An idea worth censoring: 'The Science Delusion'

Originally posted by vasaga

Originally posted by mbkennel
It is unwise to make an unsupported analogy about computing hardware and then believe it has anything useful to say about biology which is profoundly different.

Ah.. How exactly are biology and computing hardware different?'

computing hardware is dry and hard.

biology is wet, salty and squishy.

This is why biology can't use fast wires the way computing hardware does.

I've seen a bunch of arguments in here on how we could recreate someone by just putting the right connections together. We are mechanistic, except when we aren't. We are like computers, except when we aren't. We are deterministic, except when we aren't. Always interesting to see that there are always exceptions when it's convenient.

Biology is never clean or convenient for anybody's intellectual ontology. Deal with it.

The specific molecular processes and evolutionary feasible pathways always influence the biological solution.

Originally posted by Bleeeeep
reply to post by Kashai

 

It's not slippery, it's strong faith; and with enough faith, you can tame any beast - even the serpents.

If we had little to no faith, we would be indistinguishable from them.

There is a book called "The Forest of Kings the Untold Story of the Ancient Maya written by Linda Schelle and David Friedel. In it amongst other things?

Is that Mayan leaders identified themselves first with there animal spirit name.

We do not treat this as taming an animal.

reply to post by Kashai


We are veering of topic, but you need to understand what the fallen ones do. They give half-truths to deceive us. Deep thought, meditation, and idolatry prayer will give them access to your thoughts. I mean, you will think what they want you to, not that they will be able to read your thoughts [they can always access your thoughts] - they will implant lies in your thoughts.

Beasts have the breath of life but they are not us. The bearded one known as Quetzalcoatl is one of the fallen. Just as Zues, Apollo, Ra, Krishna, were before him. Even the mighty known by Buddha were they.

After the fall of Babel, and the division of man upon the Earth, Mystery went forth to the great tribes and deceived.

It works because they're using half-truths. They give truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, deception, and then everything from then on becomes wrong.

bbl, going to watch tv and clear my thoughts.

Originally posted by Bleeeeep
reply to post by Kashai

 

We are veering of topic, but you need to understand what the fallen ones do. They give half-truths to deceive us. Deep thought, meditation, and idolatry prayer will give them access to your thoughts. I mean, you will think what they want you to, not that they will be able to read your thoughts [they can always access your thoughts] - they will implant lies in your thoughts.

Beasts have the breath of life but they are not us. The bearded one known as Quetzalcoatl is one of the fallen. Just as Zues, Apollo, Ra, Krishna, were before him. Even the mighty known by Buddha were they.

After the fall of Babel, and the division of man upon the Earth, Mystery went forth to the great tribes and deceived.

It works because they're using half-truths. They give truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, truth, deception, and then everything from then on becomes wrong.

bbl, going to watch tv and clear my thoughts.

edit on 4/1/2013 by Bleeeeep because: added parts in brackets and the be back later part

I feel that each example of a "prophet" is in relation to a functional viable mutation. I person whose abilities were the result of them being developed enough to be equivalent to the common human a billion years from now (as an example).Because of there environment they were influenced into believing they were Gods. But in reality they were examples of what would occur to human beings if they were allowed to evolve for a billion years (as a an example). I consider that by that time mankind will have the ability to perceive reality in such a way, they go beyond the current ability for humans to perceive reality as it really is. This will enable mankind to do things as whole that in the past was only considered things Prophets could do.

To be clear you are of course entitled to your opinion but this is the way I feel.

Originally posted by Kashai

Seriously Bedlam do you really have any idea as to what you are talking about?

Any thoughts?

Yeah, I do, but in the case of your videos about Willowbrook, it's real tough to see how that applies whatsoever to the original subject or the direction it's sort of lurched off into.

You might as well have posted a video about the mistreatment of elephants by circuses or something.

Originally posted by Bleeeeep
reply to post by Bedlam

 

This is way out of my "field" of knowledge but it looks like you are really just guessing at all this stuff.

Nope. If you want the basics of neuron physiology, I can lay it out for you. Point out the 'guess' parts if you like. I am not going into gory detail about ion channels or the Na-K pump, and there's a lot of basic physics about field propagation across the membrane during depolarization that's not worth getting into on ATS, so I'm leaving out physical biology.

How far off is this? Correct the errors please cause this is my first in dept look at neurology...

