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It is better to set off a nuclear bomb, than to sit and curse the dark.

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Messages - Telarus

#76
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Duh Rugs
February 07, 2015, 07:52:21 PM
http://www.freedomleaf.com/marijuana_does_not_harm_the_human_brain

QuoteLast year the mainstream media was quick to highlight a study from Northwestern University that implied there were structural changes in the brains of people who smoked marijuana, even occasionally. The dubious research was sponsored by groups biased against marijuana including the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).

Now a new, study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has completely debunked those claims. Researchers at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville created a trial to attempt to replicate the earlier results but could not.

Participants in the new study were were both adults and adolescents. They were given brain MRIs and carefully selected as those who consume cannabis and those who do not. But this time people who use alcohol were excluded from the study.

The results were clear, "No statistically significant differences were found between daily users and nonusers on volume or shape in the regions of interest," the authors stated.

A cornerstone of modern medical science is not just a single experiment but results that can be replicated again and again.

The researchers in Boulder and Louisville put the issue to bed with their conclusion; "In sum, the results indicate that, when carefully controlling for alcohol use, gender, age, and other variables, there is no association between marijuana use and standard volumetric or shape measurements of subcortical structures."

Neurobiology of Disease
Daily Marijuana Use Is Not Associated with Brain Morphometric Measures in Adolescents or Adults
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/4/1505.abstract
#77
Quote from: Cainad (dec.) on December 31, 2014, 08:11:59 PM
:lulz:

I STAND BY MY DECISIONS.

This is the second time someone has found that out of the blue.

:lulz: :lulz:
#79
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Random News Stories
December 31, 2014, 10:18:20 PM
I found it a terrible spy movie. I found it a HILARIOUS take on how far the intelligence community has infiltrated Hollywood.

I mean, "the North-Korea guy" from RAND was having 3rd party communications with DoD officials (through the producer) about "the ending", knowing the film would eventually get to NK and the politics of showing a living head of state die onscreen at the hands of American entertainers. Part of these conversations ended up forcing Rogan to bargain with reducing the imaginary CG burn marks on Un's face ("We have removed 3 of the 4 burn marks and reduced the overall flesh burning... is this acceptable?") in order to actually show him die in the way the script intended.

I found a lot of the film to be parallel jokes on exactly this kind of shit. Bu no, it did not live up to the hype generated by the surrounding spectacle.
#80
I've been fuming to myself about this ruling for a while. Thanks for posting.
I think the outcome of this one is a further degradation in the public trust.
I've been convincing myself this wasn't done on purpose.
I know that I no longer trust Justice Roberts to act appropriately in the position he was placed in (this last one was just the final straw), which severely cripples oh, 1/3 of our government. Checks and what now?
#81
Great post Nigel.

Quote from: BrotherPrickle on December 27, 2014, 05:01:58 AM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on December 25, 2014, 10:40:50 AM
Normal is arbitrary by consensus and varies by location and chronological era.
Yes. But I want to find out, from people in my local area, what practices are acceptable, if only to avoid getting my ass kicked for insulting the wrong football team or whatever, or better yet, to find out how to find people I would enjoy talking to.

But the word normal does not communicate this. And when I spend a good few sentences on defining what I mean, their eyes glaze over, and then I still do not receive the information I desire.

...also, I think I have posted this thread in the wrong forum?

The word you want is "etiquette".
#82
 :lulz: Johnny, that was amaze-balls.  :evil:
#83
 :lol:
#84
Quote from: rong on December 25, 2014, 11:49:18 PM
It always tickled me that, in physics, perpendicular is referred to as "normal"

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalVector.html

#86
 :lulz: I love you guys. Really sorry I missed you Rog, they threw mass overtime at us because of the holiday release season. Didn't even get back to the forum to see your message until you had left Portland.

Not drugs, but 12+ hours of testing multiplayer code for the xbox one (and staring at network logs) does have a similar effect.  :lulz: Nailed that infinite loop of network traffic after doing XYZ, tho.

Yah, I wasn't so coherent there. Narrative continuity is most definitely useful, and I don't discard it. I just don't think that it tells the whole story and think that the Narrative is actually the most malleable aspect of your personality. Nigel had interesting points about temperament, environmental & genetic factors, and we have to acknowledge that we exist precisely because of those factors. For example, I love that epigenetics has begun to show that groups like Neanderthal are an eddy in the river of Homo Sapiens, and not a branch that dead-ended.

So I don't consider my now self compartmentalized from the past/future versions, but I also don't carry around certain events in my past as if they were central to my personality. Sometimes this just happens by itself. I was very good at basic music(piano/recorder) when I was very small. Now-days I'm great with math and art, but can't summon those musical skills from my childhood.

