/sci/ - Science & Math

because the "beat" of a song tricks your brain into thinking you're walking/running at that pace, causing a release of relevant motivating neurotransmitters (norepinephrine,dopamine etc.).

This is first of all, why you feel like moving to music, and second of all, why when you do move to music it further enhances this illusion causing the release of even more dopamine.

Most people enjoy the release of dopamine. It is afterall the neurotransmitter system which coke and speed act on.

>>3181633

when you say "first wave" of creatures so you mean sentient creatures or not?

If not, there doesn't neccesarily have to have been mass extinctions on other planets so you might not be able to classify creatures into "waves".

If you're talking about "the first wave of sentient beings", then i think you are incorrect. The species' after the extinction of the first sentient beings will not have the huge hydrocarbon reserves as the first sentient beings depleted them all. They probably won't have a chance to advance as far as we did.

But i do agree with some of you post. Perhaps global warming and fossil fuel depletion is a problem that has faced every advanced carbon-based civilisation in the universe.

yep, it's just pseudointellectualism, the worst form of intellectual wankery.

>>3179583

humans are genetically predisposed towards supernatural beliefs, perhaps not so much because of direct survival benifits of religion, but because certain ways of thinking (which increase our suseptibility to spirituality/religion) could have significant cognitive and surivival benifits.

Schizophrenia, ocd and temporal lobe epilepsy are all perhaps extreme forms of the sort of neurological that could be reproductively benifical, but also predispose a person towards religious/spiritual beliefs.

>>3179643

>Why do you require constant reinforcement that people who see the world in a different light than you are somehow damaged and wrong? That itself seems like schizotypal behavior.

Actually, I'm a huge supporter of the idea that most of the really common mental "disorders" (depression, aspergers, shizophrenia, ocd, bipolar disorder etc.) evolved to be so common because many of the genes which predispose people towards them also can potentially give them significant cognitive benifits.

I'm not trying to insult anybody, or call religious people "damaged", i'm just trying to give the scientific answer to the argument for religion based on "personal experience".
The brain is amazing but it's not perfect. it fucks up a lot, especially given the sort of selective pressures we've been under and the limited capabilities of natural selection.

In fact, I myself have had an experience which i would have labelled "religious" had i been a believer at the time (thankfully, it was of the "sudden wave of calm euphoria" and not the hallucinatory kind). I'm thankful because a hallucinatory experience would scare me. That said i think people who have a few short/mild hallucinatory experiences probably do have creative benifits over the rest of the population.

>>3179522

Are you talking about his course in human behavioural biology?
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL848F2368C90DDC3D

This lecture is seperate from that series (notice he has much shorter hair in this video).

The BBC horizon documentary "God on the brain" is also worth a watch (it's mostly about temporal lobe epilepsy-which sapolsky touches on in his lecture too):

>summary
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml

video:
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0WC9VPsAqg

It's worth noting that temporal lobe epilepsy is thought to be correlated with high levels of creativite/original thought.
It only seems logical to me that people with sub-clinical levels of this neurological trait probably have a creative advantage which leads to a reproductive advantage, which leads to these genes becoming more prevalent in the population.

All of /sci/ needs to watch this video:

http://boingboing.net/2009/06/06/evolution-religion-s.html

>Stanford's Robert Sapolsky gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities.

>>3179214

If your parents tell you growing up that if you don't live a certain way you will be tortured in another plane of existance for all eternity after you die, would you live your life that way instead of how you want to live it?

What if your parents were scientologists?

acquired tastes are for snobs. Like, actually what sort of idiot thinks liking a certain type of food makes them "more mature", it doesn't.

Study after study has found that people can't tell the difference between normal and expensive wine.

I don't think you can ever truly enjoy "aquired tastes", you just become tolerant of them and maybe even pretend to yourself that you do enjoy them in order to make yourself feel superior to other people.

Btw, licorice is nice, plenty of kids find it nice. Liking licorice does not mean you have a "developed pallette", it's just a natural taste difference that exists between people.

>>3177466
>continued

His unhappiness when dealing with the general public is not to do with philosophical enlightenment (in fact when i read his book "the god delusion" i was quite dissappointed at him basing arguments on emotionalist sentimentalism towards nature/science). But it is possible to be happy and also be free from many of the irrational beliefs we seem to be born with. In fact, if anything, i think I'm a much happier person since my philospical awakening. There's so much that people get worked up over for no reason, causing much suffering to themselves and others.

>Is it rational to feel depressed that there is no ultimate grand "meaning" to life? NO!
>Is it rational to feel depressed over the fact that you will inevitably die? NO!
Now keep enlightening yourselves and helping others to do the same and we could be the first generation that starts to not suck!