Brain cells use glucose to convert sodium/potassium ADP into ATP, thereby becoming ionized. (These ionized sodium and potassium ADP/ATP are stored in what is referred to as electrical synapses.)

The mitochondria in neurons (most 'brain cells' are support crew, various glia like Schwann cells or oligodendrocytes...) convert glucose (or fatty acids, or ketone bodies, but mostly glucose) to energy in the OXPHOS cycle, which produces ATP from ADP. ATP is the principal but not only high energy molecule your cells use for storage, but it's the major one.

ATP is then used to do work in the cell.

Sodium and potassium are found in the body in the form of ions, having entered as some sort of ionically bonded compound like sodium chloride or potassium chloride. Otherwise known as electrolytes.

For the neuron, primarily sodium and potassium are used for the neuron's signaling status, although magnesium, calcium, chloride and phosphorus ions enter into it as well.

There are two major types of connections between neurons, the chemical synapse and the 'electrical synapse' which is usually called a gap junction. Chemical synapses use neurotransmitters. Gap junctions have shared ion channels.

Upon access of the electrical synapses, the ionized sodium and potassium are triggered, released, and travel through [some channels] (electrolytes maybe), resulting in an "electrical charge", that somehow [materialistically] reads other neuronal information, interprets new information, and then goes on to store the said new information by creating new neurons with the newly released ionized sodium/potassium?

Once an action potential begins, there's no gradation or stopping, or half responses, once that neuron has decided its inputs merit triggering, it goes all the way through its firing cycle, this is called "all or nothing".

The action potential propagates down the axon relatively slowly. It's not a current like in a wire. What happens is that you've got that sodium-potassium gradient that was previously established by chemical processes involving that Na-K pump.

Locally at some point on the axon, you see a wave of reduced polarization coming from the soma side of the neuron, heading down the axon towards the synapse. The sodium ion channels "see" a falling local polarization and open, allowing sodium into the cell there, further reducing the polarization. The next set of sodium ion channels a little farther down the axon "see" this fall and THEY open, and thus the wave of falling polarization props down the axon. It's a lot like people doing 'the wave' in a football stadium. The sodium ions, which are not only diffusing into the cell but being sucked in by the electrical charge difference, will sort of 'overshoot' and the inside of the cell will become slightly positive. This opens the potassium ion channels all over the cell and allows the diffusion gradient to equalize. Then both the sodium and potassium ion channels close, the ion pumps re-establish a diffusion and electrical charge gradient and the cell is once again ready to fire. And again, since all this is rate limited by the total pump capacity, diffusion rates, docking and pumping speeds plus the time to get the channels all closed it's a matter of milliseconds to re-arm. This is what makes neurons orders of magnitude slower than electrical gates.

Are you a brain surgeon/neurologist? what made you study all these terms?

I have EE and physics degrees. If I'm going to be somewhere for a while, I take science courses at the local uni just to keep my hand in. I have just about enough for an honors biology degree. Also, when you're bidding projects to the MIC, you have to absorb a lot of background info on the thing you're bidding, some of them were biology related and I got picked to be the one to learn the body of knowledge.

This semester I decided to take humanities since I'm in California for months,so it seemed fitting to take a movie script writing course. I started to use the framework of an old script outline I pitched once as a joke to my overlords, they almost took it seriously, but nixed it. Byrd pointed out I couldn't limit the spread of the thing to the instructor if he decided to farm it out and not tell me, so I had to kill that one as it had classified info in that I didn't think the teacher would recognize.

The other one does too but the project is pretty much long dead AFAIK, and good riddance, but I think it's politically twisty on one side and individual warfighter twisty on the other, and I'm trying to play all the sides off (there's at least three now) as being good guys in their own perception, it's more how they misinteract with each other while trying to do what they see as right that causes this massive collision you can see coming the whole way. And I can stick a lot of current events in like the recent "urban combat drills" with alternate explanations worthy of ATS.

lots of questions involving memory and perception

What I was speaking of was this. Your neurons are slow, because they depend on chemical processes for signaling information that are inherently slow, in a relative way. The thing that makes them wonderful is that each neuron has a really amazing ability to learn, in its own little way, and the decision making to fire can be quite complex. But the wind-up and firing parts are not fast, and the neuron can't do anything while that's going on.

