/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4930485]

so infamous (the game).
how based on reality is the concept of taking some internal force/energy (such as how people say if you used 100% of the brain you would have stuff like telekinesis.) from others to boost ones own (take the unused ability , example being telekinesis, from other people to supply and harness one's own internal power).
now im more than happy to do my own research, but i would need a starting place. what internal force do people have/how to abduct it/how to harness own. now im not talking crystals and "well being" energy stuff. like for real science, how plausible is this concept.

pic related: its the 'blueprints' for the device in the game. i dont think theres any serious information on there but here it is

[Anonymous No.4930498]

>>4930485
It is all total 100% bullshit.

\thread

[Anonymous No.4930502]

that's the true reason why engineers drink cum.

[Anonymous No.4930506]

>>4930485

and by the way... that whole "we only use 20% of our brains hurr durr" is bullshit. We use it 100%... there is no evolutionary benefit of using only 20%.

[Anonymous No.4930509]

>such as how people say if you used 100% of the brain you would have stuff like telekinesis
no. just no. if you use 100% of the brain at once, you may be having a seizure. the 5/10/12% number that always crops up is just a complete misunderstanding of how the brain works.
>what internal force do people have
they don't. the internal force you're talking about is magic used to make a video game more exciting.

[Anonymous No.4930531]

I can think of internal body temperature, the force exerted from muscle movement and that maybe-fact that you hear every now and then that 25% of your body's resources go to fuelling your brain.
Though I can't think of how you could techno-babble that into using your brain as a reactor, psionics and magic.

[Anonymous No.4930552]

100% of our brain are always in use.
this "we (the average man) only uses 10%/20% of his brain as a myth.
only 10% of the brains cells are actually neurons.
when we say "we only use 10% of our brain" than it actually means that we only have 10% to work with.
the other 90% can be considered as "support" cells towards the 10%

[Anonymous No.4930555]

>>4930552
Actually, astrocytes may be more than simply "brain glue".

[Anonymous No.4930561]

>>4930552
>we only have 10% to work with
Is this true? that number sounds way too low.

[Anonymous No.4930566]

anyway, what you can imagine is possible in reality in some other way: either by ignoring some physics or by just saying "if i can imagine it, its possible"
the goals that are achievable in your imagination should be split up into 2 parts.
the one part is the goal/achievement and the other part is the way this goal is achieved.
you may very well imagine that its possible to fly as a human as in "free floating" but it might not happen by telekinesis because that would break some rules in the universe we live in. but it will be possible as soon as brain-computer interfaces and nanobots are powerful enough.

[Anonymous No.4930581]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5031rWXgdYo&feature=relmfu

22 minute mark

in this first half of this video i learned things that blew my mind way harder than what i learned at school. science is awesome.

[Anonymous No.4930585]

>>4930485
That number about brain use has been abused for decades, just like damn near every other simple statement about human ability.

The researcher was saying how much of the brain seemed to be active at any one time; not how much should be.
For instance, if 100% of our memory was active at every moment, we'd be inundated with memories. No use to it, so our brain doesn't do that.

Likewise, the idea that the human body is electrical, and gives off, makes, or needs more.
It's of no use to the people who misunderstand that; they just want to pretend we are batteries, or whatever nonsense about pretending we run on circuits.

[Anonymous No.4930598]

10:50-11:20 also blows my mind. never have i thought that nature displays such a heavily organized and intelligent structure and design and to me this isnt possible by chance anymore. im not saying "god did it" although i believe there is an entity out there which is powerful enough to seem like a god to us but anyway it blows my mind because this organization and intelligent design looks like it was working towards some purpose which seems...quite mythical

[Anonymous No.4930605]

>>4930598
>im not saying "god did it"
>intelligent design
yes you are.

