/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5161903
I have experienced god, therefore he exists. Why is that so hard to appreciate?

The fact that the word "God" exists in English ditionaries and is appreciated by countless pubilcations dating back to the beginning of civilization is solid evidence for other non-zombies having experienced Him, too.

>>5161235
So because subjective consciousness cannot be defined, it is necessarily impossible to find a neural basis for it.

All of what I mentioned, however, has a neural basis. It's completely unnecessary to evoke something as meaningless as "thought" to explain how the brain works and what the brain does.

What's a thought, anyway? Are you talking about a percept, or a memory? Are you talking about a plan to move a part of your body, or are you talking about using language? Are you talking about 'remembering' many objects at once, or perhaps recalling a visual scene? Or maybe you just mean something as simple as a snail habituating to being poked.

Matlab for data, python for programs where the largest runtime is trivial, and C++ for data collection or when absolutely required.

>While each of these evidences reveals reasons why the earth cannot be billions of years old, the real issue is not the age of the earth. Instead, the real issue is authority. God’s infallible Word must be our ultimate authority, not the unstable foundation of human reasoning.

This statement concisely encapsulates the toxicity of religion.

While "consciousness is an illusion" is self-contradictory, there's no clear evidence that consciousness exists. By consciousness, I don't mean what an anesthesiologist means, but what a metaphysicist means.

Prove to me that you, I, or any third party is 'conscious.' An equivalently impossible challenge is to define consciousness.

>>5133380
Are you involved in research? Any university worth it's salt has or is affiliated with a program that offers some kind of summer research scholarship. I managed to get a $3,500 summer scholarship with my wee 3.62 'cause I was an extremely active undergrad researcher.

If you're not in research already, you won't get one, though. If you're fresh/soph, get in research and aim to get one of these this upcoming summer.

Severing all dorsal connections in the spinal cord will result in a loss of all bodily somatosensation (nocicoception, thermoception, proprioception, and any mechanosensation). That would leave vision, audition, olfaction, and gustation intact, though.

To maintain realism, just remember that someone with no proprioception can't walk or make coordinated movements.

>>5132174
Rightfully, because they should be using python anyway. hyuk.

I get etocs for ~10 different journals, and I read several papers a week. I know the top 5 journals in my field and read publications from them regularly, but only those that are relevant to me.

I can't imagine claiming to know science without reading primary literature, really. Shiggy diggy.

>>5123944
There are at least three of us, but probably no more.

>>5107851
>neurons are one bit each

I thought physicists gave up using mcculloch-pitts neurons to model organic brain function in the 80s...?

This is so false it hurts.

>>5099555
fMRI doesn't tell you *shit* about how the mind works, and it only gives you an extremely flimsy indication of how the brain works. Real physiologists (AKA real systems neuroscientists) don't give three shits about fMRI.

That one can't observe one's object of study doesn't make one's discipline more noble or scientific, it makes one's questions poorly defined.

>>5092954
It isn't totally baseless (see split-brain studies), it's just grossly oversimplified and champions the cancerous view that the purpose of the brain is conscious thought.

If you think about it, there are some processes (e.g. language) which don't need to be bilateral, particularly when they involve a totallymedial structure (the mouth). It wouldn't make any sense for your entire lexicon to be represented twice in your brain given that structures involved in generating language aren't bilateral.

Although we might expect bilateralization of a sign language lexicon.

No one on /sci/ likes any kind of molecular biology, despite that it and biochemistry make equivalent contributions to modern medicine.

Molecular genetics is really useful to all biosciences, but like other bioscience, it'll only pay off at the masters/Ph.D level.

>>5085612
fMRI and EEG are not equipped to measure molecular-level changes that underlie neuroplasticity. The best they can do is use fMRI to examine changes in functional connectivity, but that changes day-by-day and it's not even widely accepted that it means anything substantial.

This is barely neuroscience, and a great example of how you can make bullshit psychology look like gold with a few pictures of gamma oscillations and brains. You have to be a troll.

>>5085472
Neuroplasticity has nothing to do with the amount of grey matter in your brain. At least not at a level that we can measure it in humans (i.e., we can't measure dendritic spine density with fMRI).

>>5083679
There are a number of neuroimaging studies (EEG, fMRI) looking at what sort of changes in neural activity can be detected during meditation. I don't know anything about the fMRI work, but I do know that the EEG people tend to find increased presence of slow waves that are present during sleep, and alpha waves that precede sleep.

This doesn't mean that meditation is equivalent to sleep or a replacement for sleep, but it's definitely interesting.

>>5084638
That'd be news to me. Plenty of development studies would have a looooooot of 'splainin to do.

>>5084102
OP is chill as fuck.

A poster in the physics building at my undergrad institution listed a bunch of majors by their starting salary. The top was computer engineering followed by electrical engineering, followed by mechanical engineering, followed by physics. Computer engineering was low 50k, physics was mid 40k.

I couldn't cite this info now if you wanted me to, so take it for what it's worth.

Dumb, useless, baseless.

>>5073450
Uh, chemical basis for consciousness?

Picture related?

Today I learned that neurons in the hippocampus fire fewer action potentials than neurons in the globus pallidus, and that axons in the optic nerve are less mylenated than white matter in the internal capsule (you can hear background activity when you probe it with an electrode!).

I also learned that the superior colliculus isn't just a motor structure, but plays a role in visual perception without affecting gain modulation in V4.