I like how he tried doing push-ups at :37 to impress her

Those are terrible pushups.>> ^Stormsinger:

>> ^Fusionaut:
Ellen is going farther down! Michelle is cheating!

Yeah, we'd have been running laps had we tried to pass those off as pushups in high school. Nose must touch the floor, or it doesn't count.


Seriously. This is what America considers impressive... ?

>> ^Fusionaut:

Ellen is going farther down! Michelle is cheating!


Yeah, we'd have been running laps had we tried to pass those off as pushups in high school. Nose must touch the floor, or it doesn't count.

Elbows flying out, hands miles apart, chest no where near the ground. I mean yes she's technically "pushing up"...

Hey! Thanks!~


In reply to this comment by MycroftHomlz:
*promote.

>> ^lv_hunter:

It looks like Australia is pushed up into south eastern asia.


Bastards.

It looks like Australia is pushed up into south eastern asia.

The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.

No, Dandy-Walker does not contradict everything taught in the video. He has (and others like him have) most of the same brain structures (especially the ones related to consciousness). For the most part, they are missing their cerebellar vermis, which controls and analyzes spatial motion. The parts that have something to do with consciousness are still there, and they are even in pretty much the same place as they would be otherwise.

Even if the parts of their brain were jumbled up a bit, that doesn't mean they couldn't necessarily have consciousness. The body does some amazing things considering some of the biological errors that happen. People can be born with holes in their hearts, or on the wrong side of their body, and have perfectly functioning circulatory systems - that doesn't mean the circulation of their blood is transcendent from their circulatory system.

Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes.

This is a complete cop-out. I can say the same to you. If your god is omniscient, then he knows what you are going to do before you do it. Therefore you don't actually have free will because, no matter what, you are going to do what god always expected you to do.
>> ^shinyblurry:

Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
Consciousness is consciousness, whether the brain is damaged or undamaged. The key part is having it, and It stems from the soul. The quality of the consciousness is effected by the relative performance of the medium, but if access to information is lost in the physical, it doesn't mean it is gone. It's purely your assumption that it can be destroyed in any way. The access may be lost in the physical, but it still exists in eternity. God knows everything, so He is the ultimate memory storage for our souls.
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.
Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam:
"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”
And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."
You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I believe anything that you're saying?
>> ^Skeeve:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.

Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?

Consciousness is consciousness, whether the brain is damaged or undamaged. The key part is having it, and It stems from the soul. The quality of the consciousness is effected by the relative performance of the medium, but if access to information is lost in the physical, it doesn't mean it is gone. It's purely your assumption that it can be destroyed in any way. The access may be lost in the physical, but it still exists in eternity. God knows everything, so He is the ultimate memory storage for our souls.

As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.

The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.

The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.

Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam:

"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”

And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."

You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:

"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I believe anything that you're saying?

>> ^Skeeve:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.

Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?

As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.

The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.

Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.

@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:

Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.

>> ^ForgedReality:

>> ^ChaosEngine:
>> ^ForgedReality:
I don't get it.

Default in most games is push up (on mouse or analog stick) to look up. There's an inverted option where you pull down to look up. Contrary to what the video says, this is actually the correct way and anyone who plays the other is wrong and probably immoral.


I see. Well with a mouse, up SHOULD be up, and down SHOULD be down. For anything with a stick, I always use back for up and forward for down. How anyone can do the opposite just astounds me. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever, especially considering ALL flight sticks in EVERY real-life aircraft EVER CONSTRUCTED uses the same control scheme.
Also, I can't recall the last game I played that came with a default setting of pushing up (forward) on a stick to equal up. It's always been forward for down for every game I can remember.
Flight sims always (faik) follow RL™ stick control (they're "sims"), but most FPS default to non-inverted, which, as ChaosEngine already addressed, is clearly wrong. Study after study has shown that those who play inverted have larger brains, more money, and pwn.

Tell that to Apple (Mac OS X Lion) or any modern touchscreen device.

If you hold on the page and move up, your view goes down.

