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u/nukefudge · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

>information integration theory

i do believe you mean integrated information theory? (btw. woah, i just had to delete an entire section from that page, because it was terribly written!)

moving on, i see you're indeed a fan of the eastern stuff. i'd like to just note here that this whole idea of "liberating" consciousness from "disturbance" is entirely value-laden (there's this whole historical developmental thing that comes into play), and as such, i myself don't consider it worthwhile. we could talk about it if you wish, but i'm afraid i would probably just disappoint you by merely attacking the ideas, not exploring them as such (i have a certain measure of experience with such ideas due to my time spent studying philosophy - philosophy of consciousness in particular, actually).

as for husserl - you should definitely read e.g. some merleau-ponty. he's a much less obscure student of husserl, and he's got some great perspectives to add. where husserl was a bit more formal or idealistic in scope, merleau-ponty opens up to some more "alive" angles - or at least, so it would appear on the surface of it, probably because husserl is older, and his tone is rigid, where MP moves in another time. let's say that the perspectives need more work to tease out in husserl than in MP.

but actually, if you're gonna read at all, you should start by reading some overviews. that's always a good idea, when touching a new field. this book is co-written by a former professor of mine, and it's pretty sweet.

you might even be delighted to find that some phenomenologists in recent years have begun to dig around in eastern stuff, to find similarities and establish connections. it's not something i personally found rewarding, but some probably like the culture, or just meditation in particular. verdict's not out yet on whether this actually makes sense in an academic context.

in your last part there, i don't entirely get how you're using the word "phenomenology", so i'm having trouble commenting on it. but it appears that you're making a dualism of some sort out of the study of consciousness on one hand, and the materiality of the world on the other. important to note: it's a major part of phenomenology to dismiss dualisms of this sort, in so far as they're setup by people who wish to describe the world in "layers" (as we see it with so many models of consciousness done by "fans" of the frameworks of modern natural science).

u/DigitalMindShadow · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

No. Very no. A few reasons:

First, the social problems caused by overpopulation discussed by others in this thread and books like The Postmortal.

Secondly, at best it would be really fucking boring after a while, but more likely it would turn into a nightmare. I suppose that if you knew you were going to be immortal, you could make some uber-safe investments and ride them until you were a bajillionaire, and then do whatever you want on this world for as long as it lasts; go back to school and get PhDs in everything and make all sorts of discoveries and inventions, and basically be a superhero. But after you've done all that, then you still have a literal eternity left to live. If you're smart you'll have devoted substantial energy to figuring out how you're going to get off of Earth and onto some other habitable planet before the Sun becomes a red giant. Maybe that's not even possible, in which case have fun enduring whatever surviving is like while the Sun incinerates the Earth. Even if it is possible to travel to another inhabitable world, you'll inevitably run into a similar problem wherever you go next, so in the best case you're probably going to spend untold trillions of years just traveling between different star systems. Which I'm sure is a spectacular experience at first, but anything will get boring after a thousand years, let alone ten billion. In any event, eventually your luck would run out and you'd end up on a planet with insufficient resources to allow you to get to another star system (again, that's probably the one we're on right now), in which case ultimately you'd just end up in a near-endless orbit around a brown dwarf star, waiting for the heat death of the universe to finally annihilate you. (Or not? What then?) Anyone who considers true immortality desirable doesn't understand what it would mean to be alive for literally eternity.

Finally, life just wears you down after a while. Have you ever talked to someone in their late 90s? They're almost universally ready to go. Not just because they're always in physical pain either: they have seen and done enough. Life contains a lot of joy but also a lot of pain, and it all gets to be really tiring after very long.

So no, I just wouldn't want to live forever under any circumstances. If there were some magical way to extend my life an extra 20 or 30, I guess maybe all the way up to 100 years or so, I might cautiously consider doing it, just because I'm curious to see what will happen in the future. But ultimately, I'm glad my life will someday come to an end.

u/habisch · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

This was some years ago, but in my Theory of Knowledge class in high school, I did a presentation on whether or not there is a universal system of truth; that is, are some things inherently "good" (or "bad") regardless of what society has taught us to think?

It's obviously an unanswerable question, but the most interesting research, by far, came from Dr. David Hawkins and his book, Power vs Force. He offers some very interesting evidence that suggests that, perhaps, there is a universal scale of truth. Not only that, but he provides an easily reproducible method to "test" various objects, thoughts, and ideas against this scale.

I'm not saying he's right or wrong, but if you're interested in the subject, the book is a wildly fascinating read. And my live demonstrations on various classmates had a room full of International Baccalaureate candidates in awe.

