Re: Open Bar: RECOMMENDABLE

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Tangentially related is this FB update by Stephen King:

"What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle."

Partially true.

We also breed like roaches.

We actually breed really, really slowly compared to most other species of comparable size: only one child every two to three years. We just live way longer, have a much lower infant mortality rate, no predators, and our females are reproductively viable for 20-30 years, as well as continuing to provide food and nurturing to subsequent generations for another 30-40 years after they can no longer breed, which confers a HUGE survival advantage.

Sure.

End result, though?  7.24 billion primates?  Close enough.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I seem to have found myself in the odd position of being fairly sure a god of some sort exists but that an afterlife doesn't. Probably just an error in the programming combined with the input. But it's an odd mindset to have. Not that it hasn't happened before with other people or even whole cultures but the two are usually seen as a package deal, and this is kind of a package screw over. The opposite would obviously be a better deal.

[Left]

I seem to have found myself in the odd position of being fairly sure a god of some sort exists but that an afterlife doesn't.

...Curious.  Wanna elaborate?

*Goes back to Al-gibberish.*

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I seem to have found myself in the odd position of being fairly sure a god of some sort exists but that an afterlife doesn't.

...Curious.  Wanna elaborate?

*Goes back to Al-gibberish.*

The more that I understand about biology the more I believe in a god, even with evolution taken into consideration. It just seems so... ridiculous that I can't wrap my head around it. And I was a theist to begin with.

The more that I understand about consciousness, the less I believe in the immortality of the soul. And really it is the one religious belief that I CAN measure. Where do I go for those couple of hours between falling asleep and going into REM? I don't go anywhere. I experience nothing. I, as a sentient entity, temporarily cease to exist. The body is still there, and the personality is still wired in to reboot when I wake up, or even dream, but there's about a third of my existence where it is nothing more than biological activity. I am not there to experience it.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Never mind that personality is merely a consensus between conflicting parts of the brain. I tagged Nigel in this yesterday, but this was merely something else to back up some sneaking thought in the back of my head anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFJPtVRlI64

[Left]

I seem to have found myself in the odd position of being fairly sure a god of some sort exists but that an afterlife doesn't.

...Curious.  Wanna elaborate?

*Goes back to Al-gibberish.*

The more that I understand about biology the more I believe in a god, even with evolution taken into consideration. It just seems so... ridiculous that I can't wrap my head around it.

So, God shows its' work in its' warped sense of humor?

The more that I understand about consciousness, the less I believe in the immortality of the soul. And really it is the one religious belief that I CAN measure. Where do I go for those couple of hours between falling asleep and going into REM? I don't go anywhere. I experience nothing. I, as a sentient entity, temporarily cease to exist. The body is still there, and the personality is still wired in to reboot when I wake up, or even dream, but there's about a third of my existence where it is nothing more than biological activity. I am not there to experience it.

...Brain shutdown is apparently a necessary biological purging process:
http://www.livescience.com/40510-sleep-cleans-brain-harmful-toxins.html

Dunno.
The "near-death experience sorta thing" I had was just probably just due to pain overload.  I found it interesting (in retrospect) that it was nothing like fainting or being anesthetized, which I've done rather more often. 

*Shrug*
What the hell do I know? 
Thanks for sharing.

Never mind that personality is merely a consensus between conflicting parts of the brain.

I can't watch youtube @ work right now, whitescreen.
...But I laughed loudly at the above sentence, because truth.


Edited to add:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypostatic_model_of_personality  *That's* the personality model I was looking for, couldn't remember the term.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Idk, man. I am accused often of being anti-spiritual because I can't take any religious teaching seriously, especially teachings about the afterlife. But I haven't ever been fully convinced that there is no such thing. I just have never encountered an idea of an afterlife that didn't sound absurd. Especially after a few month-long LSD benders...

As for there being a god, I guess I am pantheist. There are organizing principles to the universe. I think that is a profound enough thing to call "god" in itself.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I seem to have found myself in the odd position of being fairly sure a god of some sort exists but that an afterlife doesn't.

