Cosmic Consciousness

The consciousness of a dead person could live on in the consciousness of others and I don't mean as a memory. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_consciousness

I remember reading something about how some neuro science suggests that the last conscious moment experienced by the brain persists for eternity from the perspective of the brain. If it's true, it's unsettlingly terrifying. I think the implication was that the brain is the arbiter of the passing of time, and the last snap of consciousness persists for eternity, because there's no next snap, from the perspective of the brain, not drawing infinite energy from within the universe or anything like that.  The brain surely runs down. The mind could contain some other energy source, the soul could be capable of anything.  So that's a good enough loophole for anything to happen after death. So until we figure out the mind/body problem, the question of material braindeath is secondary.

How do you define conscious? I just define it as having a sense of existing.

No one knows what causes consciousness. For all we know EVERYTHING might be conscious (have a subjective 'sense of self') and it just might be our novel arrangement that leads to our particular variety of consciousness. Why would only the human brain allow for subjective experience? It doesnt quite make sense. The earth for example has electrical impulses, it moves, it adapts. The earth could be conscious. The sun could be as well. Its likely EVERYTHING in the universe is conscious (read: Has a subjective SENSE of existing) but its our novel arrangement that gives rise to our particular variety.

How does the mind relate to the body? Was there consciousness before birth or conception? Does a week old fetus have consciousness? On the subject of fun theories, what if the infinite multiverse theory if true, and dreams are you glimpsing into one of your alternate lives?

We are living in the greatest time in the history of humanity. Why are we so miserable? (Part I)

We have the best technology, the best medicine, convenience up the ass. I could pull up any kind of information I want in seconds. I can communicate with people across the world effortlessly. And that is the tip of the iceborg. We live in an age where time is measured in seconds and minutes. Whereas before, a lot of the simple shit we do every day would take hours, days, months, or even years. 

Technological innovation is not similiar to enjoyable lifestyle, overwhelming modernization, online addiction, and depersonalization does not make for a good era. Because we are still bound by instincts we must attempt to control in order to live in society, and no amount of technology can ever change that.

We just moved up a slot on maslow's hierarchy of needs, we don't have to worry about acquiring food anymore, so now we wring our hands about how no one loves us. I wonder what humanity's like when we reach the top of the pyramid and we decide to become a part of something bigger than us. and yet, we're just a single mistake away from collapse. If we could only reciprocate that for every country in the world, and have no immigration/intermarriage anywhere, we would be living in a utopia.

Not thinking in a spoken or written language

Language in the context of thinking is only practical in organizing your thoughts into something you perceive as coherent. Because we rely on communication, and the input of language, we like to communicate our own thoughts back to ourselves in a "language" that we are comfortable with. What you are identifying as "thinking" is probably just a side effect of your brain trying to comfort you or fill in the space in between external stimuli.

You are not aware of most of your thoughts. They work by association. Like if when you see someone you don't like you dont think "I dont like him" you just experience your negative association. Hot associate with burn. Cup associated with shape. Same with blind people. Language has definitely expanded the possible complexity of thought unless the blind person invented all own concepts.

What traits will be favourable

The word Eugenics gives the idea of somebody deciding whether people can have children based on their genes, and that would be unethical because nobody should have that kind of power over other people. There's no basis for it. Genetic engineering on the other hand, you could just modify embryos so they're free from defects, more intelligent, better looking, etc. Hitler's Jewish holocaust stuff was eugenics, elimination of 'bad' instead of encouragement of 'good'. I'm worried that if someone thinks the latter is ok, they will make the assumption the former is also acceptable. Therefore, since one is unacceptable, neither can be.

If we go along the path eugenics, its not long before we decide on some standardized genetic build and replicate it to the point where uniqueness dies. Because dumb parents occasionally have smart kids too. Our species would be better off if the dumbest poorest laziest motherfuckers didnt have the most children.

The way mutations work, it could be that some neutral or livable-but-unfavourable trait combines with some other trait to result in something better down the line. Its based on false assumptions and psudeo-science and has an equal posibility to remove potential as it does to refine it as its the western equivilent of voodoo.

