Best cognitive psychology books according to redditors

We found 477 Reddit comments discussing the best cognitive psychology books. We ranked the 183 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top Reddit comments about Cognitive Psychology:

u/albasri · 26 pointsr/askscience

You may be interested in the books Optima for Animals and Vehicles.

u/Norwazy · 25 pointsr/MagicArena

Lots of people in here saying you should seek help but not really helping you with what help to seek.

Look into a specific type of therapy for this - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

You can buy a self help book online, they're fairly cheap. Or, you can look into a therapist that can go into that with you. This is a very good book for that

Work on yourself, don't let depression beat you down too hard.

u/YoungModern · 19 pointsr/exmormon

Compulsory science education would be useless without compulsory critical thinking education. There are hundreds of thousands of people trained in the natural sciences (including professional scientists) who can't think critically -at least for topics outside of their narrow specialty. To make didactic science instruction compulsory would just exchange creationism for "intelligent design". Exchanging sets of what to think without how and why to think will lead to a recurrence of the core problem. This is why philosophy should be a core subject along with English and Math rather than an option in university.

u/amateurphilosopheur · 14 pointsr/askphilosophy

TL;DR Like us error theorists deny that slavery etc. is moral; they just have different reasons. For relativists, on the other hand, slavery is wrong relative to our moral framework, which is why we shouldn't do it; and yes, for them, we can still criticize slavers!

You raise an excellent question, which [moral relativists] (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/) like [Jesse Prinz] (https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Morality_is_a_Culturally_Conditioned_Response) have done a lot of work towards answering. In fact, your point is one of the biggest objections to relativism: if morality is merely relative, how can we justifiably criticize or object to slavery, misogyny, holocausts, etc? why shouldn't we just do what we want, whether or not it hurts anyone? After all, relative to our moral framework, such actions could be justified.

If you want, check out the Prinz paper linked above, or even better his book [The Emotional Construction of Morals] (http://www.amazon.ca/Emotional-Construction-Morals-Jesse-Prinz/dp/0199571546), as well as the SEP article for the relativists' answer: relative to our morality, slavery etc. is wrong, which is why we shouldn't reenact it. And even though morality's relative, that doesn't prevent us from criticizing others or defending our views - relativism doesn't imply 'anything goes'!

To answer your question, though, [error theorists] (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/) can oppose horribly immoral crimes like slavery just as much as anyone else; like us, it rejects that slavery is morally okay, just for different reasons (because moral judgments are errors). See Richard Joyce's [The Myth of Morality] (http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam031/2001025740.pdf), his paper [here] (http://personal.victoria.ac.nz/richard_joyce/acrobat/joyce_2007_morality.schmorality.pdf), and Ricahrd Garner's [Abolishing Morality] (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10677-007-9085-3#page-1) for a fuller explanation.

u/AlexCoventry · 13 pointsr/SneerClub

They cite Rationality and the Reflective Mind, which looks potentially interesting.

> Stanovich argues that to fully characterize differences in rational thinking, we need to replace dual-process theories with tripartite models of cognition. Using a unique individual differences approach, he shows that the traditional second system (System 2) of dual-process theory must be further divided into the reflective mind and the algorithmic mind. Distinguishing them will allow us to better appreciate the significant differences in their key functions: The key function of the reflective mind is to detect the need to interrupt autonomous processing and to begin simulation activities, whereas that of the algorithmic mind is to sustain the processing of decoupled secondary representations in cognitive simulation.

The same author also wrote What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, which also looks pretty good.

> He mentions Georges Bush, Jr. who was very intelligent as measured by IQ tests. But, he was not a proficient thinker as he was dogmatic, ill informed, impatient, and prone to rash decisions sometimes associated with devastating outcomes. Stanovich describes Bush condition as Dysrationalia or someone who is less rational than his IQ would suggest.

u/shachaf · 12 pointsr/AskReddit

A few that come to mind:

  • Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, by Keith Johnstone. Discusses many things in the context of improvisational theatre, such as human interaction, creativity/spontaneity, stories, perception, and teaching.
  • The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, by Robert Wright. Evolutionary psychology. Puts some concreteness, even obviousness, to many irrational human behaviors.
  • The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. A selection of texts on consciousness, and reflections by the editors. Some is fictional, some non-fictional.
  • The Tao is Silent, by Raymond Smullyan. Eastern philosophy in an Eastern way by someone who thoroughly understands the Western perspective on things.
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig. No one has mentioned this book so far, so I feel like I should; although it did not affect me directly in the way some of the other books here did, it certainly planted some ideas for "independent rediscovery" later on. Some things I've only thought of some time after reading it and then made the connection. This is Taoism from a Western perspective. I'll read it again in a few years and see how it's different.
  • The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence, by Josh Waitzkin. A book about learning that says some important things quite well. I read this only a few days ago, but it's influenced my perspective on learning/teaching (and doing in general), so I thought I should add it to the list.
u/the_opinion · 11 pointsr/unitedkingdom

Are you on the Olympic mental gymnastics team or something? That isn't even close to what I said. You really think that allowing for people to have beliefs means I'm ok with being murdered? Jesus Christ dude. Here, stick this on your wish list, maybe Santa will bring it for you.

u/[deleted] · 10 pointsr/philosophy

If you dig this, I'd highly recommend checking out Dennet and Hofstadter's anthology of writings on consciousness, The Mind's I. It's thought-provoking and highly enjoyable, the opposite of a guilty pleasure.

u/distantocean · 10 pointsr/exchristian

That's one of my favorite popular science books, so it's wonderful to hear you're getting so much out of it. It really is a fascinating topic, and it's sad that so many Christians close themselves off to it solely to protect their religious beliefs (though as you discovered, it's good for those religious beliefs that they do).