...Curious.  Wanna elaborate?

*Goes back to Al-gibberish.*

The more that I understand about biology the more I believe in a god, even with evolution taken into consideration. It just seems so... ridiculous that I can't wrap my head around it.

So, God shows its' work in its' warped sense of humor?

I am still open to the possibilities, and always have been, that this is some kid's shitty science project in another universe; that everything that exists is God and that God is indivorceable from reality, it's just that we got the idea of God wrong; That God honestly doesn't know what s/he's doing and just making it up has s/he goes along; God's a little crazy. I dunno, it's, as far as the biology thing is concerned, I can only accept emergent properties to a degree. It seems like there's a hell of a fucking leap between organic molecules and those organic molecules self-organizing and taking on specialized tasks in order to maintain other processes going on with other self-organizing molecules. I understand that biology and physics tend to shake theistic belief off of people and that chemists and engineers tend to be more theistic, but I'm getting the opposite effect.

The more that I understand about consciousness, the less I believe in the immortality of the soul. And really it is the one religious belief that I CAN measure. Where do I go for those couple of hours between falling asleep and going into REM? I don't go anywhere. I experience nothing. I, as a sentient entity, temporarily cease to exist. The body is still there, and the personality is still wired in to reboot when I wake up, or even dream, but there's about a third of my existence where it is nothing more than biological activity. I am not there to experience it.

...Brain shutdown is apparently a necessary biological purging process:
http://www.livescience.com/40510-sleep-cleans-brain-harmful-toxins.html

Dunno.
The "near-death experience sorta thing" I had was just probably just due to pain overload.  I found it interesting (in retrospect) that it was nothing like fainting or being anesthetized, which I've done rather more often. 

*Shrug*
What the hell do I know? 
Thanks for sharing.

The nearest death experience I've had, other than sleeping, was that I expected my plane to crash (I was stranded abroad for another couple of days instead). I don't doubt that sleep has important things to do to the brain, and I'm not worried about the brain. I'm thinking about where Twid goes when Twid's brain powers down. It's an absurd question. The Essence of Twid winks out of existence for a while. I know this because I experience non-experience.

Never mind that personality is merely a consensus between conflicting parts of the brain.

I can't watch youtube @ work right now, whitescreen.
...But I laughed loudly at the above sentence, because truth.


Edited to add:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypostatic_model_of_personality  *That's* the personality model I was looking for, couldn't remember the term.

[/quote]

The gist is that people who have had their hemispheres split (presumably to stop seizures) develop two distinct personas. One speaks, the other can understand simple language and respond by pointing to yes, no, or I don't know.

The experiment demonstrated people who verbally were left brain atheist and right brain theist. Cool. But what does that mean? And as the presenter asks, does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other hell? (When I believe in the afterlife, I don't think the matter of belief has any bearing on destination)

Idk, man. I am accused often of being anti-spiritual because I can't take any religious teaching seriously, especially teachings about the afterlife. But I haven't ever been fully convinced that there is no such thing. I just have never encountered an idea of an afterlife that didn't sound absurd. Especially after a few month-long LSD benders...

As for there being a god, I guess I am pantheist. There are organizing principles to the universe. I think that is a profound enough thing to call "god" in itself.

I consider my baseline belief to be pantheist too, but I dunno. I've recognized that the belief in god(s) and belief in an afterlife are two separate, but usually attached thoughts. And now the thoughts are detached, but instead of being an atheist Buddhist, I'm a Sumerian who thinks this is it. Part of my wanting religion was the comfort of the idea of surviving physical death, with or without God.


Like I said, it's probably just some buggy thing, but I'm a bit stuck on the... I guess, "This statement is false"

[minuspace]

I always love this one:
Paul Fenwick, "All Your Brains Suck - Known Bugs And Exploits In Wetware"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnX5v0uwNjc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[Cain]

I am grudgingly coming to the conclusion that every single essay I will write for this course will involve at least a thousand words devoted to explaining you can ask three terrorism reseachers for a definition and get seventeen billion different answers.