This means that you can't directly handle complex, fast real-time inputs with neuron transmission of the data. You can't pipe raw audio or video data down a nerve connection, because it doesn't transmit analog data and its firing rate is quite slow, most CNS neurons have a cycle time in the 10s to 100s of milliseconds. You have a few that can fire every millisecond but most do not, and even the 'fast' ones are not fast compared to even relay logic, much less to electronics.

So, the way you compensate for this is to interpret the data on the spot, so to speak. Your ears and eyes do not send on raw information. They take it apart and send on boiled-down data that is broad but not fast, so that you can interpret it with a CNS that's massively parallel but slow.

Originally posted by vasaga

Originally posted by mbkennel
It is unwise to make an unsupported analogy about computing hardware and then believe it has anything useful to say about biology which is profoundly different.

Ah.. How exactly are biology and computing hardware different? I've seen a bunch of arguments in here on how we could recreate someone by just putting the right connections together. We are mechanistic, except when we aren't. We are like computers, except when we aren't. We are deterministic, except when we aren't. Always interesting to see that there are always exceptions when it's convenient.

Neurons aren't much like logic gates. It's not convenience, it's the way it is.

Neurons evolved out of needing to use something like a half-assed muscle cell to do logic processing. So they use ion channels for state storage. It's not fast, but the way a neuron does it, each neuron typically does more than a minimal amount of logic. Using actual neurons for processing would be sloppy and slow, and hard for it not to die. Silicon is less prone to croak on you, but isn't implemented like a neuron, typically.


So, computer logic is not much like a neuron.

Originally posted by Kashai
Color is caused by what are refereed to as "cones" in the eye's. The proverbial "terrible two's" occur when these cones develop.

Up until that time a child vision is restricted to perhaps black and white with very little if any depth perception. When the cones come into effect a child learns about color and a way cool ability to see depth in the way the rest of us see it.

edit on 30-3-2013 by Kashai because: modifed content

My memory runs all the way back to being a child in a pram and these memories are in perfect colour.

Originally posted by BlueMule

“In this $25 million program we used ‘remote viewing’ to find a downed Russian bomber in North Africa, for which President Carter commended us. We found a kidnapped U.S. general in Italy, and the kidnap car that snatched Patricia Hearst. We looked in on the US hostages in Iran, and predicted the immanent release of Richard Queen, who was soon sent to Germany. We described a Russian weapons factory in Siberia, leading to a U.S. congressional investigation about weakness in U.S/ security, etc.

“We published our scientific findings in Nature, Proc. IEEE, Proc. AAAS, and Proc. American Institute of Physics. I thought a TED audience would find this recently declassified material interesting. And no physics would be harmed in my presentation.”

I notice Targ leaves out a lot of the problems with the program, though. Ask him about the tent problem.

It's not that it's not interesting. It's not that there might not even be something to it you could pick out and analyze, maybe find something new and interesting there in terms of physics.

The Army, SOCOM and the Agency love this sort of thing, it's being researched all the time to some degree, and if you're really lucky you won't get tied up with any SRI related project during your career with them. Although this year I found out I was working very indirectly for SRI at one point.

Oh, by the way, don't view SRI as the psychic good guys. Seriously. They're involved with a lot of projects you sort of glance off of here and there, not all of them would go over well with you.

Trivia: Egon Spengler is a parody of Targ.

Originally posted by Bleeeeep
What you can or cannot do is because you have faith that you can or cannot do it. You aren't evolved into having more faith, by some "natural" evolution. You just lack the doubt that paralyzes most others.

Jesus spoke of the power of faith long ago - it is not some new age thing that is evolving by "nature". Think of those with out psi as "Doubting" Thomas - not some lesser evolved beasts.

Do you have faith that you can flap your hands and fly like a bird? If you did, do you think you'd be able to?

Jesus also did not throw himself down from the heights, just sayin'.

reply to post by Bedlam


In short, chemicals reacting to other chemicals cause the brain to store garbled information, by way of chemical bonds, and that information cannot be read in any distinguishable way, when trying to read just electrons. The reason being, the garbled information is not analog or digital, and because most of the information is in chemical bonds?

ions = molecules with extra electrons

Why can't we figure out the electrons syntax and then push electrons and have them read the chemical information? Or why can't we at least read the electrons to read the current information (if we can figure out its syntax)?

Surely the electrons in the ionized molecules are information carriers? Otherwise, basic electricity or magnetic fields would cause heavy memory loss. The ions must be formatted information, not only because something has to carry the information, but because standard electrons, of electrical/magnetic fields, do not cause heavy memory loss.

