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  1. J

    Mod+ Discussion - Are Genetically Modified Foods Safe? Should they be labeled?

    GMOs are being pushed by multinational corporations, which are already seen as untrustworthy as they do not have the "best interests" of any one region in mind. Secondly there are economic risks, as GMO goods are being sold in forms which cannot reproduce on their own--this means that, combined...
  2. J

    Possible evidence of human ability to detect Earth's magnetic field found

    I'm pretty sure this is what Persinger claimed, back when he demonstrated magnetic fields as a possible vessel for telepathy.
  3. J

    Movies: Is Ex Machina ignoring the hard problem of consciousness? |300|

    Singularity technology doesn't require answering philosophical concerns over what it means to be (ex. consciousness.) It simply requires knowing how to compute harder problems, which offloads work from the human, and allows them to do more useful work. Two hundred years ago, performing...
  4. J

    Thoughts about the popularity of this forum

    This is the part where I started to get less interested in the topic overall. If the visions are unique to a particular person, then obviously its the product of their imagination (not B.) If the visions are uniform across people, then obviously its the product of biology (not A.) The skeptic...
  5. J

    (Article) Trying to simulate the human brain is a waste of energy

    I thought that article was the usual "no fun allowed" drivel, personally. If nothing else, they're good at red-teaming for neurology. I suspect a bit more interaction between both disciplines would be greatly beneficial for the both of them. My brief experience with neurology papers suggests...
  6. J

    What facts would disprove the afterlife hypothesis?

    Panpsychism seems (and this is probably a very uninformed piece of conjecture) like the only way to escape the dichotomy of "if consciousness is not computable, then spirits exist. if spirits do not exist, consciousness is computable." Elevating consciousness to some kind of universal particle...
  7. J

    What facts would disprove the afterlife hypothesis?

    The best results have no explanatory power behind them. There are a couple of experiments that have passed the bar to indicate something potentially odd is happening (Ganzfelds, EEG telepathy), yet offer no real details other than "something happened statistically which should not have." That...
  8. J

    What facts would disprove the afterlife hypothesis?

    They're buzzwords by this point. Two or so years ago, there was a high degree of links, whitepapers, and logical (sometimes inductive!) reasoning. Post forum move, "physicalist paradigm" has become a drinking game.
  9. J

    What facts would disprove the afterlife hypothesis?

    Its exactly relevant. Is rhetoric which implies falsifiability is somehow not applicable to spiritual topics, and also implies that its only applicable to physicalism. Both of these assertions are false.
  10. J

    What facts would disprove the afterlife hypothesis?

    Its pretty hard to satisfy If ¬B then ¬A if A or B can never be "false."
  11. J

    Children from religious homes less tolerant, meaner than kids from secular homes.

    Spiritual models embody free will, and ultimately personal responsibility in some way. There is a narrative that a person can opt to become better than they currently are, which leads to the possibility of social development. Non-spiritual models are poorer at that.
  12. J

    Veridical perception in OBE's

    It's certainly being used as an against (even though the NDE community already stated at the outset the protocol couldn't help in the first place.) They already operate on that conclusion.
  13. J

    Children from religious homes less tolerant, meaner than kids from secular homes.

    I'd say they're mostly about storing knowledge, wisdom and figures of speech in a means people are likely to remember. These things hearken back to cultures without ready access to paper or copyrights, and mneumonic skills almost universally converge on strange stories as a means to remember...
  14. J

    Psychic Detectives...

    I would argue that parapsychology's current disinterest in understanding psi has more to do with it than what some skeptics think. Last I read up on the papers, they were largely working on random number studies (which I suspect are terribly uninteresting, and not helpful) instead of going...
  15. J

    Near Death Experience's of Maori...

    Cultural influence as an argument seems to be a red herring. Consider the following: A cultural influence exists = expectation bias. A cultural influence does not exist = physical stimulus bias. Either way the NDE gets "explained" by nothing.
  16. J

    University of Texaz team replaces some genes in yeast with some genes from humans - media goes wild

    I'm all for successful gene splicing with human DNA. Maybe some cool side projects will come out of it. Has Sheldrake ever actually posited a formal theory for morphic resonance? I've seen a lot of skeptiko people (and skeptics) debate it on his behalf, yet any videos I've seen of Sheldrake...
  17. J

    Is determinism logically unfalsifiable?

    I've been lightly reading in to free will v. determinism lately, particularly discussions about how far genetic/epigenetic and body chemistry would interact to decide on human behavior. One niggle I've always had with the deterministic (especially biological deterministic) argument is that it...
  18. J

    New precognition study supports skeptical view

    There is a skeptic quote that might be paraphrased here, "I don't care how much evidence you show me, I will never believe you." Unless we are going to start going in to implications of some quantum intepretations, a person's belief in something does not create the reality or lack thereof. I...
  19. J

    State of Artificial Intelligence

    My guess is that the onset of circuit printing will help somewhat. A lot of current-day software engineering is constrained by bad or inefficient thinking; using suboptimal languages for prototypes (e.g. using 'dead' code such as C or Python instead of 'live' code such as Lisp) and...
  20. J

    State of Artificial Intelligence

    A lot of humans would probably get that wrong as well. The sentence is intentionally ambiguous, and there is no reason "simulated" knowledge is somehow worse than "real" knowledge deducing how styrofoam works. What is actually going on here is a lot of fuzzy logic and bayesian math[fn:1]. The...
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