn't exist either?
Maybe, but if we are unable to notice the difference between a 'real' world and the illusion that we live in, there's little we can do about it. So we might as well assume the world is real and act accordingly, we don't have anything to lose.
> No we can't -- that would be a basic scientific and philosophical blunder. The "(nonmagical) mechanism" could be "simply the mechanism that God uses". You can only conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven if you have already concluded that God does not exist, and I think I can see the makings of a circular argument.
If there was no magic involved, then surely an argument could be made that anyone who uses high amounts of ketamine experiences heaven? Would injecting someone (even 'evil' people) with ketamine just before they die ensure they go to heaven? Do people who are unable to produce enough ketamine have no afterlife, or do they go to hell?
I'll go there right after you explain to me why I should believe this ancient book of yours, why all the other old books are not true, and why I should support a system that thinks it's okay to throw people in a lake of fire.
> They just have to argue that the encounter with heaven produces ketamine,
So now all that's left is finding a (nonmagical) mechanism that causes ketamine to be produced/released when the brain is dying, and we'll be able to conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven, regardless of heavens existence or lack thereof.
> The fact that we happen to know what that chemical action is says nothing at all about the validity of the experience
The chemical reaction itself does not. The circumstances surrounding it do. If you were to inject me with some chemical that makes me feel hungry, the chemical reaction may be indistinguishable from 'real' hunger, but we both know why and how. If we would only measure my brain to see if I was hungry and conclude on that basis that I need to eat more, we would be wrong (although in any other situation we'd probably be correct), but if we measure the whole thing (you injecting me, my brain getting hungry) we would understand that while the experience of hunger is real, the conclusion I would be tempted to make ('I need to eat!') would be wrong.
With NDEs, the same thing. Measuring ketamine in the brain of someone having an NDE doesn't prove the experience isn't real, but finding out the mechanism whereby the brain, when in the circumstances associated with dying, produces/releases ketamine would (assuming those circumstances also have a non-supernatural explanation). If you have an exact chain of events that lead to an NDE, and nowhere in that chain it says *heavenly magic triggers X*, that pretty much proves NDEs are unrelated to the afterlife (if any).
> People who declare someone wrong before hearing them out have already failed Science 101 in the most fundamental way possible.
Like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don't think not investigating very unlikely claims is that bad. If all scientists were immortal and had infinity patience we could afford to examine every claim. Until that happens ignoring the unlikely ones that have zero evidence is very reasonable imho.
About your sig, how should we distinguish between magic and divine power? Is the latter not simply a subset of the former?
I'm afraid I'm one of the "just brain chemicals" people. In fact it's why I never trust my parents when they say anything positive about me as they don't really have much of a choice in liking me anyway... shut up mom that's just the "my-offspring" chemicals speaking! :p
I thought maybe explaining how his post is counterproductive instead of just punishing him would have more effect. Consider it a social experiment...
Besides, I'm not telling the mods what to do, and he is, so I wasn't *really* being a hypocrite, only a little ;)
> As the religionists will correctly point out any minute now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Yes... and by that logic every lightning strike that we don't measure may have been magical and thrown by Thor, and it's just that sometimes lightning is caused by electricity and those are the only ones we've measured.
If all 'measured' NDEs appear to have been caused by ketamine (of course we can never PROVE *any* causal relationship...) the religionists can point out all they want that the unmeasured ones may have really been caused by heaven, but they'll just look silly. They're free to pump some people full of chemicals that instantly break down ketamine and then almost kill those people (that'd be an interesting if somewhat immoral experiment) and see if any NDE's occured.
> Well, so can hunger -- does that mean that food doesn't exist, or that we don't need to eat?
Well, I believe there is a lot of evidence that suggests not eating causes those chemical reactions, and no evidence that it is caused by some supernatural afterlife. Obviously we could use chemicals to make someone hungry even if they eat enough... but I fail to see how that proves food doesn't exist.
> Looking at science, if science was good to humans, ms windows wasn't such a pain to use...
You're free not to use a computer, or to use another operating system.
> We are living in a culture, were we can't live without science, yes you are right, but if you look where it is heading. At the moment it isn't heading in the nice star trek direction... It is more heading in direction of big calamities, terrorism (without science no boms), diseases, war....
Without science no medicine either. Science can cure diseases, and sometimes completely eradicate them (currently only smallpox, but I'm sure we can do it again). Sure, the virus is still held in a few labs somewhere, but it hasn't killed anyone in decades.
> Why wouldn't I have been born without science ??? People have been born for thousands of years without science... Science says we come from apes ? There is even proof we have been walking strait up for millions of years, and still science says we come from apes.
It's quite likely that without science many of your ancestors would have died long before they were old enough to reproduce, but I admit GP made a lousy argument (unless your mother required a C-secion I guess). I don't know about your walking straight example, but the specifics are not really relevant: whenever science discovers it is wrong is becomes MORE accurate, not less.