Yes no?


And thanks for the hefty overview. I really appreciate the time and effort you took. (I'll have to read it many times to get a really good understanding. )

reply to post by EasyPleaseMe


Your brain stores colors? Freaky!

The only thing my brain stores that I find abnormal is feelings...

I ate some squash about a year ago and it triggered sadness. I was overcome with grief for some reason. I guess when I was a kid I was made to eat squash even though it tastes awful.

Regressed memories, aren't they awesome?

reply to post by Bedlam


I think if I have enough faith I would walk through the wall and into the air; I wouldn't need to flap my arms.


Not sure what you're referencing with "Jesus didn't throw himself down from the heights"?

Are you referring to not climbing down from the cross? If so he knew what he had to do.

"Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me thrice."


Oh I see... Yeah you aren't supposed to ask for miracles for proof. You are supposed to have faith, and all you need to know will be revealed.

I understand the circular reasoning in this but it is done to teach you to have faith.

edit again: Think of it like being catatonic but instead of basic motor skills being disabled, it is psi skills.

Originally posted by Bleeeeep
reply to post by Bedlam

 

In short, chemicals reacting to other chemicals cause the brain to store garbled information, by way of chemical bonds, and that information cannot be read in any distinguishable way, when trying to read just electrons. The reason being, the garbled information is not analog or digital, and because most of the information is in chemical bonds?

"Garbled" is a bit off, I'd use "encoded". Instead of 'at .000001 amplitude was 2.233, at .000002 amplitude was 2.234' like digitized audio, or as some sort of analog signal, audio is more like "phase 3.0 degrees, frequency 334.1 hz, amplitude 23 db". Your ears bin out very small frequency increments, part of your midbrain parses out phase data to detect source location. But you don't store or process audio the way a tape recorder or a DAT would. As memory, which I really haven't addressed because it's freaky and multimodal as far as can be told, it would be stored electrically in specialized neurons for about 15 minutes tops, then encoded into neuron weights, then possibly downloaded to proteins at some point. That's why you have access to recent things very quickly, less recent things with a bit of hesitation, and you recall who Louis XIV was after a few minutes. You're retrieving it from different sorts of storage.

ions = molecules with extra electrons

Why can't we figure out the electrons syntax and then push electrons and have them read the chemical information? Or why can't we at least read the electrons to read the current information (if we can figure out its syntax)?

Or fewer...but the electrons don't have the info. And the info is broken into the way your brain encodes memory, and scattered all over the place. It's not in a simple linear format like analog magnetic orientations of tape with an old style tape recorder.

Surely the electrons in the ionized molecules are information carriers? Otherwise, basic electricity or magnetic fields would cause heavy memory loss. The ions must be formatted information, not only because something has to carry the information, but because standard electrons, of electrical/magnetic fields, do not cause heavy memory loss.

The question's off a bit. Your neurons use ions for signaling when their input criteria are met. Since neurons are involved with memory, then obviously those memories are passed around various brain structures through this method, but it's a bit like saying that a TV has wall power, so the wall power is inherently involved in the pictures being displayed and has some facet of 'pictureness'. Sort of, but not in the way I think you're asking.

The information is encoded in structure, not the signals. Sort of like how an oil painting has information encoded in the structure, and while that structure is in the way the oils are on the canvas, it is not the oil or the canvas itself. Or, in a way -

reply to post by Bleeeeep


Well, one would have to expect that Jesus had the ultimate in faith - he was a pared-down-to-fit copy of God, that could be hosted in a human. He KNEW what heaven was, he KNEW God because he was God, at least a human sized fraction of it. So it's not faith, really, but experience, it ought to be fullbore faith in a way a human who has never really seen or perceived or been these things could ever know.

Yet when Satan said, Jump, dude, the angels will surely lift you up, Jesus said no. And I also seem to recall once he said that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand, then when nothing happened, he took himself off to contemplate why that didn't work.

I hear you about faith, but I am as far away from that being a part of my perception that I can only model it - I don't believe in miracles. I believe in what I can measure. You really don't want an engineer that says "ok, this bridge will hold all these cars because I have faith, screw the math", you really don't. I don't think you can fly around by wanting to. I don't believe most occult things, because they're not operant. You don't see them producing anything, or being testable, or replicable, or useful in any way, which in my book makes them likely not to exist, no point wasting time on it.