Stopping people from having the free will to breed with whomever they want is unethical. What are ethics? Ethics isn't something that's just written in stone; you have to justify why you think so. Ethics are a man made idea. If human race end up with a monoculture one disease could wipe us out. All it would take is the right flu and goodbye human race. We need to keep some mutts around for genetic diversity.

What your heart and brain are doing when you're in love

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

Poets, novelists and songwriters have described it in countless turns of phrase, but at the level of biology, love is all about chemicals.

Although the physiology of romantic love has not been extensively studied, scientists can trace the symptoms of deep attraction to their logical sources.

"Part of the whole attraction process is strongly linked to physiological arousal as a whole," said Timothy Loving (his real name), assistant professor of human ecology at the University of Texas, Austin. "Typically, that's going to start with things like increased heart rate, sweatiness and so on,"

When you catch sight of your beloved and your heart starts racing, that's because of an adrenaline rush, said Dr. Reginald Ho, a cardiac electrophysiologist and associate professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Here's how it works: The brain sends signals to the adrenal gland, which secretes hormones such as adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine. They flow through the blood and cause the heart to beat faster and stronger, Ho said.

The response is somewhat similar to a fast heartbeat while running on a treadmill, although exercise has other benefits, he said.

For people with serious heart problems, love could actually be dangerous, Ho said. That's because when the heart rate goes up, the heart uses more oxygen, which can be risky for an older person with blood vessel blockages or who has had a prior heart attack. But good medicines such as beta blockers help curb the adrenaline response, Ho said.

It is also likely that norepinephrine, a stress hormone that governs attention and responding actions, makes you feel weak in the knees, said Helen Fisher, professor at Rutgers University and author of the book "Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type."

Fisher's research team did brain imaging of people who said they were "madly in love" and found activity in the area of the brain that produces the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine and norepinephrine are closely related.

"What dopamine does is it gives you that focused attention, the craving, the euphoria, the energy and the motivation, in this case the motivation to win life's greatest prize," she said.

This norepinephrine response has never been precisely studied in relation to romantic love, but the system seems to be more activated in people in love, she said.

Also likely involved is the serotonin system, she said. Some data from an Italian study indicate that a drop in serotonin levels is associated with obsessive thinking.

The stress hormone cortisol has also been shown to have implications for love, Loving said. His lab showed study participants who had recently fallen in love a picture of a romantic partner or friend, and had them describe or "relive" the moment of falling in love or wanting to be friends, respectively. Those who recalled falling in love showed an increase in stress hormones such as cortisol even 30 minutes after they were asked to think about it.

Generally, there are three brain systems involved in romantic love: sex drive, love and attachment, Fisher said. The sex drive evolved to get you to look for a lot of partners, the "love" portion is for focusing mating energy on one specific person at a time, and attachment is for allowing you to tolerate the partner -- at least, long enough to have children with him or her.

These systems are often connected, but can operate separately, she said. That means you can start out with one of them -- casual sex, or an intense feeling of love, or an emotional connection -- and move on to the others. For example, what may start out as a one-night stand may feel like more because the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, released during orgasm, make you feel deeply attached to someone. You may feel in love after that, or instead feel somehow responsible for the person, because of these hormones.

Fisher's team has found that romantic love doesn't have to die -- they found the same activity in the brains of people who said they were in love after 20 years of marriage as in people who had just fallen in love. This brain area makes dopamine and sends it to other areas.

In the days of early humans, in hunting-and-gathering societies, these qualities were especially advantageous for finding a person to bear and raise children with, she said.

Why, then, do small children fall in love if they are not trying to reproduce? Fisher hypothesizes that kids -- even 4-year-olds -- practice at love and learning more about themselves before it begins to become important to them.

Love also has health benefits for people who have aged beyond their reproductive years, she said. Being in love makes people feel optimistic, energetic, focused and motivated, which were all positive for health and societal contribution in the early days of humans, she said. So, it makes sense evolutionarily that people can still fall in love after their childbearing period.