> so you say science killed Christ, I rather lived without science then...
You claim not to be a christian, so honestly what do you care about some guy who supposedly died 2000 years ago? Besides, it wasn't science that killed him, just people. If the cross hadn't been invented yet, they'd just have beat him to death with a rock. Science merely enabled the particular way they killed him.
> And yes I am using a computer, and use it for work... If there wasn't one, we would live different, doing other stuff. You can't jump from one situation in the other, people are not used to it...
But you ARE free to do other stuff. Go live naked in the woods! You CHOOSE to use the fruits of the very science that you claim to dislike. There is a word for that: hypocrisy.
> The same when you grow up in a big town, you probably don't want to live some where without people, and the same way around.
So what are you trying to say? You don't like science but don't want to live without it? Or that we like science but only because we grew up with it?
> This is a discussion were we can go on for ages, you believe your stuff, I believe mine.
Yes, if only this were science, so we could use objective data to come to a conclusion.
> I just think science makes our lives more complex and slowly destroys our surroundings... Because money is involved, and moral isn't looked at...
Ah! So it's greed, not science, that you oppose?
Seriously, stop doing that. Want GPs post to get modded up? Don't post in this discussion (Oh dear! Too late now) and hope you get modpoints in the next few days. Every "Mod up parent" post I see when I have modpoints is one point lost to '-1 Offtopic'.
A '-1 whining about modding up or down' moderation would come in handy.
If NDE's can be explained by chemical reactions, that means there's no evidence for heaven right? And even if we assume heaven exists, there is no longer any reason to believe we actually go there when we die (since obviously you can't be experiencing a NDE and be in heaven at the same time, since the NDE is all in you brains).
Surely this research says something about heaven: it tells us that an NDE is not part of heaven (when previously some people believed it was).
I assume the police actually did both nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA testing on both twins, and other analysis of blood content?
Why do mitochondrial DNA testing? The twins would share that DNA too, doesn't make much sense to test it, right?
Now we just sit back and relax until a physics geek helps us out and calculates the maximum amount of information that could be contained 0.311 cubit foot. I'm sure he's out there somewhere!
> The problem is that in many states, judges are an elected position. Do you want people able to vote out someone because he oversaw their trial?
Like I said, are criminals so common they wield signifigant political influence? And why shouldn't someone have a right to vote out someone who oversaw their trial? The actions of elected officials affect us all the time, why should judges be the only ones who have zero accountability to those whose lives they affect most?
> But considering the fact that we have become such money whores that girls sell their virginity [foxnews.com] to the highest bidder, why should we be even surprised that some douche is willing to sell his kid's names? At least he'll get reelected if he pulls it off, and maybe fiber to the home.
How is this worse than 'normal' prostitution? The 'girls' you speak of is a single person and is 22 years of age. The highest offer mentioned is about $3.7 million, I think she's getting a pretty good deal for giving up something worthless.
> So if you found out one of your employees was a member of the KKK, you'd keep him on the payroll?
Odds are such a person would blatantly discriminate some of the other employees, which is a good excuse to fire someone in most places in the world, including those that do not have at-will employment.
There's a very large grey area between "let's roll some dice to decide who to fire today!" and "I can't fire anyone for any reason!".
> States are still free to impose certain restrictions (ex-cons can't vote in many states for instance) and those restrictions vary between the states
That always seemed strange to me. Are criminals really so common in the USA that, were they able to vote, they would wield significant political influence, outvote the poor honest people and take all their stuff? Could the lack of influence (ex-)criminals have over their government have anything to do with the fact that the USA has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world?
Oh, if only there was a "+1, Flamebait that made me giggle" option...
> He [the president] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
The key is not to have any Senators present, or just 1 who supports ACTA ;)
> At that point we're dangerously close to racism.
Dunno, sounds more like conformism than racism to me. Just wanting other people to be more like you (or wanting yourself to be more like other people) doesn't make you a racist.
> We had this problem 50+ years ago, when being left-handed was considered a defect; and an impediment at times since so many tools are designed for right-handed people only. Teachers would try to correct/punish students who tried to use the "wrong" hand, to no avail. Eventually people realized that being left-handed was perfectly normal and you can easily get tools that work for left-handed people, and that no cure was necessary.
I actually got corrected for that. Can't say I regret it. An interesting detail is that when I try to write with my left hand my handwriting is very similar to what it was just before I became right-handed. When switching I went through a period of semi-ambidexterity, but I'm afraid I stopped training my left hand and and am not significantly different from a 'natural' right-handed person.
But anyway, I don't see a problem with the handedness-correction thing.
> I get a LOT more sex, now that I'm out, than I did when I was a closet case and trying to be straight.
And this couldn't have anything to do with your motivation? Might it be that you didn't try to have sex with quite as much enthousiasm as you do now?