Well, it explains why my cat just ups and bolts around the room for a bit, then acts like nothing happened.

She's hallucinating. Thanks, Friskies!

I really disliked this film. Terrible storytelling, weak characters, and an over reliance on CGI. It's the George Lucas Phantom Menace syndrome: Give a director a $200,000,000 budget, and they spend all their time figuring out how to spend all that money, rather than focussing on creating a worthwhile piece of art.

Johnny Depp's Mad hatter, whom gets almost as much screen time as the bland lead, consists of drag queen make up and an effeminate voice, which occasionally shifts to a Braveheart brogue. It comes across more as self indulgent mugging from an actor who has received no directorial guidance than any kind of actual insanity.

In Burton's earlier years, when his budgets were a fraction of what they are now, he told truly imaginative stories, with great characters and heartfelt performances. Movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and The Nightmare Before Christmas were cinematic masterpieces in my opinion.

The scene above is the precise moment when my disappointment turned to contempt. Issy and I actually turned to each other in the theater to verify that it was not a hallucination. (/disappointed fan-boy rant)

If you are reading this Tim Burton, here's your assignment, should you decide to take it:

Make a film for under 10 million dollars. You are not allowed to use your wife or Johnny Depp as cast members. The script must be original and not an adaptation of some previously existing work. Use models, stop motion, or whatever other effects you like, but keep the CGI to a bare minimum.

Ralph is a friend of mine -- a brilliant brilliant man.


Sidenote: Here's an interesting essay about mathematics & hallucinations

They exemplify very clearly why they are not fit to lead anyone... why haven't they been ousted yet? They're mentally unstable, delusional and even having hallucinations. They're not fit to operate heavy machinery, much less lead the country.

And sadly, no one ever hears of the back story to this test. It seems one of the soldiers went on to become a dispatch worker in the English Post and began seeing all manner of demons and hallucinations. Lost his little boy in a freak roadway accident, too. Luckily, his chiropractor set him straight. ...I think.

i like his books and he's obviously brilliant but this speech was a bit boring. the brief parts about brain function were good but most of it was detailed and uninteresting descriptions of a few hallucinations. by 13:00 i was struggling to pay attention

Sorry it took so long to respond, I had a busy weekend.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

I'm going to need a definition of "decide" I suppose. It seems like you are dancing around these squishy intuitive concepts instead of having a specific physical distinction to point out. The amoeboid is composed of a lipid bilayer membrane riddled with intricate protein micro-machines that detect changes in the environment, and behaviorally compensate. To discount the intricacy of the mechanisms of genetic expression and chemical signaling that exist even in the simplest of eukaryotic organism is foolish IMHO. Many of the modern models of genetic expression, and compensation for environmental factors look strikingly similar to the connectionist network models of the brain. The computations are similar in the abstract.


You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Well, more likely I'm moldopomorphizing us. What goals do we have that are ultimately distinct from survival, reproduction, and the general continuity of our species? Even something as seemingly unrelated as making music, or art could be cast as some sort of mating ritual. When you somehow separate our behavior from the rest of life on Earth it's as though you want to draw a barrier between us and them. You want to somehow separate us from the natural order. I hate to break it to you, but it just isn't so. We are just demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of the second law of thermodynamics.


Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

I experience the moment. In fact, that's all I'm ever experiencing, although my sensation of it may run a little behind. I never experience my memory, I merely compare my experience to memory. Further, what I'm suggesting is not entirely distinct from any experience we claim to have. Some autistic individuals, for instance, report an extremely chaotic existence, in which causal models can't be formed as sensory modalities are not unified in the same way as ours. They are experienced as independent inputs, not reflective of a coherent physical world. Still, they experience it.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

Things can not be enforced without an enforcer. Further, as you've conceded the determinism of our brains, again, how are we not passively allowing the laws of nature to push us around? What exactly are we deciding?


I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

No, I believe that by some other physical mechanism, likely involving quarks and particle physics that I admittedly have a poor understanding of, the electron receives information from not immediately proximal locations, and physically displaces itself to a location with more desirable properties given its current energy state. I don't see how that's different than cuddling up to a warm fire.


You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

Something like that , although I still don't like the word decide. I don't necessarily think they do come to a consensus. It's just that, as with an attractor network, or similar guaranteed convergence dynamical systems, certain macroscopic states are just more likely than others, despite chaos at the subordinate level. The reason I'd rather drop the word decide is because I don't necessarily want to open the door to something like free will. To cast it in a "God" metaphor, I imagine more of an omniscient God, than an omnipotent God.


Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

I can't other than to refer you to what I presume you to have. I could suggest focussing on your breathing, or what have you. I can point you towards literature showing that people that claim to focus on their consciousness can perform physical feats not previous considered possible (for instance monks rewriting the books on the physical tolerance of the human body to cold). Otherwise, I can't. I will say this, however, I take it to be the atomic element of inductive reason. The natural "laws" you are taking as primary are secondary. There is a simple reason for this as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out. If suddenly we were to observe all bits of matter floating away from one another, and were to confirm we were not hallucinating, and perhaps have the experience corroborated by our colleagues, it would not be the experience which was wrong, it would be the laws of nature. Experience has primacy. Matter is merely the logical consequence of applying induction to our particular set of shared experiences.