I'll note here that I've never thought to explicitly apply the technique to an incident, such as the traffic situation you described; though I don't see why it wouldn't work.

u/mkdz · 18 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

I think they should be allowed to, but they wouldn't be competitive enough to participate in the top professional leagues. In the book Andy Roddick Beat Me with a Frying Pan, the author dedicates a chapter to the gap between men and women in sports.

He concludes that the top women in the world compete at about the level of 15-year-old boys. For example, the world records in track and field for women are right around the records of 15-16 year-old boys. Also, the US Women's National soccer team regularly scrimmages 14-16 year-old men's club soccer teams. They can beat the 14-year-old squads pretty easily but once they play against the 15-year-old teams, they start having trouble. They start getting beat regularly playing against the 16-year-old teams. It's the same in basketball.

Even in non-physical sports, the top women aren't really close to the top men. The author interviewed the top women's pool player in the world, Jeanette Lee, and she said that if she played in the men's tour, she would be ranked around 200.

u/senjutsuka · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

Ok I get where you're coming from. I was in some serious programs for gifted kids early on and it changed my perspective and motivators. I agree you dont have anything to prove to anyone. And Im sorry you're not interested in seeing what you can do for the world and others with what is obviously quite a strong potential.

I agree you need to be happy with what you're doing its just sad that your parents/teachers mistakes are weighing on you so heavily that you wont do something valuable that you also want to do in the world.

This is what I mean by happiness via helping - its not just b/c its supposed to be good its because studies show it makes you happier: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/04/is-there-a-way-to-create-a-positive-feedback/#ixzz2b2m2LMBe

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/04/interview-wharton-business-school-professor-teaches-approach-give/

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/11/is-being-selfless-the-smartest-way-to-be-self/#ixzz2b2lnKKci

http://www.amazon.com/Flourish-Understanding-Happiness-Well-Being-Achieve-ebook/dp/B0043RSK9O/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406381025&sr=1-1&keywords=Flourish%3A+A+Visionary+New+Understanding+of+Happiness+and+Well-being

Studies arent certainty though. I hope you find YOUR way (fuck all the other pressures) in a world that could use your help.

u/cafemachiavelli · 3 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

I'm not sure how to answer this one. My main problem is that most definitions of communism describe a state or framework, not a testable system.

I'm not convinced that there couldn't be a functional/effiecient system that matches some basic definition of a communist society (e.g. commonly owned means of production), but I haven't seen a satisfactory answer to the basic economic questions, i.e. how do we organize work and distribution of goods and resources.

'Central planning' and/or SoEs are usually the go-to response(s), but that's like a Hollywood plot about solving the great problem with a big-ass computer (with no discussion of its archtecture or OS). How would the central planners operate? What priorization scheme would be used to make the necessary trade-offs that the market solves by comparing ask/bid?

Once we get into calculation models, expected utility and the whole philosophy of what constitutes value in the first place, the issue becomes so huge and unwieldy that I'm not sure anybody can actually understand it, so people just insert their own assumptions to simplify the issue. I think that's borderline fallacious.

> Have you seen any other analysis, sources, or books that suggest viability may be dependent on levels of technology and productivity?

I wish. Parecon discusses allocation of work and resources, but backs down when it comes to calculation and conflict resolution. I think there's a lot of opportunity in alternative economics, just not much work being done beyond the x-th re-interpretation of Marx or Ricardo. (If anybody knows of anything interesting in this area, do let me know)

u/figeater · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

I haven't read or otherwise studied Dr. Mate enough to say for certain, but he seems quite reasonable and well-informed in the interview I linked, and has excellent ratings on his books (including the one on ADD), which would seem unusual if he was as unreliable as you claim he is.

I would also note that there has come into being significant financial incentive for schools, doctors, and many scientists in the US (via a $40 billion annual psychotropic drug tab and additional money for schools if children are diagnosed/on ADHD drugs) to attribute ADD to biological causes instead of psychological ones, ones even though the biology of human children would not seem to have changed so much in the past 30 years or so to explain the huge upsurge in ADD/ADHD diagnoses in that time frame. I can only imagine it would be much more appealing for many parents to attribute the poor school performance and other problem behaviour of their children to biological factors instead of poor parenting as well.

When I said psychopaths were severely abused I actually meant serial killers (I mis-typed), though the amount of child abuse present in the world (see again http://board.freedomainradio.com/forums/t/23711.aspx ) would seem to cover the 4% of psychopaths quite well.

While I have heard intelligent people promote both sides of this topic, here is an interview with someone who has studied the topic in some depth (see his book here), and has come to the opinion that ADHD drugs are vastly over-prescribed, and are doing a lot of harm in the scope they are currently used in.

