Having Kids or Being Childfree: The Controversy

aruna said:

This is absolutely true, and science needs to be humble enough to admit that it's still in baby shoes as far as consciousness study is concerned. Studying the brain in order to undrestand consciousness is like studying computer hardware to understand how Windows works. Consciousness study is by definition subjective: ie, meditation. Folks in the East understand this far better.




You still find this in poor rural areas of tropical contries. Babies and toddlers go naked, poop on the ground. Then the dogs come and eat the poop.

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Which explains why they don't like dogs much in some parts of the world. Now, I have dogs instead of kids, and I take great pains to keep them out of the cat boxes and so on.

This thread seems to be maturing nicely, integrating its absurdity with its more sober levels yet not falling to boring homogeneity - well done, all!

aruna said:

This is absolutely true, and science needs to be humble enough to admit that it's still in baby shoes as far as consciousness study is concerned. Studying the brain in order to undrestand consciousness is like studying computer hardware to understand how Windows works. Consciousness study is by definition subjective: ie, meditation. Folks in the East understand this far better.

You still find this in poor rural areas of tropical contries. Babies and toddlers go naked, poop on the ground. Then the dogs come and eat the poop.

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Back in the early 80's some friends decided to explore Thailand and I mean explore - spending weeks hiking in the jungles. One day, while answering nature's call in the middle of nowhere, one of my friends heard some crashing in the jungle not far from her so she hurriedly pulled up her pants and was about to run back to camp when she was horrified to see a large pig come charging out of the bush toward her. Frozen in fear she waited for the inevitable - which was not to be. Far from being interested in her, the pig stopped at her "deposit" and gobbled it up before the rest of his herd could find it.

There. Now if that story doesn't kill this thread nothing will.

aruna said:

This is absolutely true, and science needs to be humble enough to admit that it's still in baby shoes as far as consciousness study is concerned. Studying the brain in order to undrestand consciousness is like studying computer hardware to understand how Windows works. Consciousness study is by definition subjective: ie, meditation. Folks in the East understand this far better.

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I'm sorry but this is argument from ignorance. "We don't understand how this works, therefore this is how it works". The fact that science doesn't understand something doesn't give you a free pass to insert whatever.

Also, the subjective experience of consciousness is subjective, ie qualia, but not the mechanics of it. The mere fact that science doesn't have all the details doesn't make it subjective. It's not subjective that a dead brain has no consciousness. We actually have a good understanding of the constituent parts in the brain. We understand how it signals, the chemistry behind it. What we haven't figured out is why these parts are necessary or in what way it's configuration is critical. Patients with brain damage has taught us plenty about what happens when bits are missing. But our understanding of why those specific things break is still a bit of a mystery.

I personally meditate and it has helped me a lot. It's helped me understand my own motivations better. But it hasn't helped me understand the underlying architecture of the brain. Your example is equally applicable on what's wrong with eastern philosophy and it's theories of mind. To reverse it. No matter how much you pick apart your application, you'll still never figure out the physical bits in the computer.

Well. Now that Dr. Zoidberg has set us all straight, why not douse the thread with gasoline, light a match, and give it the ending it deserves.

CassandraW said:

Well. Now that Dr. Zoidberg has set us all straight, why not douse the thread with gasoline, light a match, and give it the ending it deserves.

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who feels like giving birth to the match? I don't. I hate matches.

That cannot be. No one hates matches. Human beings have an inherent instinct to love fire.

CassandraW said:

That cannot be. No one hates matches. Human beings have an inherent instinct to love fire.

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Let me rephrase that. I don't hate them, per se...I just wouldn't want to bring one of them into this world!

That's unnatural. I do not believe you exist.

CassandraW said:

That's unnatural. I do not believe you exist.

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nonsense. I am both unfalsifiable and unputdownable!

Wow, this thread has really grown up. *sniffles and tears up* I remembered when it was a little innocent baby thread.

*wipes eyes and sniffles again* Threads, these days. They grow up so fast!

*wrings hands* I'm sorry. I'm...I'm just being emotional right now.