>> ^ForgedReality:


I see. Well with a mouse, up SHOULD be up, and down SHOULD be down. For anything with a stick, I always use back for up and forward for down. How anyone can do the opposite just astounds me. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever, especially considering ALL flight sticks in EVERY real-life aircraft EVER CONSTRUCTED uses the same control scheme.
Also, I can't recall the last game I played that came with a default setting of pushing up (forward) on a stick to equal up. It's always been forward for down for every game I can remember.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^ForgedReality:
I don't get it.

Default in most games is push up (on mouse or analog stick) to look up. There's an inverted option where you pull down to look up. Contrary to what the video says, this is actually the correct way and anyone who plays the other is wrong and probably immoral.



I see. Well with a mouse, up SHOULD be up, and down SHOULD be down. For anything with a stick, I always use back for up and forward for down. How anyone can do the opposite just astounds me. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever, especially considering ALL flight sticks in EVERY real-life aircraft EVER CONSTRUCTED uses the same control scheme.

Also, I can't recall the last game I played that came with a default setting of pushing up (forward) on a stick to equal up. It's always been forward for down for every game I can remember.

>> ^ForgedReality:

I don't get it.


Default in most games is push up (on mouse or analog stick) to look up. There's an inverted option where you pull down to look up. Contrary to what the video says, this is actually the correct way and anyone who plays the other is wrong and probably immoral.

Only a dogmatic right winger could say that with a straight face. And in the later sentence you proved it. You're so convinced it couldn't have been the free market, you are willing to accept any explanation for the economic collapse that pinned most of the blame on the government.

And it's categorically absurd. Yes, absolutely, the gov't played a role, but the overwhelming majority of the collapse was due to derivatives and CDOs. The only conceivable explanation for the gov't being the primary root cause is either they didn't regulate as they should have, which actually ends up being the antithesis of your argument because it advocates gov't taking a much more involved role from here on out, or it's because of initiatives by the gov't to increase homeownership by giving loans out to people who had little chance to pay it back. Of the later, the simple fact of the matter is the vast majority of the subprime loans were given out by subprime lenders, not Fannie and Freddie, before Fannie and Freddie entered into that market. Even when considering in the end all subprime loans including Fannie and Freddie, the odds of default on subprime loans were several fold higher with subprime lenders than Fannie/Freddie.

And why did CDOs containing subprime loans get pushed up into investment vehicles that could be purchased by retirement programs like 401k, etc., which fueled their growth? Fannie and Freddie backed loans and non-Fannie/Freddie backed loans were both in funds rated AAA by ratings agencies that were not regulated by the US gov't. Instead, they were paid by the investment houses that gave them the investment funds to rate in the first place. No gov't agency put a gun to their head and made them slap lipstick on those pigs.

Absolutely, Fannie and Freddie helped to legitimize subprime lending, but the simple fact of the matter is Fannie and Freddie were late to the subprime game. They even thought that they almost had to in order to, survey says, COMPETE THE MORTGAGE MARKET! Oh yes, that's right, they were compelled to enter into these dangerous loans because they were losing market share to the Countrywide's of the mortgage industry. While gov't certainly liked the idea of the result in increased home ownership rates this would cause, no gov't agency put a gun to their heads to issue subprime loans specifically. They chose to jump into those waters.

The Great Recession is in the end more about what happens when the free market, particularly the financial sector, isn't regulated effectively. I don't blame the financial industry for inventing derivatives and CDOs. Both instruments can be used to reduce risk for all parties involved, and potentially to the entire system. But they inadvertently created a system that led to its own collapse because no entity watched over the system as a whole. How could the investment banks have known they comprised entities that should any of them fail, they would cause the entire system to collapse because of the intricate web of these CDOs and derivatives? How could they possibly know AIG was overextended on derivatives? They simply aren't equipped or structured to know this. But some entity should have, and the ONLY possible answer is the gov't. I'm even sympathetic to the view the gov't as is cannot possibly do this, but that means we need to fashion a gov't that can. It's the only answer.

>> ^lantern53:

Now Wall St. may have fouled up but it was the US gov't which was holding the gun to it's head. Only a gov't could foul things up this badly.