From the book description:

Robert Whitaker discusses his book 'Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America'

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation's children. What is going on?

Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix "chemical imbalances" in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals.

Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?

This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?

By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?

In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

u/itchytweed · 6 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

Agree

I think a society that encouraged/mandated exercise and had no stigma for therapy would be much healthier one. In some cases, I think "freedom of ideas" make people lonely and therefore depressed. But that could easily be fixed by teaching more tolerance for those who have different ideas than yours.


Disagree

I'm interested to know how old you are. Not to judge your thoughts, but to judge your experiences. As an adult, have you ever sat on your kitchen floor attempting to eat an entire cake just because you could? That's freedom. And yeah, it's not necessarily healthy, but if you only do it once a year, it's not necessarily unhealthy either.

The problem with regulations is - humans are complicated. You will never be able to write a set of rules that encompasses the whole of human complexity. Many people would be severely stressed out by having to follow all the rules. Mandatory anything for people with disabilities would be borderline impossible. Have you read 1984? Or ever read To Kill a Mockingbird how the one family was allowed to not go to school?

Plus, what we learn continues to change. Did you know that organic food is no different chemically from GMOs? You could say coffee and wine serves no nourishing purpose and should be banned, however it's been shown that having a stress-relieving substance like wine can help you live longer when had in moderation.

What about religion? Some people believe the belief in such a delusion is harmful to brains, thought processes, and society. While others take great comfort in their god(s) and it helps them navigate life with less stress. Who gets to make the decision on which is allowed? China's plan isn't working out too well.

We should enable citizens live healthy lives - healthcare, healthy food, mental health services, paid time off for mental health (naps, etc), community centers, limit access to harmful substances. But I do not agree in any way that it would be possible to create a utopia under such strict guidelines.

u/Murrabbit · 5 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

>What happens when one dies? Does the other die with it, or do they become half a person? If they meet someone else who is half a person, can they form a bond and become whole again?

You should read Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon The Deep wherein he explores the idea of an alien culture where individuals are made up of four or more creatures with a much more animal-level intelligence. He really gets into the weird nitty gritty of trying to maintain a single consistent identity, how individuals cope with the death of one of their members, or the integration of another, and also interestingly how no external over-mind exists for these beings, but rather how they are in constant auditory communication which makes large group settings extremely awkward, confusing and in some cases identity stripping.

Vinges novels tend to deal with matters of consciousness, identity, and how hypothetical circumstances, technology or in this case alien biology might affect those things. It's pretty fun stuff to read, and, as with most questions and comments on this sub-reddit, way fucking better if you're stoned, haha.

u/boywbrownhare · 5 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

the term "drugs" is a perversion of language. there is no such thing. there are many many unique substances. to put crack and cannabis in the same category is beyond ignorant. this is a serious problem in our culture.

and the first sentence of your title could not be further from the truth.

i highly recommend a book called Food Of The Gods by Terence McKenna. it traces the history of humankind's relationships with different plants, and the effects those different plants have had on our cultures. blazing insight into this topic. it's really the perfect thing for your question.

here's a video of Terence doing a talk about this book; he's better known as an amazing speaker. most fascinating person i've ever listened to, by a longshot.

u/OriginalName317 · 5 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

Reorganize the concept of work of all sorts such that everyone operates within an appropriate level of their own authority. No people are expected to act as robots, and everyone has clearly defined roles in which they have decision making power. And, those roles and authorities can evolve over time with the advice and consent of the group, with the goal of doing better work in better ways.

Incidentally, I'm getting all this from Reinventing Organizations and Holacracy. You might be interested in reading those.

And to be fair to our real world so far, you couldn't really reboot and expect to get here. We needed the other organizational models to get us to the point that we'd even understand and be able to implement what I said above.

u/bobbyfiend · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

That's exactly what I'm saying. Here is one of the go-to works that really got this conversation going a few years back. And it's not "unlikely" at all, in a linguistic sense, for labels--especially those that refer to really broad things imbued with social and political import--to be multivalent, to have different definitions for different individuals, or to just be really vaguely defined. For example, go ask a hundred people to talk for a few minutes about what "freedom" means to them, or "America," or "education," etc. Cultures (and certain groups in the culture) sometimes have a vested interest in restricting the definitions of various terms, and this masks their true variety. For instance, many people believe that there is only one definition of "American," and might become angry if you explain that there are various ways to define that term.