[Anonymous No.4930616]

>>4930605
yeah, its highly contradictive, i know.
well either i "believe" into this sort of stuff (although i dont believe in the god/s religion gives us, like i already stated)
or i just cant fathom the result of a very low propability stretched over a very long time

[Anonymous No.4930622]

bump,
i want more ppl to talk to

[Anonymous No.4930625]

>>4930616
Very low probability of what? the fact that you keep saying "chance" and "probability" shows a bit of a misunderstanding of evolution.

[Anonymous No.4930633]

>>4930625
extended part 1
the fact that the motor and somatosensory cortex sort of line up with the body line up with the body itself seems impressive until you remember that-

[Anonymous No.4930634]

then how did our brain turn out that way ?
im sorry when im ignorant to facts that are obvious to you.
im taking every occasion to learn something new, this here is no exception

[Anonymous No.4930638]

>>4930633
extended part 2
-that this is what the body looks like according to the motor cortex.
No, this isn't an argument against an intelligent assemblage of the brain, but the details are a lot less exciting than how the presenter explains them.

[Anonymous No.4930642]

>>4930638
For me it is exciting to look at and imagine how the brain evolved like this, as a way to look at the logic behind the set up. The logic of nature is always fascinating.

[Anonymous No.4930648]

>>4930634
multicellular organisms arise, some are just lumps of gelly that gobble up things around them (sea sponges, for example), but others have primitive muscles cells and neurons that allow them to react to their environment (sea gellies and tube worms). evolution with these continue, the nervous system grows more complex (sea star-ish distribution of a primitive brain), and eventually having one big glob of neurons that can react to more varied forms of stimulus like sensory organs and hunger is selected for. this came about incredibly quickly, and that last steps continues for ages. with a big enough brain, interacting with other members of the same species or having better memories can provide obvious advantages, and a lineage of great apes eventually capitalize on evolving beefier and beefier brains.

This is wildly simplistic, examples are drawn from extant species, and I could be wrong on some of the selective pressures. but I don't have the evolution of the brain in memory and I can't be asked to look it up.

[Anonymous No.4930652]

>>4930638
well ,this bursted my bubble to some extend but im still under the strong impression that the brain and its design is quite a feat of nature (not contrary to what you said, mind you).
however, im starting to study biomedical engineering at the first day of october because i aim to specialize in neural engineering which is the most interesting science field to me because it bares so many possibilities to improve myself and pretty much everyone else. this is especially obvious when looking at brain-computer interfaces and deep brain stimulation.
you seem to know quite a bit more about this topic than me (noshit.jpg), can you make a suggestion to me about what to inform myself about like various books etc. ?

[Anonymous No.4930655]

>>4930642
Think about how much you interact with the world. Much finer feedback comes to my brain from my fingers and much finer control is given to them than, say my elbow. same with the jaw and tongue.

[Anonymous No.4930658]

>>4930648
still, why did it happen to these "simple" organisms ?
in hindsight, the advantages of evolution are obvious but what pushed these cells to become ...more ? evolving this way looks like having a "plan" to me

[Anonymous No.4930665]

>>4930652
Congrats! Putting "brain" and "engineering" in the same sentence gets me excited. Hope you're not part of the 90% (or whatever) of students that change majors five seconds into college.
I'm not a psych or neurology student in any way. I'm aiming for microbiology, so I'll be lucky to deal with anything with a single neuron. I've taken psychology classes in high school and college (which both dipped heavily into neurology), and just hang on to what I'm interested in. I don't have too much to point you to.

[Anonymous No.4930676]

>>4930658
The push to multicellular organisms is actually kind of cool. If you're single celled, then your option for reproduction is pretty much binary fission with a bit of horizontal gene transfer thrown in, and photosynthesis and/or endocytosis for eating.
multicellular organisms can finally reproduce sexually which is a huuuuuge boost to evolution. adaptations are spread around much more quickly than with horizontal gene transfer, meaning your linage is much more likely to survive. and if you can have specialized cells, some for motion, some for digestion, some to make a horrific toxin to deter predators (see the man o' war, even though it's actually colonial. still shows the kind of thing I'm talking about.), then efficiency for the organism also skyrockets.