Oh well, it makes hitting the word limit easier.  And I can just copy and paste the same section each time.

[LMNO]

Why is there no commonly agreed-upon definition?  Politics? Academic elitism?  Too much variation, so a single definition is too broad to be effective?

[Cain]

All of the above.  Plus research problems.  From one of the papers I'm citing:

The first problem is that terrorism quite simply is not a topic that is easily researched. Or at least, it does not give that impression on first inspection.  The central actors involved in the phenomenon are difficult to access – and extremely difficult to access in a systematic manner. As Ariel Merari notes, 'the clandestine nature of terrorist organizations and the ways and means by which intelligence can be obtained will extremely rarely enable data collection which meets commonly accepted academic standards'.3

Terrorism itself is an emotive subject and researchers have traditionally not been overly concerned with remaining objective and neutral in how they view the subject and its perpetrators. It has been noted that many researchers seem confused by their roles. As Schmid and Jongman have pointed out, the researcher's 'role is not to "fight" the terrorist fire; rather than a "firefighter", [the researcher] should be a "student of combustion"'.4 But such objectivity is relatively rare in the field (not especially surprising when most of the research is paid for by one side in the terrorism equation). Most researchers do seem to believe they are fulfilling – or are meant to fulfil – a firefighting role. The result is that research is largely driven by policy concerns and the area has fallen into a trap where it is largely limited to government agendas. This is unfortunate as government agendas rarely if ever stretch beyond the next election, and the result is that research tends to be driven by similarly short-term tactical considerations. The other problem with the impact of policy is that it tends to lead to research fads that can divert an excessive amount of scarce resources down unnecessary and unproductive paths (e.g. the massive amount of energy channelled into research on weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Other problems emerge from the tenacious conceptual confusion which mires the area. What is terrorism? What makes an act a terrorist act?  What makes a group a terrorist group? These are such basic questions, but satisfactory answers continue to elude the field.

Plus the original researchers on the topic were, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cold Warriors looking to lend academic expertise to fighting the Soviet Union and third world nationalist movements.  Also:

The understanding of terrorism or terrorism theory is at a similar point of crisis, as it is affected by the same post-Cold War and globalisation trends and is also in the international spotlight following September 11th and the war on terrorism. However, the study of terrorism it seems has not yet embraced the changes pioneered by conflict studies and made the transition to a more holistic understanding of the roots of political violence. This is largely because attempts at understanding 'new terrorism' are still located in the Cold War state-centric, realist and positivist perception. This is primarily because the understanding and definition of terrorism is contained within a state discourse. Terrorism is defined primarily in terms of state legitimacy and is largely understood to represent a challenge and threat to state authority by an illegitimate body. This is the conventional or the 'orthodox theory' of terrorism and is based on the legitimacy/illegitimacy dualism that constructs non-state violence as terrorist while state violence is deemed to be legitimate. As a result it does not engage in a roots debate about the causes of terrorism, as this would legitimise non-state violence

[LMNO]

Makes sense to me.  I'm assuming you're on the side that believes State-based Terrorism is a thing, yes?  Have you pissed off anyone in your classes with that, yet?

[Cain]

It is a Thing, yes.  I suspect a few are annoyed at me, but since the professors in question also think it is a Thing, they haven't really argued the point too strongly.

This essay, incidentally, is research methods, aka "why researching terrorism isn't for sissies or people who believe in verifiable facts."

[LMNO]

It is a Thing, yes.  I suspect a few are annoyed at me, but since the professors in question also think it is a Thing, they haven't really argued the point too strongly.

This essay, incidentally, is research methods, aka "why researching terrorism isn't for sissies or people who believe in verifiable facts."

EPISTEMOLOGISTS TO THE BACK OF THE BUS.