"Masculinity" is very much like the examples above. I think some examples will demonstrate:

  • In the domain of "grooming," a person can be very "masculine" by smelling awful and never shaving his face or trimming his hair, looking like a tidy lumberjack with a bit of stubble, looking crisp and James-Bond-like in a tuxedo, being perfumed and manicured all metrosexual, having just the right amount of rumple and scruff in a hipster way, etc.
  • In the domain of "sexual fidelity," you can be "masculine" by being unfailingly faithful to your current partner, by sleeping with everything your junk is compatible with, by practicing "serial monogamy" with many partners in a row, and probably some other things.
  • In the domain of "parenting styles," you can be "masculne" by being extremely patient and engaged with your child, by stoically modeling a keep-your-mouth-shut-and-get-things-done ethos, by being a cold and harsh authoritarian drill sergeant, by yelling and hitting your child, etc.

    All those examples are "masculine," and they don't all work together. You might say that some are more masculine than others. I'd say "prove it." I've met people who have very different core beliefs about what it is to be a man, or a "good man," or a "natural man," etc. (we can't even agree on that--what "masculine" actually refers to).

    There is a concept sometimes called "hegemonic masculinity," and I think it refers to what many people sometimes call "traditional masculinity." It looks a lot like the Hispanic concept of machismo. It is not a nice way of being a man; it usually includes dominating others, constantly being prepared for violence, being sexually promiscuous to a pretty riduculous degree, etc. It's not called "traditional masculinity" as much in scholarly circles, I think, for a good reason: it's no more "traditional" than any other conceptualization of masculinity; in the (admittedly Western) cultures I have experience with, there have always been multiple masculinities. They vary by geographic region, social stratum, personality type, family background, religious expression, ethnic heritage, education level, and probably more stuff. In fact, I think masculinities even vary within individuals--we are a different kind of masculine (at least many of us) depending on the situation we are in, or the life tasks we're dealing with (e.g., finding a mate in our 20s versus raising children or building a career later).

    So OP's question can't be answered as asked, because there is not one thing that is "masculinity."
u/balanced_goat · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

Check out Chapter 7 of the Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading social psychologists today. He goes into great detail about it, and it's fascinating. Short answer is yes, adversity absolutely benefits development, but there are lots of variables that influence how much, and there is definitely such a thing as too much.

u/[deleted] · 12 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

No.

We'll start with a machine that has two parts: The Hard Drive, and the Reader. The Hard Drive must contain a pattern written in shorthand which can be interpreted perfectly by the Reader.

If the Hard Drive's atoms are all you're worried about, then in theory it's completely possible and in some cases even trivial to have a Hard Drive store a pattern that tells where each and every one of its own atoms is, including the atoms used to store the shorthand pattern. You just need a sufficiently complex Reader to be able to interpret and extract the pattern.

Things get trickier if you want the Hard Drive to store the atoms in the Reader in addition to its own pattern. What this means is that every single atom in the Reader also needs to follow an exact pattern, which it can itself interpret and extract.

So you have a Hard Drive which stores two pieces of information: The pattern that you can extract to tell where every atom in the Hard Drive is (which I will call Pattern A), and the pattern you can extract to tell where every atom in the Reader is (which I will call Pattern B). This means that Pattern A now needs to include a shorthand of Pattern B. Pattern A is now Pattern A + short(Pattern B). But wait! This means that Pattern A no longer describes every atom in the Hard Drive. It describes how it was before short(Pattern B) got added in. So now we have new(Pattern A) which contains the information of old(Pattern A) + short(Pattern B). But this means that old(Pattern A) no longer describes anything useful. Additionally, new(Pattern A) still doesn't contain all of the information, because it doesn't describe itself; new(Pattern A) = old(Pattern A) + short(Pattern B). Plus, we might need to come up with a new(Pattern B) which can read new(Pattern A), because this step has made the storage much more complicated. But then we'll need to make a short(new(Pattern B) and add it to new(Pattern A). And then we'll have new(new(Pattern A)) = new(Pattern A) + short(new(Pattern B)). And so on, and so forth, ramping up the complexity with each new step.

While each new step will look like it's getting close to perfect self-reference, it'll always change something minor that will have to be addressed in the next step. You'd need an infinite amount of steps and an infinite capacity for storage in order to perfectly store the pattern.

If this machine can't even describe itself, it can't describe the universe it belongs to. The universe includes the machine, so total information about the universe has to contain total information about the machine.

If you're really interested in this subject, I recommend reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. He goes into far more detail about it.

u/Wylkus · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

To this day there is still no greater book for opening up the world of thought than Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. This book is indispensable.

Aside from that the best advice, as many here have noted, is to simply read widely and often. Here are some other books I can personally recommend as being particularly insightful:


u/dr_entropy · 3 pointsr/InsightfulQuestions

Douglas Hofstadter talks about something like this in I am a Strange Loop. Here's an interview that talks about it a bit. I recommend reading the book, though you may enjoy it more after reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.