I am. You are becoming too funny. What happened to Dimitri? He was never that clever to just say 'black is white' and sit back. What's your handle, comrade?

A chronically ill informed fear mongering right winger claiming the left is the fear mongering and hoaxing party is just so over the top hilariously ludicrous...the left's leaders aren't convicted criminal frauds who's entire platform is "they're coming to get you and only I can save you by protecting unregulated gun sales, banning im'grants, saving Christmas, and fixing some fence....i mean getting Mecxico to build that wall.", it just wouldn't work on the left, only the right celebrates known lies.
Before Obama, I might have agreed about the left being the snowflakes, but absolutely not now. You babies are so thin skinned, snowflake seems too adult, you melt over nothings daily.

If I thought for a pico second you honestly meant it and weren't just angrily projecting and trolling I would suggest an immediate brain scan, because that's so incredibly irrational that non professionals are simply not qualified to deal with that level of clinical dementia.

Funny you didn't contradict the neo-nazi right wing terrorism issue....I guess you must agree the right is now, by their own standards, a violent terrorist organization, and a more pressing issue for the U.S. than other terrorist organizations as the most active by far, outpacing to the point of replacing Islamic terrorism.

Like saying humans have white skin, or blue eyes, or blond hair isn't dehumanizing to non Arians? If you make a blanket statement about who's human that leaves out a group, you dehumanize them, intentionally or not. Simple. Saying humans have five fingers on their hand dehumanized anyone who doesn't. Saying the sky is blue during sunset just makes you moronic.

No, you don't get to change or erase the meaning of words because you disagree with proven, peer reviewed, long standing science. Sorry. Brain scans show physical differences between genders that don't always correspond to sex, but do correspond to gender.

"saying humans are born with either a penis or vagina isn't a hateful statement against people."
It absolutely is hateful to hermaphrodites, clearly saying they aren't human. Use the qualifier "usually" or "almost always".

"As for gender being something different than sex, if you define it that way"
No, you said that. I'm saying all the physical attributes of gender are changeable besides the brain, and many humans with male gonads have female brains, and vice versa. Today, gonads can be surgically changed, so where is gender? I argue it's in the brain, which today can't be changed.
Gender is different from sexuality, clearly, no?
Edit: I guess I do think gender is different from "sex", if sex is determined solely by your gonads.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction
....as to who cares about gender....the bigoted bakers do. ;-)

We're talking perceived race, gender, sexuality, ethnic group, as identified by the discriminating individuals. They don't DNA scan or brain scan customers before serving (or denying) them, they react based on perception.

Skin color, that's totally changeable. Never heard of spray tans or bleach? Try watching Eddie Murphy's 'White like me'.

Odd you might argue against perception being the measure, since you seemed to argue that gays could be perceived as acceptably heterosexual by not acting on their uncontrollable urges and desires, bypassing the bigoted discrimination, essentially by lying.

Again it's about perceived ethnicity, not actual genetic heritage. Like you say, your actual heritage is unidentifiable by strangers, so less important to this discussion of public business discrimination.
If I want my wedding cake for me and Chris, and I wear my pink paisley silk shirt, leather chaps, choker, and heavy makeup to buy it that doesn't make me gay but the bigot baker would still deny me because he would assume I was.

Please allow me to disagree on all points.....

1) Humans are absolutely animals. Some may have the mentality of vegetables or minerals, but they are still animals.

2)Instinct can be difficult to ignore, and dangerous to ignore as well. Instincts developed because they helped our ancestors survive better than those who did not possess them. Those that had less developed instincts, didn't have them at all, or ignored them died off.

3)Not all people have a conscience (or lack an ability to experience empathy...essentially the same thing), sociopaths and psychopaths for instance usually lack one at all, and many of those that DO have one consistently and intentionally ignore it.

4)I don't believe there have been psychological experiments on lions to see if they really experience empathy or have a 'conscience' or not...and I'm not at all sure what one would look like. Simply stating that other animals don't have empathy does not make it so.
For example, people have said for eons that dogs don't have emotions, but that's simply wrong, and nothing more than a self serving excuse to abuse them and ignore their needs. Actual study and brain scans have proven they DO have the same type of reactions in their brains that humans do to emotional stimuli, conclusively proving the claims that they don't have emotions false...lions could be the same, simply unstudied rather than emotionless/lacking empathy.

That is as factual as any of it. If people enter hell because they don't worship the correct god in the correct way, but have no way to tell which way/god is correct, or if any is, that is no fault of their own. If your proclaimed system was fair, god needs to come to each person and make them KNOW his truth, then offer them the choice to reject it. That's not what happens, no matter how many rainbows and sunsets you see.

I won't go to hell then, and neither will any real atheist. I've never seen/heard/read anything convincing about any religion...ever. I don't 'know there's a god' or right way to worship, it seems far more likely there isn't. I say this with all honesty and not because it's somehow convenient or I'm 'angry at god'. I did not 'reject' him, I don't think he exists to reject.