And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

I told you, in the best english I can, what X is. It's the qualia of phenomenal experience. Now I can't provide you with direct evidence for it, but I can tell you that nearly everyone I talk to has some sense of what I mean.


You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

I take the Bayesian sense of the word. All probabilities are subjective degrees of belief. I adopt this degree of belief based on anecdotal experience and generalizations therein. None of this would be accepted as evidence by any reviewer, nor should it, and thus I wouldn't want to risk my credibility by asserting it as fact. I can believe some hypotheses to be more likely than others on the basis of no evidence, and in fact do all the time. That's how I, and all other scientists, decide what experiment to run next. I should not, however, expect you to believe me a priori, as you may operate on different axioms, and draw from different anecdotal experience. Thus, I would not feel compelled to assert my beliefs as fact, other than in so far as they are, in fact, my beliefs.

What an idiot.. agnostic means you believe there is a god.. just don't know what it is..
Do you believe in a god. Atheists, no. Agnostics, yes.
What an idiot. - joedirt

What if you don't care if there's a god (or gods) or not? Agnostic means you CAN NOT know if a god (or gods) exists or not. Agnostics can chose weather or not they believe in god (or gods), just admit it's unprovable.

Agnostics are just atheists without the balls (or knowledge) to label themselves correctly. -MaxWilder

Again, what if you DON'T CARE if there's a god (or gods) or not? Athiests choose not to believe, agnostics can either believe, or disbelieve. Or neither.

It's not weather I believe in a god (or gods) or not, or even weather there is a god (or gods), as an agnostic I believe you can't prove god (or gods) at all, and personally don't care, at all. I'll live my life the same either way.

Technically agnostic means you don't, or cannot know if a god (or gods) exist. Well this includes everyone ever. Even Moses and Jesus and Abraham had to hope that it was God, and not some hallucination telling them what to do. That's why Christianity, and most (if not all) religions are called faiths. You have faith God exists, knowing it is unknowable.

I take agnostic, in common parlance, to mean that I neither believe, nor disbelieve in the existence of a higher power. Technically, I would also be an ignostic, or theological noncognit. I don't believe talk about a god (or gods) is worth two shits until you convince me of what a god (or gods) actually consists of.

To quote Wikipedia: In a chapter of his 1936 book Language, Truth, and Logic, A. J. Ayer argued that one could not speak of God's existence, or even the probability of God's existence, since the concept itself was unverifiable and thus nonsensical. Ayer wrote that this ruled out atheism and agnosticism as well as theism because all three positions assume that the sentence "God exists" is meaningful. Given the meaninglessness of theistic claims, Ayer opined that there was "no logical ground for antagonism between religion and natural science", as theism alone does not entail any propositions which the scientific method can falsify.

"An atheist would say, 'I don't believe God exists'; an agnostic would say, 'I don't know whether or not God exists'; and an ignostic would say, 'I don't know what you mean when you say, "God exists" '." -Theodore Drange

So yes, technically I'm not just agnostic, I'm also ignostic. But it's hard enough to explain to people what agnostic means, and that's a word people have at least heard of.

If you asked, "Do I believe in God?," I would answer, "What is 'God'?"

i have had my lawn chair out waiting to watch it all go down the pooper.
anyone ready for another beer?...
overcast has a eugenics flair to his end solution.lets thin the herd a bit so we dont get eliminated by uber'evolved-virus.he actually has a point,it just has that "brown shirt" feel to it../shivers.
as for myself i like to think its gonna go down like the book of john states.not because i believe in a mushroom induced hallucination,but rather to watch the faces of all the bleating sheep when the "rapture" comes.dumb-founded christians roaming aimlessly in the streets mumbling " i was a good christian wasn't i? why didn't the lord take me?".
now THAT is entertainment.
meh.../shrugs.end of the world?or end of humanity?
somebody already quoted carlin but it deserves to be said again.
"the WORLD ain't going nowhere...WE ARE.pack your bags folks we are going away".
i think keenan maynard said it best:
http://www.videosift.com/video/Tool-nema

he must have had something like a prefrontal lobe disruption, an effect of this is that you think you feel a presence of somebody/thing nearby.
but more striking is that it can end up making you see greater meanings in seemingly insignificant things, sometimes all the way to hallucinations.
many of the most bizarre religious leaders/speakers have had this too.

he appears quite normal otherwise, but some slight malfunction/hemorraging back in the late 1980s seems to have had this mild but lasting effect.
i'm wondering if alex jones has something similar, but then there's some obvious differences..

what's surprising though is that they're very articulate and seemingly intelligent in other ways
(similar to how some scientists might happen to believe some contradictory religious babble).
partitioning of the so-called mind, from reason and logic.