For a more extreme example, when my ex-wife left me she was drunk and physically abusive. The only time I have ever had to use violence to defend myself from her was the night she left, she had pinned me down into a corner with intent to hurt me, grabbed one of my feet (which I was using to keep distance) and bit my big toe. HARD. The toenail fell off a week later. I then kicked her hard, twice, in the shoulder, which knocked her off balance and gave me distance to get up and use my training to arm-lock her on the bed, tell her that was a very bad idea and that I was going to sleep in the living room, and not to get up and chase me when I let her up. I could not go back to the callcenter I worked at for a week, because we had both worked there and it reminded me of her, which reminded me of the fight. This was back when I was meditating about once a day, so unraveling the constant narrative in my head around this trauma became a big focus. "I don't hit girls" had been a large part of my narrative since highschool. The cognitive dissonance on top of the violent breakup was a bit heavy.

Nowdays, I swordfight with my current fiance. While we mostly use soft boffers with flexible cores (a spendy birthday present from a MA training company), we've also gone at with bamboo shinai and lacrosse gear. She fights hard and I have definitely fallen back into that basic bio-survival state when taking a bruise while sparring with Liv (which the fight with the ex-wife had also triggered). The past memories don't interfere, tho, neither in the sense that I start hesitating (afraid I might loose control), or over-committing due to memories of the adrenal rush/trauma. That took a lot of work, meditating on the memories of the incident and letting them play out, trying not to inject my own narrative, starting over each time I caught myself.

Bringing this back to the topic of Monotheism & the Mind, I see the narratives that push a monotheistic model of deity also push a mono-narrative model of the mind. Specifically, being eternally judged by the eternal deity. I don't think that's how it works. With state-based memory as an example, we are more apt to remember things we did while were drunk... when we are drunk. I think we have distinct sub-routines in our personality that express when we are at work vs when we are at home. Distinct groups of people bring out different patterns of behavior and thought in us. I don't think we're the "same person" when posting/reading this forum as we are when in a very boring office meeting. I think we use the abstraction "I" in order to access the memories of those other sub-personalities.

Sometimes. This shit's been confusing us monkies for thousands of years, OK?  :lulz:
#87
 :lulz:


Took me a while to get back to this thread. I wanted to clarify my position to LMNO & anyone who commented on my post.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on December 16, 2014, 12:16:22 PM
Quote from: Telarus on December 16, 2014, 03:18:48 AM
I think this is the really interesting part of all of this. It says to me that the monolithic-self (i.e the narrative of self continuity), along with the monotheistic god (the narrative of singular-continuous deity) are 'illusions'.

I'm not sure where how you arrived there from
Quoteyou can absolutely develop a language in isolation.

I was simply saying that a single person can develop a means of coding, storing, and recalling information absent any other person.


I do not consider MyselfNow to be the same person as MyselfThePast or MyselfTheFuture. I think that "I" is a narrative-illusion, which is useful within certain contexts. If you've develop language vis-a-vis, patterns of symbols which can be decoded by any audience with the right context, you're communicating to others, even if they are your future iterations.

:lulz: :fnord: :lulz:
#88
Techmology and Scientism / Re: Attn: LMNO
December 21, 2014, 11:14:44 PM
From my understanding of this, we had been using different types of formulas to describe/predict the wave/particle experiments than we used to describe/predict the other uncertainty-bound properties (like position/momentum). These guys have figured out how to describe the particle/wave relationship using the same 'min- max- entropies' based formulas, which puts them in the same mathematical name-space as the other relationships. Thus they think they can begin to find other neat things by being able to directly compare the variables/etc as they run experiments, as they share the same 'units'.
#90
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on December 15, 2014, 03:45:21 PM
Ok, so I guess the question about whether language can develop in isolation isn't that hard to figure out.  It's looking like just about every common definition of language includes some reference to "communication", so there necessarily must be a sender and a receiver, even if that receiver is the Self (leaving notes and reminders, for example).

So yeah, as long as it's a set of symbols, or sounds, or just about anything that can be sensed (Original Story Idea: A language communicated through taste), and has a structure that can be understood by a sender and a receiver, you can absolutely develop a language in isolation.


Which means, concerning the OP, we're left, again, with Nigel's list of assumptions.  And, perhaps, the complete overuse of commas, specifically by me.

Sorry I had to take the long way to get there, Nigel.

I think this is the really interesting part of all of this. It says to me that the monolithic-self (i.e the narrative of self continuity), along with the monotheistic god (the narrative of singular-continuous deity) are 'illusions'. I've mentioned elsewhere how useful illusions like the 'self' function to 'keep the body out of traffic' and stuff like that, but the other side of this is also interesting. Imagine that GOD was all the seraphim taking turns wearing a mask....that fits the language in Genesis 1 anyway.


EDIT because I think synchronicities like this can be meaningful - this came up on Facebook from another Discordian seconds after I posted this and it ties to the mono-narrative.