Mathew 7:14 seems to repeat what I said, it's incredibly hard to find the way into heaven and most people won't find the way...according to your brand of religion. It's not that they reject the way, they can't find it, even though many looked with vigor.

No, it's like some guy telling you in the courtroom hallway that the judge will say that, but no one has ever seen it happen, or even seen the judge or what happens after your case is heard, there are no ex cons at all anywhere. This is the same guy that's telling you what the law is, but make no mistake, he's not a lawyer and he's telling you things that make no sense at all (like the judge will let you off for murder if you just SAY you won't do it again).
I don't think even the most hard core murderers and rapist have NO remorse, only the true psychopaths and they're rare.

When I die and god and Jesus are there asking me questions and telling me what the rules really were, I'll believe in them and say so clearly, and admit I was wrong. Not a nano second before they prove themselves though.

Ahhh, but did we have a flat EKG and brain scan on Jesus to prove he even died? ;-)
Also, yes, 3 days later! If you eat poorly prepared blowfish you can go into a total paralysis that looks like death, and come out of it 3 days later +-! It's how Voodoo practitioners probably made 'zombies'. That doesn't happen every day, but often enough that you can't bury people in Japan right away if they eat sushi.

Still sounds like a logical fallacy to me, with some people shoving their heads in the sand to avoid seeing it. I say you can't have it both ways, the punishment is eternity in hell and Jesus should have stayed no matter how special he and his pops are, and since he left (after less than 3 days? pussy!), he didn't even take the punishment he expects humans to, forget taking that amount of punishment for each person. Saying he's 'special' so he didn't have to is ridiculous and shows the mind bending mental acrobatics you must do to make sense of this. It reminds me of the 'I'm too rich to have to go to prison' defense.

Oh, I see, I misunderstood what you were saying about the soul.

You know what else you don't see on (US) beaches. The right for a woman to omit a top. I'm all for women wearing what they want. I personally find less more comfortable when it's really hot and a full suit better when it's cold. I don't see covering up any more dignifying that showing more. Also, who wears a swimsuit for power?

Covering up isn't going to solve the issue with how the male brain reacts to scantly clad women. I really doubt the result of said brain scan would be the same in a culture where women's breast and other body parts were not fetishized to the point where they HAVE to cover them (or the other way around)

Vintage bathing suites have been in style for a long time. She's not really doing anything new or revolutionary. The designs are cute but I've seen similar designs all over the web.

The shirt in the beginning slayed me.

Also I wanna see a brain scan of her and compare it to someone who use hands for this stuff.

1...2...3...4...5. 5 out of 5 that are bullshit, misleading, or just plain bad ideas.

Generating power from your bike and/or water pipes. BS and misleading.
Biometrics, already demonstrated to be -way- too easy to fool, and there is no way to revoke them. Won't even begin to address the misleading claims that "as always, you can opt in or out of the system."
Mind-reading - right. They can't even manage natural language accurately, after spending 25 years on commercial products. I'm sure brain scans are easier, though.
The gaps between information haves and have-nots will cease to exist. Anyone that believes that, raise your hand. Anyone?
Analytics, deciding for you what you want to see. Because living 100% of the time in your own personal echo chamber is such a great way to stay in touch with reality. The knowledge level of Faux News viewers provides a reasonable estimate of how well that works.

In short, total bullshit. But what else would one expect from IBM, a company that sells nothing else.

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.

Do you have any links to stories about this? I'd be interested in more details, personally.
>> ^shinyblurry:


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.

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.

Congratulations! Your video, Scientists Scan Movie Clips From Your Brain, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 3 Badge!

What I do for a living and what I do in my bedroom are polar opposites...

>> ^AgentSmith:

>> ^MonkeySpank:
I don't understand how this works. I read the articles and I am a little skeptical. I've designed fMRI and DTI algorithms for years and I don't see why they keep talking about fMRI and brain waves. fMRI is an activity map that is related to the hot spots in the brain where the hydrogen protons aligned by the magnetic field resonate to the frequency of the emitter (TR/Echo Time) and only show consumption of glucose (hydrogen protons motility) during a designed paradigm, which in this case would be having the subject watch a video. Diffuse Tensor Imaging will help map the neurons going there in case a surgical procedure is necessary, and that's about it. Extrapolating fMRI (a very coarse k-space reconstruction) to brainwaves (an EEG signal) and images sounds very suspicious to me, and nothing published so far explains how this is technically done. I understand the excitement and it certainly would be possible in the future, but under the current state of the art, I don't see how this is possible, especially with fMRI or Fractional Anisotropy.

...says "MonkeySpank", lol! Really, thank you for the insight, but the association between your well informed comment and your avatar is what did it for me.
This is what led me to believe that E = MC² --LoudBelcher78