[Anonymous No.4930682]

>>4930665
i know what everyone thinks about engineering but it doesnt define the performance of individuals. if someone is smart enough, he can make his field of work shine. im not interested in the title or name of a scientific field but rather what it can do for me/others.. you know, following what interests you.
although i try hard not to be moved by public opinions, its buggers me a little that my bachelor finishes with the word that is engineering although the same major is titled as bachelor/master of science at another university on which i want to specialize into neural engineering.
would the same scientific field be more appealing to you/others if it didnt have "engineering" in its name ? not to me

[Anonymous No.4930687]

>>4930676
I may have missed a bit of you post
>in hindsight, the advantages of evolution are obvious but what pushed these cells to become ...more ?
The push you talk of is just the survival of a lineage. the evolutionary advantages usually lead to more reproduction, better efficiency, more food, less predators, survival of kin or other members of the species, etc. this all leads to less chance of extinction and the takeover of traits that exploit some sort of niche.
Also keep in mind that evolution isn't a ladder. a sea sponge isn't 'more' than a bacterial cell. It's just different. Bacteria still flourish even though we have a chunk of meatloaf in our skulls that let us do human stuff. Evolution isn't a tree with the topmost leaves the most brilliant. it's a tumbleweed.

[Anonymous No.4930695]

>>4930682
>would the same scientific field be more appealing to you/others if it didnt have "engineering" in its name ?
Almost tried to make some grand post about how I can agree that the title doesn't matter in the end, and that all that matters is how it can be put to use and stuff... but yeah. having engineering makes it a bit more interesting.

[Anonymous No.4930693]

>>4930676
i know the advantages, its clear to me but...
why did the cells think (not that they would think in any way) it would be good/advantageous to go down that path ?
they didnt "know" beforehand.
maybe i dont get my words right, maybe it is something that cant be explained or maybe it is just a misunderstanding of mine.

[Anonymous No.4930710]

>>4930693
Everyday language gets a bit sticky in science. I know what you mean to say.
I kind of preempted this in
>>4930687
but just for an example, let's say mutant socks in a drawer can reproduce. I really like the color blue and hate the color red, I like softer materials and socks with an heel rather than tube.
the entire drawer is filled with slight variations on the theme of black heel socks. I'll choose to wear the softer materialed ones more often than the ones made of barb wire.
then sock sex leads to a blue, ankled, silk, moth-resistant sock, and I wear that motherfucker and his sock children every day till my death.
the sock didn't 'know' that I liked these traits. it's just that my selection of them lead to this result. if someone took my place and liked red tube instead of blue heel, then the selective pressures would change and the 'ideal' sock would change.
...Does that make sense or was I having too much fun with the sock analogy?

[Anonymous No.4930723]

>>4930710
If it helps at all, have a realistic example. pre-cambrian, co2 levels were fantastically higher than they are now, and oxygen was rather low. any organism that can feast on co2 and sunlight would have been master of the world. This happened with rather cyanobacteria-like cells. there were also distant evolutionary cousins that ate other cells and some pretty primitive multicelled things out there, but the selective pressures favored the first. the cells didn't "know" that fixing oxygen and getting energy from sunlight would lead to proliferation over the planet. It's just that the cells that were able to do so were able to do just that. And so they did!

[Anonymous No.4930729]

>>4930710
the analogy is clever, its clears up a bit now. environment dictates what is best right now and i also remember what darwin said: "survival of the fittest" .
so you could say that the environment sort of...molds its inhabitants, right ?

[Anonymous No.4930745]

>>4930723
i totally get what you say and so they did what they were best at but evolution obviously didnt stop there. its already good enough to dominate anything else, so why bother and go for more ?
this is what strikes me the most.

