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Posts by Obbe
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2019-03-11 at 1:51 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-11 at 12:50 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
Originally posted by gadzooks Admittedly, I have not scrutinized that entire article, it's pretty long so I saved it for later and just kinda skimmed certain parts so far.
I was mainly responding to the part that you quoted here, and that was even bolded in the article itself, about the nature of consensus in science.
And regarding that particular point, I see what he's getting at, but my problem with it isn't the underlying point, but the fact that most of the opponents of climate change will use nearly identical arguments, and that's why I see a need to refute that central thesis.
It's totally true that science is consensus based, but climate change deniers can't use that as an argument against climate change.
When it comes to using mathematical prediction models, the results are only as good as the data fed into them.
i.e. Garbage in, garbage out.
I haven't taken a super close look at the data, but obviously thousands of respected, highly-specialized climatologists have reviewed the data and are satisfied with it.
As to the accuracy of these predictions, it's all a numbers game. The more data points you feed into a model, the more accurate your predictions can become. But then there's also specificity of predictions. If you want to take thousands of years of global temperature data and use that to try and predict global temperature data for a few years from now, it should be pretty damn accurate.
But if you want to predict something way more complex, such as isolated weather phenomena within specific geographic regions… That's going to be a lot trickier.
Similarly, the Drake equation is a similar such estimation, but it's a LOT more difficult to verify since we can't exactly load up a rocket ship full of space exploring astronauts and just launch them into every neighbouring galaxy.
Did you ever finish reading it? -
2019-03-11 at 12:48 AM UTC in So who is up for vapen some shrooms.What about spores in your lungs?
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2019-03-11 at 12:43 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-11 at 12:37 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by Lanny Don't talk to obbe about illusions, it's a dark dark road to go down.
Illusion or not, consciousness is not something we just “believe in”: it is our immediate experience, and the social world as we know it wouldn’t be possible without this idea of Self endowed with consciousness and free will. The cornerstone of consciousness is metaphor. So what is metaphor, and how can it generate consciousness? The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language; it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things.
There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, the target, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, the source. A metaphor is always a known source operating on a less known target. The human body is a particularly generative source, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a variety of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and so forth.
In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, or actually created the abstract on the bases of metaphors. It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete sources become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.”
Consider any word which has meanings both from the physical-behavioural world and from the inner domain of cognition. For example, grasp: one can grasp a stone or one can grasp an idea. You don’t need to know the etymology of this verb to have a clear intuition about what is the target here and what the source, which meaning is primary and which metaphorical: the direction is always from the “outer” world to “inner”, from “objective” to “subjective”, from physical to cognitive. The mind refers to the outer, objective world to “model” its inner world of ideas: grasping an idea is like grasping a stone, not vice versa.
Have you ever wondered what actually happens in the brain when you understand a word? For example, if you listen to someone saying something as simple as that they jumped, what’s actually happening in your brain to create the understanding of what you’ve heard? There is an increasing body of evidence that such understanding involves partial simulation of the very action of jumping. The pattern of neural codes engaged in understanding the word jump and the pattern of neural codes engaged in actual jumping have a portion in common (but obviously not enough to make you jump whenever you say or hear the word). And if we hear the same word used metaphorically, for example something about someone jumping to conclusions, it would still involve processing of the word jump, and hence the corresponding neural simulation of actual jumping. The sensory properties of the source are brought in to contribute to the target meaning.
Metaphors generate the illusion of special inner mind-space where consciousness “takes place”. Every time the brain processes a sentence about grasping an idea or jumping to conclusion, it simulates a space where these actions might take place, a space where ideas, conclusions, thoughts are modelled as “things” in the outer world — something one can see, approach, jump to, or get hold of.
Consciousness itself emerges as a special kind of “metaphorical” operation in which the world around us is the source and what’s happening inside us, the target. And this internal model of the outside world contains a little “I” who acts there. If I approach a problem both “I” and the “problem” must be located within the same space. This thinking and willing “I” turns out to be a tiny little actor on the stage within my own mind-space.
A mind-space is a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in others. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This is spatialization. Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever - except by analog. You cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen as a spatial projection.
This spatialization of time is what allows our little metaphorical “I”s - the actors within our mind-spaces - to travel in time: to reminiscence about the past and imagine different futures which is particularly important because of its potential role in willing and decision making. But the spatialization of time is also a metaphor: we understand time by modelling it as a kind of space, and this happens in language too. The "time as space" metaphor tends to be embedded not only into the vocabulary, but in the grammar as well - for example, when we use spatial prepositions for time periods (something may happen in America and in winter, within a building or within a month). Just as we learn to understand thoughts and ideas as objects in space when we acquire language in childhood, so do we learn to think of time as a space.