i've been bitching about this for years. my exhusband has a very real psychiatric disorder, but in the years we sought treatment he was over medicated over medicated over medicated, which only turned a sick man into a monster. we were spending over $1000/month on his meds, with health insurance. he had siezures, hallucinations, cried uncontrollably, lost his sex drive, lost the ability to feel love, lost his hair, gained or lost weight rapidly, had the shakes, and visual disturbances (very dangerous considering he was an electrician and a welder and built massive cranes for a living) etc. when i questioned the doc i literally got yelled at and called names. (we switched docs after that one of course) but its more of the same, none of them really know what to do and pharmacuetical kick backs are sweet! he was admitted to the psych hospital on several occasions, but on this one in particular, they admitted because he was so severely over medicated they needed to ween him off all that shit, then discharged him 3 weeks later with prescriptions for xanax, klonipin, wellbutrin, paxil, seroquel, and risperdal, WTF? its fucking sick. and in the end he chose to be unmedicated rather than go through that anymore.
now he lives under a bridge self medicates with meth and booze and gets beat up in homeless shelters.

my biggest fear for my kids is that they will inherit this shit, its coming at them from both gene pools. im even more terrified that i will either freak out at the first sign of mental instablity and rush to have them evaluated and medicated, or be so scared of diagnosing them of something they dont have, that i will ignore the warning signs until its too late.

its a scary balance.

If you do it right, you get fractal views of things around the room, your surrounding start to migrate about, blend, roll over themselves, and dominate what you can see. You get very surreal hallucinations, ranging, in my cases, from teeth floating out of a smiling face and becoming larger than the originating head, tranquil river valleys as seen through the bathroom mirror, wondering why I can't get there, and utter confusion as to why I arrive back in reality having ripped apart my bedsheets, facing a wall, with my pillow clenched tightly, especially since I started the trip downstairs in the main room on the couch. I naturally don't remember parts of the trip in the middle, I describe it to people who are about to take it that it's like taking a sledge hammer to your brain then trying to pick up the pieces. It's much more fun to watch someone who has never done it before do it. When smoked in little bits your brain starts the "pulling, swirling" sensation, where you feel like you're in a cement trucks mixer, and your falling into the turn, but you never fall, even though you're always falling. Other descriptive things would include "cactus like pins and needles all over", "funny, cartoonish images dancing in ones field of vision" "trying to continuously push yourself out of a stupor created by an artificial bubble of time distortion." I gave the tiniest hoot to a girl once that had never done it, she exhaled immediately, i turned around to say something, turned back to see what everyone was looking at, and she had ran out onto the street outside, like, bolted, and guys ran after her to see what was wrong. fukkked! thank you.

>> ^Morganth:
"Dead-on" would be the opposite of what this clip is. The top 10 best U.S. states as ranked by the so-called
"Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence" have a 40% higher rate of
violent crime, including murder, than the 10 worst states by the same
ranking


One thing I've noticed about statistics being used by pro-gun activists in the US, is it's always looking at either the difference in violent crime in between states, and the immediately 1-5 year effects of enacting harsher gun restrictions in other countries such as Britain.

For the first point, do you really think that in a US state which completely outlawed gun ownership it would really be that hard to smuggle weapons across the border from a neighbouring state which happens to have very lax gun ownership laws? Is the widespread evidence that guns are being bought in the US and used in Mexico for crime ring related violence not proof enough for you of the futility of such a narrow analysis?

For the second point, it's pretty clear that after purely enacting harsher gun laws there isn't going to be an immediate sudden dip in either gun ownership levels or as a result violent crime. In comparison a policy a while back in Australia encouraged a voluntary no questions asked hand over of guns. That alternatively, would have an immediate impact.

Given what I've said, consider the following statistic. Now I'm completely aware of the limitations, particular the issue of firearms being moved across borders, and the fact that it is likely living standards and poverty levels among other factors would have the overarching impact.

National Master ranking of murders with firearms (per capita) by country

Do you see a highly developed country above the US, 8th highest on the list? Yes, I'm sure despotic countries with a lack of data were neglected here, but that is of no real significance. How far do you have to go down before you see a developed country? How many times lower is the rate of murders with firearms for that country?

And it's no wonder. The US has the highest level of gun rate ownership in the world. 90 guns per 100 residents.

In the face of that, can you really tell me with all due certainty that gun ownership makes people safer and doesn't empower the criminal who is almost guaranteed to catch the victim without a gun just conveniently in reach? Can you really tell me without a shadow of a doubt that the whole notion that guns make people safer, a very parochially American view is not manufactured propaganda by the US gun industry to serve their own financial interests with a complete indifference to the death of their own countrymen?

"Dead-on" would be the opposite of what this clip is. The top 10 best U.S. states as ranked by the so-called
"Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence" have a 40% higher rate of
violent crime, including murder, than the 10 worst states by the same
ranking

When Jesus talks to someone, they are in fact hallucinating. He is retarded, clearly.

Edit: Ugh, I ought to have downvoted, but I hope people can learn from this exercise in stupidity.