[Anonymous No.4930749]

>>4930729
Exactly. this leads to stuff like covergent evolution, insular dwarfism and island gigantism, and of course, finches having different shaped beaks depending on which Galapagos island they're on.
If you were the one to ask about how our brains got how they are now, then consider my comment earlier about niches. one big one that's only really filled by apes, dolphins, and a few bird species, is intelligence. check out a few videos of ravens being smart bastards and it might be clear how that can help them out.

[Anonymous No.4930750]

>>4930745
You don't seem to firmly understand how evolution works. There *will* be mutations, and the most successful sets of genes will continue and spread.

That said, there are long-term stable niches we can point to, like sharks.

[Anonymous No.4930763]

>>4930745
> its already good enough to dominate anything else, so why bother and go for more ?
it turns out that a planet full of co2 munching oxygen producing machines leads to lower co2 levels and much higher levels of oxygen. aerobic respiration (o2 + food -> co2 + waste) means that a lot more energy can be had than just anerobically munching on co2 (co2 + sunlight -> food + o2). this is why the most mobile plants you see are the venus flytrap and the sensitive plant (look this thing up.), and the most sedentary animal is something like the sloth. there's a huge gap in mobility between the two, lots of room to run after prey and find mates.
the different atmospheric gas levels means a different environment. the person choosing socks has changed!

[Anonymous No.4930776]

>>4930750
see
>>4930634

[Anonymous No.4930784]

yeah, the answer to that to my questions were mutations. i totally forgot about the mutations.
well, somewhere in this thread i asked about how we got here, is it either by some intelligent design of nature (which is off by a landslide) or by "chance/randomness" but i didn't come to think of that this "randomness" which i tried to think of was in fact the mutation which is a basic concept in evolution, atleast to my understanding.
so yeah, i got it worked out now. the mutations which i mistook as chance was the missing link in my train of thought, thanks for helping me out.
again, my choice of words might not be optimal to tell you what i was thinking of

[Anonymous No.4930782]

>>4930763
Fun stuff here, too. The massive increase in oxygen was *toxic* to most forms of life that existed at the time. Cyanobacteria dominated the planet, pumped out enormous amounts of oxygen, and then lots of things died off because they were no longer well-adapted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
>The ability of cyanobacteria to perform oxygenic photosynthesis is thought to have converted the early reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, which dramatically changed the composition of life forms on Earth by stimulating biodiversity and leading to the near-extinction of oxygen-intolerant organisms.

[Anonymous No.4930789]

>>4930782
> leading to the near-extinction of oxygen-intolerant organisms
And also, say, the cambrian explosion. These bastards are why I'm heading for microbiology.

[Anonymous No.4930797]

>sensitive plant
fascinating.
venus flytraps already got me stunned and i didnt think there would be anything similar

[Anonymous No.4930798]

>>4930784
Ah! I guess I was kind of working around that. Thanks for the chance to flex a bit of knowledge on this topic!

[Anonymous No.4930800]

>>4930784
Ah, yeah, there you go. There's no evolution fairy, just various random processes than can produce changes in DNA/RNA that can be passed on. There's no one driving this in any direction at all, and most mutations don't survive to become fixed in a species (spread through the local population by leaving significantly more surviving copies that out-compete the others).

Evolution isn't a magic or intentional process, it's just what happens when there are replicators that mutate.

[Anonymous No.4930812]

While we're talking about evolution in a thread that once talked about video games (yes, it was a shameless derail), I'm sure a few anons out there might have fun with http://www.boxcar2d.com/
watch bikes evolve instead of socks.

[Anonymous No.4930817]

i had my quality time here.
again, thank you for that
so long!

[Anonymous No.4930872]

>>4930485
Veery implausible, it's pretty much straight up comic book magic.

Do you rember that fight, that one on a suspension bridge with old, psychic man with the steel band holding his head together, piloting a golem made of pure energy and scrap metal?
Right, well during that fight, Alden calls your character 'electric-man'- unashemedly comic book, the entire setting!