This is how consciousness is generated in each of us now: by modern languages and their metaphors. Languages were not always like this. Their inherent models of our inner worlds weren’t always there, they have evolved over time with language. And before that happened, there could have been no consciousness as we know it. -
2019-03-10 at 5:27 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of ConsciousnessConsciousness is not some weird and wonderful product of some brain process, rather it is an illusion constructed by a clever brain and body living in a complex social world. We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.
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2019-03-07 at 1 AM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?"Cluck cluck"
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2019-03-07 at 12:55 AM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?
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2019-03-07 at 12:08 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
Originally posted by gadzooks I think that article provides an interesting perspective. I'm not trying to dismiss it as being utter garbage or anything.
I mean, Michael Crichton might mostly be known as a world-renowned author of fiction and T.V. shows / movies, but he's also a trained medical doctor on top of that.
What worries me, though, is that it can become so easy to take what he's saying as some kind of proof positive that climate change is completely false.
Or even that he is somehow "anti-science".
That's not the impression this speech left on me. Climate seems to obviously be changing. His speech doesn't seem to be in denial of that, or anti-scince. Rather, his speech seems to be pointing out opportunism. The issue is not about whether human activity is causing global warming, rather that science is used to establish authority, and therefore policy, and therefore power. Certain groups seem to be able to use "science" to push their agenda as if they were a business selling a product, and they seem to be able to do it quite effectively, even if the science is quite poor. I feel like this may not be a good thing.
Originally posted by gadzooks As far as my own personal position on climate change goes, I err on the side of "consensus" simply because of how strong that consensus is. Something like 97% of climate scientists polled agree that climate change is occurring, and that it is a result of human activity.
It seems obvious that the climate is changing and that fossil fuels contribute to that. What do you think about their predictions of the future 30, 50, or 100 years from now? Predictions made using computer models based on equations similar to the Drake Equation mentioned at the beginning of his speech. What are your thoughts on these? -
2019-03-06 at 11:31 PM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
Originally posted by gadzooks This whole notion that we use consensus in some areas of science and not others is just totally incorrect.
This speech is like 10 years old.
I don't know what to make of it. I posted it here so people like you can help inform my opinion. I want to hear what you have to say about climate change. -
2019-03-05 at 9:40 PM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?
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2019-03-05 at 4:15 PM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?
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2019-03-05 at 3:49 PM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever.
In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no.
In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no.
In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a jedi, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory.
Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra.
The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.
Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
But back to our main subject. What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.
Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, “I really don’t think these guys know what they’re talking about,” other prominent scientists were noticeably reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying “It’s an absolutely atrocious piece of science but who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?” And Victor Weisskopf said, “The science is terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good.” -
2019-03-05 at 11:33 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
We can take as an example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past president of the AAAS wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever “published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review.” (But of course, the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication.)
But what are scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from scientists? Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts.
The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was “rife with careless mistakes.”
It was a poor display, featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocaust denier. The issue was captioned: “Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist.”
Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to? When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn’t enough, he put the critics’ essays on his web page and answered them in detail.
Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down. Further attacks since, have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That’s why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That’s why the facts don’t matter.
That’s why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He’s a heretic. Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I’d see the Scientific American in the role of Mother Church.
Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become, unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggressively separate science from policy. -
2019-03-05 at 12:05 AM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?Who doesn't like big titties?
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2019-03-05 at 12:02 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warminghttps://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/
To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.”
But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data.
As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs. This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well.
Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands. Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future?
And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds? -
2019-03-04 at 10 PM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?Every individual is unique.
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2019-03-01 at 12:12 AM UTC in Influx of incest porn
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2019-03-01 at 12:09 AM UTC in Wireless neural communication discovered in the brainMaybe eventually they will use something like this for brain to phone communication.
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2019-02-28 at 12:23 AM UTC in What was it like the first time you did drugs?I don't know how some of you have such vivid memories of this stuff.
First drug besides those 3 was mushrooms with my freinds. We ate mushrooms, walked around from park to park smoking weed and having fun tripping out, then went back to my friends basement and smoked more weed and hung out more while tripping. Don't really remember any details.