Romance also is good for you. Studies have shown that people who have frequent sex are generally healthier, with a longer life, fewer coronary events and lower blood pressure. A 1995 study in the journal Demography found that marriage adds seven years to a man's life and two years to a woman's.

Loving's team is studying how people who have recently fallen in love respond to stressful situations. They hypothesize that people for whom the love is still new will respond to the stress and recover from it quicker than those who have recently been in a breakup or have been in a relationship for a long time.

"The guess is that when individuals are falling in love, they are walking around with rose-colored glasses," he said.

[source]

Time traveling

Magic Knight Rayearth

Time travel to a previous moment in time is impossible. Surprisingly, some educated people discuss this like it's a viable sensible worthwhile thing to be discussing with all seriousnes. Depends what theory you subscribe to. Like some say, depends on your outlook of the universe. Is time based on deterministic or indefinite parallel lines?

The deterministic view of time explains that every person's decision have already been made that every action already (predeterminately) taken and no matter how much you put effort to mess around with time travel it would not matter because it had already happened.

The most subscribed believe, one starts with a single known timeline event but when a time traveling put into effect there will be multiple future results. There is also the divergent timeline theory where the real future still exists, but is now unreachable, mixing with other alternate universes.

I believe that the time travel itself is unreachable because by the second a time traveling device is invented the situations may have been changed. The future on that altered line will never be the same as the original, one can't move forward and end up where he started off.

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Unnatural Selection

Birth Control Pills May Alter Choice Of Partners ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — There is no doubt that modern contraception has enabled women to have unprecedented control over their own fertility. However, is it possible that the use of oral contraceptives is interfering with a woman's ability to choose, compete for and retain her preferred mate? A new paper published in the October issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution reviews emerging evidence suggesting that contraceptive methods which alter a woman's natural hormonal cycles may have an underappreciated impact on choice of partners for both women and men and, possibly, reproductive success.

Human females are only fertile for a brief period during their menstrual cycle, just prior to ovulation. Many scientific studies have established that partner preferences of both women and men vary significantly according to predictable hormonal fluctuations associated with the natural menstrual cycle. Ovulation is associated with a profound shift in some female physical characteristics, behaviors and perceptions related to mate attraction.

Ovulating women exhibit a preference for more masculine male features, are particularly attracted to men showing dominance and male-male competitiveness and prefer partners that are genetically dissimilar to themselves. This is significant because there is evidence suggesting that genetic similarity between couples might be linked with infertility. Further, some studies have suggested that men detect women's fertility status, preferring ovulating women in situations where they can compare the attractiveness of different women.

The oral contraceptive pill alters the hormonal fluctuations associated with the menstrual cycle and essentially mimics the more steady hormonal conditions associated with pregnancy. "Although mate choice studies in humans have routinely recorded pill use during the last decade to control for its confounding effects, little effort has been invested in understanding the consequences of such effects of the pill," offers study author Dr. Alexandra Alvergne from the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield.

Dr. Alverne and colleague Dr. Virpi Lumma reviewed and discussed new research supporting the conclusion that use of the pill by women disrupted their variation in mate preferences across their menstrual cycle. The authors also speculate that the use of oral contraceptives may influence a woman's ability to attract a mate by reducing attractiveness to men, thereby disrupting her ability to compete with normally cycling women for access to mate.

Of particular interest is the fact that women taking the pill do not exhibit the ovulation-specific attraction to genetically dissimilar partners. "The ultimate outstanding evolutionary question concerns whether the use of oral contraceptives when making mating decisions can have long-term consequences on the ability of couples to reproduce," suggests Dr. Lummaa.

Taken together, an increasing number of studies suggest that the pill is likely to have an impact on human mating decisions and subsequent reproduction. "If this is the case, pill use will have implications for both current and future generations, and we hope that our review will stimulate further research on this question," concludes Dr. Lummaa. (sauce)

That's just insane. I don't even know why somebody would investigate that. They also linked it to women losing interest in genetically dissimilar mates. This is a bad, badwrong thing. This will hurts fertility as women are more likely not expanding the genepool (blonds only dating/reproducing with blonds, etc).