If you could show me something that worked reliably and I could prove wasn't being faked, I'd be the first one to get in line to study it. But so far, nada, at least with things like this. The problem is, it's really tough to separate out magic powers from good guessing.

reply to post by Bedlam

but it's a bit like saying that a TV has wall power, so the wall power is inherently involved in the pictures being displayed and has some facet of 'pictureness'. Sort of, but not in the way I think you're asking.

Ah it's good to finally understand your take on reading the brain's information...

I'm thinking electrons (or something in the nervous system) has to be like the cable that carries the bulk of the antenna/satellite feed, and not the electricity. Or maybe they are like telephone lines and they carry both the power and the information.

My own personal opinion, is that I think all of the body and energy around it, carries certain types of information and processing instructions [all the way down to the smallest form of energy], but for this argument's sake, we can stick to electrons for the bulk of the information permeation (since you and chaos were discussing it.)


To the Jesus and purely faith post:
You have to understand that my interest in this topic, is because I am looking for a unified theory. Something that allows for everything to be one subject and easily understood. It kills me that everyone only looks at reality through a bunch of different subjects, when I know there must be only one subject. Also, my interest in this topis is purely for curiosity sake, and not for proving or disproving God to people. I do not wish for faith/esp/psi to be found to prove it to the faithless. Those with faith can already see that it is real...

Think of it this way: To understand anything you must have faith that the information is able to be right, otherwise, you will still deny it, won't you? You will deny and look for tricks and deceptions, or you will go into some form of denial, as most already do.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but even if I wanted to prove God exists, I just don't think it can be done to the faithless [not by me anyway]. And I'm not trying to forsake you, I'm just trying to build some semblance of a unified theory, because I'm addicted to coming to understandings. (Idk if there's a word for addiction of understanding/solution resolution, but that's me.)

Originally posted by Bedlam

This semester I decided to take humanities since I'm in California for months,so it seemed fitting to take a movie script writing course. I started to use the framework of an old script outline I pitched once as a joke to my overlords, they almost took it seriously, but nixed it. Byrd pointed out I couldn't limit the spread of the thing to the instructor if he decided to farm it out and not tell me, so I had to kill that one as it had classified info in that I didn't think the teacher would recognize.

Ah shucks, I was hoping to get a glimpse of the script for "Planet Dirt"

Who's Byrd?

reply to post by Tajlakz


Byrd's a mod. As part of the assignment, we're supposed to get a feel for the difficulties in getting permissions for explicit mentions of things by name. I had a final scene on the storyboard where they come back without the character that's basically me, thinking I had been killed and unassing the AO, leaving me there for the sequel. At the first of the script I'm on ATS at work with the NG guys posting about inertia control or what not in a comic scene but when they get back the doc posts a full disclosure under my ID, closing the big foreshadowing loop. However, Byrd said they wouldn't let anyone use the name. And he said how sure are you he won't keep a copy or farm it out?

The guy is totally non tech so I hadn't expected him to recognize the more enlightening parts, but someone else might. I still plan to do it and repitch it to my overlords.

The other one sort of follows a guy through early 80's life at Ft Bragg, passing Q right after Stubblebine, and finding out that there is secret operator to operator training going on in the aftermath of Project Jedi, passing on refined how-tos on how people worked out the bugs off the books. The main character turns out to be good at it, using his talents for the Army without them knowing. After he ETSs, though, he is sort of surprised into using it as a civilian and it happens with witnesses and video. Then it goes nuts.

reply to post by Bedlam


The topic is about the "Science delusion" and the example presents how despite the hype science, is in no real position to claim they have a grasp upon what consciousness is.

Effectively there is a quality to it that is beyond any modeling, that is consistent with materialism as a philosophy or psychology.as valid

The methodology you profess as valid is any way shape or form as it does not account for this qualia. Your point in this regard is mute as it was tested upon a population. In the 50's and 60's practically every government run psychiatric facility on the planet provided psychiatric care based upon the materialist models.

Today there effectively are none; so therefore as much was you want to belief in the efficacy of your belief system, when it comes to consciousness you have no foundation whatsoever.

To be clear they were humans some percentage of which are still alive. You could actually meet them and perhaps then it will be more difficult to think of them as animals. However to be clear, that was a major part
of the problem, this being people who felt they were no better than animals.

By the way to suggest they might as well have been animals to you, does fall under the category of being a delusion as they are not animals.


Any thoughts?