fear

How did he get approval to do experimental surgery on primates for this?

Trump is a full blown cult of personality at this point, no one else will do. Maybe that’s a good thing since he doesn’t seem to have much time left.

Are you really pretending there’s no difference between assisting a country in defending itself from an aggressor, and starting your own war as the aggressor?

欲蓋彌彰

I just can’t with this western bullshit!

I’m sure if someone remarked about “eastern bullshit” that you would cry racism, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Thanks for at least being amusing by calling me a racist and then immediately acting like one yourself. Don’t feel too bad about it, you’re one of countless to prove that wise saying which predates the CCP by 1400 years.

You pointed out how well China will be able to combat their declining birth rates and what they are doing to raise fertility rates. That’s great. You disliked the format of the article and didn’t feel it expressed their point adequately. Awesome. But you’re coming at the comments section with an intensity that seems disproportionate to how banal the article is. Birth rates are plummeting across the world, and every other country has their turn to have attention drawn to it, complete with their own set of uninvited suggestions regarding potential impact and what to do about it. It’s okay for people to disagree on the impact of stats like this. It’s normal and healthy when done in good faith.

Regarding your other post: “Anti-CCP is anti-China” is a tactic to try to deflect away criticism entirely. It is dangerous for a population to be stripped of the right to criticize their government. I criticize my own government all the time, and others as well when I think they’re making poor decisions. The CCP doesn’t get to be above this on an international scale because racism. The old stigmatizing the critic into silence approach is not conducive to open dialogue, and it’s ultimately a way of shooting yourself in the foot. 欲蓋彌彰

A justice system criticised by Iran’s psychiatrists

Thank goodness. Hopefully they all fight against this blatant exploitation of psychiatry to persecute and control women.

The remarks were made by Qiao Jie, deputy of Peking University Health Science Center and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, at a conference on Tuesday.

The population in the Chinese mainland fell for the first time in 61 years in 2022, decreasing by a total of 850,000, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed.

Doesn’t sound like clickbait at all to me. The viewpoint appears quite honest and genuine, and they go on to give sources for why they believe this matters. If you have contradicting stats, please share.

Not my fault it’s so forgettable.

Something becoming more than the sum of its parts to such a degree would indeed be magic. Are you claiming we’re AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT? Are information and consciousness synonymous? I would say that one of us indeed doesn’t understand the complexity of the situation.

we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon

This statement begins with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness, then says that because the thing that produces consciousness has components, that it can’t be fundamental. This is a really really good example of circular logic.

I find emergence to be the least reasonable of the 3 main hypotheses I consider, but I still accept that it’s possible since I can’t disprove it. However, it is illogical to conclude your hypothesis must be true at this stage.

Your comparison proves nothing. It is no different than insisting a radio must be creating the signal it’s picking up, because if you poured alcohol or liquid gabapentin all over it, it will no longer be able to play music. I’m sure you realize that if your radio breaks, that doesn’t mean the radio signal has disappeared. It is possible our brains are simply interfacing with consciousness rather than inexplicably fabricating it from more than the sum of its parts.

Based on everything science has taught me, it seems far more likely to me that consciousness is not magically created by my brain, but rather one of two things are happening:

1. My brain is able to interface with a conscious field

2. Consciousness is a force inherent within the universe, and our brains are able to make use of the force

Why would you assume it’s an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I’m making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It’s kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.

It’s safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity’s limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.

While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we’re going to get anywhere, I’m also acutely aware that they’re still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we’re going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.

Not the one with the complaint, but I can see their point. Decapitations during birth happen around the world several times a year, with only some of those cases ever going to the news. When they do hit the news, they spread quickly because of the shock factor. Yet the general public may come away from this not realizing it’s is far from the first time and won’t be the last.

I’d say this would make a great world news article if some of the prior cases from across the world were also mentioned, and the bigger issue of women being dismissed by their doctors was prominently referenced with supporting studies.

Forces of Nature

1. electromagnetism
2. strong nuclear force
3. weak nuclear force
4. gravity
   5?. whatever the hell might be acting on the muons in this article

Quick, everyone ignore 0 because it’s “too hard”, even though it’s the only reason we can study 1-5: consciousness

I hadn’t heard this so I did a search to see what you were talking about. One of the first things that comes up is a quote from this guy whining that he doesn’t trust Wikipedia anymore because they don’t allow Daily Mail or Fox News as sources of reliable information. You know, the gossip rag Daily Mail that posts anything “sources say” for clicks, and the same Fox News that was found to be flat out lying to its viewers on a number of sociopolitical issues. What a putz.

this study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute under grant numbers R21 HL135300 and R01 HL150053, as well as by contracts from the NIH/NHLBI funding the four field centers.

It says right on the study how it was funded, that guy was being sarcastic and rude which is why he was downvoted. If there is a bias in this study, it’s not immediately apparent from the funding.

I mostly agree with your point, just substitute “genetics” for the actual array of reasons why we have an obesity epidemic. Environment, upbringing, emotional state, level of education, financial resources, access to healthy food, sedentary lifestyle, disordered eating habits, trauma, medications, hormonal imbalances, physical and mental health, etc.

It’s common sense that people trying to lose weight are more likely to reach for non-caloric products, and with other studies showing that most people who lose weight will gain it back within 5-10 years, it’s makes this study’s results obvious and proves nothing new unfortunately. Sweeteners very well could be an independent cause of weight gain, but until they account for all of the confounding factors that influence why people gain and lose weight, they won’t be able to determine its true role in the matter.

They’re asking a valid question everyone should have in the back of their minds when reading study results, no need to eye roll. It’s not some crazy conspiracy theory that corporations will happily fund studies in the hopes of cherry picking results in their favor. It’s bad science and it happens all the time unfortunately. Sometimes bad science makes it into good journals, and it can take years to figure out that the study was flawed due to bias.

I was just reading this morning about the immunologist Jacques Benveniste who got his study published in Nature, he claimed that water had memory and that antibodies imprinted on diluted water. It was such a bold claim that it made international news and quacks everywhere ran with it. It took some investigation to determine the scientists Benveniste was working with were paid off by a company that sold homeopathic products. There’s also the douche who got the MMR vaccine linked to autism. Despite the study being debunked, it’s an idea that pervades mom groups across the globe and has resulted in a resurgence of measles that never had to happen.