Dawkins has been through a lifetime of having idiots harrass and insult him, rubbishing his field of evolutionary biology, when all he was trying to do was his job as Oxford's "professor for public understanding of science". A job for which he probably had massive enthusiasm for at the beginning and by the end his positive emotions had been completely drained by his experience.
Also, his daughter was sent to a catholic school completely against his wishes by his divorced wife, which probably infused a lot more negative emotion into his argument against religion.

I agree with the OP that dawkins doesn't look very happy, but that's because of the experience he has had with non-acedmics and the general public (particularly religious memebers of the public-who are by definition impossible to reason with), his optimism is gone. Look at him in his "nice guys finish first" BBC documentary from the 1980's:

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/nice-guys-finish-first/

He seems happier, even though he had already been subjected to far more than his fair share of idiot arts-block journalists and pundits not even bothering to read his book "the selfish gene", assuming it had a political agenda and lambasting him for acknowledging the obvious fact that a lot of our behaviour has an evolutionary basis.

>>3171820

>Women who are single
>could not be described as alpha or beta or whatever.

this is where i think you are wrong

>>3171789

It's not a dichotomy. It's a very gradual slope. It only looks like a dichotomy when you comapre two people at opposite ends.
Also, there's such a thing as being an asshole/bitch, being too dominant tends to lead to a decrease in status.

>>3171776

sometimes, but say if they're single?

You're better off not thinking in terms of "rank", it's fuzzier and much more fluid/dynamic than that.

>Why don't we find human Alpha-females?

You do (well to the same extent that you find "alpha males)", women just establish dominance over each other in different ways than men.

I think this is a worthy idea, OP.

I have ideas, but i'm not sure i want to post them...... It's not that i want money (i'm cool with my ideas (if they're actually of any use) being "for the good of humanity"), it's just i don't like the idea of someone else taking credit/making money from them.

I'm definitely willing to help however i can with other people's ideas though ;).

>>3148952

well what "input" are you talking about then, if not from our genes or our environment?

>>3148815

inputs come from our environment via our senses. We already come with preprogrammed orders to engage in activities likely to increase our survival/reproduction chances.

no idea what you're trying to get at.

>>3148865

I see, but as i said, if this "magic" reasoning capacity is so obviously flawed, and these flaws in judgement line up so well with current evolutionary/neuorlogical science....well that's pretty shitty magic :D.

Unless they're saying our reasoning is from the brain but our "choices" come from the soul.... but how can you make a choice if not through reason?

aiaiaiaiai.

I'm off to bed ;).

When you say humans don't have free will, you have to state what it is we don't have free will from.

Do we have free will from our own minds?
Of course not. That's not even logically possible.

Our minds are incredibly complex machines which calculate the best action based on genetic programming and environmental learning. Does the fact that we always choose what we think is the best choice destroy "free will"?
Well (soul or no soul) it would be logically impossible not to. And we already know the mind is very fallible (and can predict many of these fallibilities with great accuracy), so does this mean the soul is fallible? If so, then it's ultimately a calculating machine just like the brain.

ITT: people thinking that "free will" means something that's logically impossible.

Trust me, women are very attracted to intelligence, you just gotta show it in the right way.

If you can display high wisdom/insight, creativity, social intelligence and practical problem solving, girls will be chasing after you.

If your "intelligence" is being good at useless puzzles or memorising facts to unneccesary detail (especially if this comes at the expense of social intelligence) they will run a mile.

Trust me, women are very attracted to intelligence, you just gotta show it in the right way.

If you can display high wisdom/insight, creativity, social intelligence and practical problem solving girls will be chasing after you.

If your "intelligence" is being good at useless puzzles or memorising facts to unneccesary detail (at the expensive of social understanding) they will run a mile.

>>3147793

haha you do realise even with medical immortality people will still die from accidents, unless we all lock ourselves in super-secure safes and live through surrogate bodies.

>>3147250

The fear of eventual death is an irrational evolutionary emotion, so i over-ride it.
You don't feel pain when you're dead, so it's not bad. It's just nothing. Why fear it?
It's just like being asleep.

I do fear an untimely death however, as there is much i would like to achieve with my life.

It is unnatural for humans to not murder and rape, therefore murder and rape are ok!

No, copyright violation is not theft.

It is is not as bad as theft.
It is not as bad as the behaviour by the record companies.
And it is nowhere near as bad as ACTA.

However, it is still morally wrong.

Believe it or not it takes years of hard work to be able to provide quality entertainment. If you benifit from this hard work, but are unwilling to do your fair share to ensure the creator can earn a living, then you are a parasite in the system. You are acting immorally.

Btw, if you're going to say "songwriters can earn money by performing", they shouldn't have to. They're songwriters, not performers (in fact having to perform takes away valueble songwriting time from them).It's like saying novelists should only be able to make money from doing open readings.