(Lol)

asroc said:

Nothing wrong with that. My degree's in biology, but with a minor in psych and I find sociology interesting too, which is probably one of the reasons I ended up in medicine. (If you really go into the soft sciences there will be lots of math, though. Very statistics-heavy fields with big data sets.)

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Oh, yes. I started encountering that in a later Sociology class, definitely.

Still, Sociology still interested me, so it was worth it to calculate the numbers (even if I didn't understand what they really mean, lol).

With physics...ugh. It was stuff like, "If Train A leaves at 7:75 at 35 MPH, while Train B leaves at 8:00 at 50 MPH, at what time will the trains pass each other, blah, blah", and "If you drop a bowling ball at the top of a 6-foot tower, and it falls at a rate of 30 MPH, and then I drop a feather, and it goes only 1/4th of the speed of the bowling ball, blah, blah", and "If you throw a baseball at a 20-degree angle and hit the top of a 10-foot fence, at what would angle would a ball be if it was thrown and hit a 4-foot pole, blah, blah", yadda, yadda....

Ugh. Physics bored the day lights out of me.

At least with the soft sciences, I can actually understand what they're talking about, lol. With physics, I had no idea, and I just copied all of boys' lab results and math calculations in both physics classes.

Sad thing: There were only about five or six girls in the first physics class, but then it dropped down to two (and then one at one point) at the advanced class, because all of the other girls ended up dropping out. None of us girls really understood any of it. (I know this, because us girls stuck together in these male-dominated classes, and we talked about how confusing the math stuff was.) The boys and male teacher seemed like they know how to do physics math, and we didn't want to test the boys' patience with our struggles and confusion, so we just nodded our heads along with the boys, and then just ended up copying the boys' work whenever we could.

Those were the only classes (outside of a few math) in my entire lifetime I that I ever had to resort to copying anyone, lol. That was how bad I was at it.

I still don't understand physics to this day.

KTC said:

nonsense. I am both unfalsifiable and unputdownable!

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That, sir, is argument from ignorance.

Shall we say pistols at dawn?

CassandraW said:

That, sir, is argument from ignorance.

Shall we say pistols at dawn?

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okay. pistols at dawn.

there. i said it.

i have no idea what it means, but i said it.

don't let it be said that i shy away from a challenge!

By gum, you are unfalsifiable and unputdownable.

Tell you what. I'll find some pistols, and we can figure it out from there.

CassandraW said:

By gum, you are unfalsifiable and unputdownable.

Tell you what. I'll find some pistols, and we can figure it out from there.

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try not to use gum in the equation. it just gets the works all sticky and what not. incidentally, it is not by gum that i am unfalsifiable. i wager, however, that if i was all gummed up...it could be argued that that would be a good reason for my unputdownability.

so i'll remove the cause, but not the.....symptom.

Gum?!

bunny-gypsy said:

Wow, this thread has really grown up. *sniffles and tears up* I remembered when it was a little innocent baby thread.

*wipes eyes and sniffles again* Threads, these days. They grow up so fast!

*wrings hands* I'm sorry. I'm...I'm just being emotional right now.


(Lol)

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I don't have any interest whatsoever in baby threads. I only like interacting with them once they're grown up enough to be able to hold a conversation and wipe themselves.

Well, now that we've got this covered, maybe someone will start a thread about the mess and unpleasantness of puppies. Is there anything worse?

...research suggests that consciousness is likely a product of this widespread communication, and that we can only report things that we have seen once they are being represented in the brain in this manner. Thus, no one part of the brain is truly the "seat of the soul," as René Descartes once wrote in a hypothesis about the pineal gland, but rather, consciousness appears to be an emergent property of how information that needs to be acted upon gets propagated throughout the brain.

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http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-network-theory-consciousness.html

CassandraW said:

Well. Now that Dr. Zoidberg has set us all straight, why not douse the thread with gasoline, light a match, and give it the ending it deserves.

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Hmmm. not a bad idea!

bunny-gypsy said:

Wow, this thread has really grown up. *sniffles and tears up* I remembered when it was a little innocent baby thread.

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Somebody please post some kitten pix! Or the one about the hamster contentedly chewing a carrot wrapped in a blanket, which is circulating on Facebook right now. No more poop, babies, or brains please.

Or a mole rat. Everyone loves a mole rat.