As a companion to the book you might enjoy the Stated Clearly series of videos, which break down evolution very simply (and they're made by an ex-Christian whose education about evolution was part of his reason for leaving the religion). You might also like Coyne's blog, though these days it's more about his personal views than it is about evolution (but some searching on the site will bring up interesting things he's written on a whole host of religious topics from Adam and Eve to "ground of being" theology). He does also have another book you might like (Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible), though I only read part of it since I was familiar with much of it from his blog.

> If you guys have any other book recommendations along these lines, I'm all ears!

You should definitely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, if only because it's a classic (and widely misrepresented/misunderstood). A little farther afield, one of my favorite popular science books of all time is The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, which looks at human language as an evolved ability. Pinker's primary area of academic expertise is child language acquisition, so he's the most in his element in that book.

If you're interested in neuroscience and the brain you could read How the Mind Works (also by Pinker) or The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, both of which are wide-ranging and accessibly written. I'd also recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Evolution gets a lot of attention in ex-Christian circles, but books like these are highly underrated as antidotes to Christian indoctrination -- nothing cures magical thinking about the "soul", consciousness and so on as much as learning how the brain and the mind actually work.

If you're interested in more general/philosophical works that touch on similar themes, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach made a huge impression on me (years ago). You might also like The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, which is a collection of philosophical essays along with commentaries. Books like these will get you thinking about the true mysteries of life, the universe and everything -- the kind of mysteries that have such sterile and unsatisfying "answers" within Christianity and other mythologies.

Don't worry about the past -- just be happy you're learning about all of this now. You've got plenty of life ahead of you to make up for any lost time. Have fun!

u/shaggorama · 9 pointsr/MachineLearning
u/Routerbox · 9 pointsr/philosophy

I recommend some books to you:

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661

http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785

http://www.amazon.com/The-Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self/dp/0465030912

Your sense of self, your "I", your mind, is produced by your brain, which is a physical structure that is not destroyed and remade during sleep. This is why you remember what happened yesterday. "You" are a pile of grey goo in a skull.

u/AdActa · 7 pointsr/Denmark

Det er et fascinerende eksempel!

Jeg er utrolig inspireret af den canadiske psykolog Keith Stanovich, som er en af de førende forskere inden for det specifikke felt i psykologien.

Den bedste og mest tilgængelig bog er "The Robots Rebellion" Som jeg ikke kan anbefale nok. Men, den handler om mange flere ting end bare rationalitet og intelligens.

Han har også skrevet "Rationality and the Reflective Mind" som specifikt handler om rationalitet og intelligens. Den er en lille smule fagtung, og det er svært for mig at vurdere, hvor svær den er for lægmand. Men du er meget velkommen til at skrive til mig og spørge om enkeltdele, hvis du giver dig i kast med den,

Endelig har Stanovich, sammen med en række kolleger, skrevet en bog om rationalitet som et målbart parameter, hvor de forsøger at opstille en gennemgående skala for rationalitet på linje med de klassiske IQ tests. "The rationality quotient" Jeg har ikke læst den, men den er allerøverst på min læseliste.

u/jtr99 · 7 pointsr/askphilosophy

Playing devil's advocate: your use of the word "essence" could be taken as question-begging. Who says you have one, and what is it?

But to answer the question, the brain's clearly got a lot to do with it, but many thinkers would say that the body is also important. See Mind in Life by Evan Thompson, for example. I don't know whether I'd go as far as Thompson does, but I think you can make a good case that a lot of our thinking about the brain and the mind is still influenced by the Cartesian split between the rational soul and the mechanical body.

u/Jevan1984 · 7 pointsr/TheMindIlluminated

Buddy, if you doubt my credentials, again, just ask me for LinkedIn privately and I'll send you the link...Also numerous people on this forum know me in real life..for example..batbdotb just crushed an 8 day home retreat with me at my house last month. You are welcome to come join the next time we do it.

>The core part of this discussion that you've had trouble overcoming since the beginning is you're just not familiar with the way that these types of discussions are conducted, so you shoot from the hip and make pop-psych, sweeping generalizations that someone who's seen some TED talks thinks is the scientific process.

LOL, oh you know how intelligence testing is discussed by people in the field? Do you know this from your years of experience as having a friend or two who learned about intelligence testing in a class in college?

>31 year old reference to support their point, and doesn't know that an academically trained person would comment on that.

You are being dishonest, I also pointed you to a book by Dr. Stuart Ritchie that was published in 2015 and summarizes all the latest research.

Here are more references

" intelligence testing is one of the great successes of psychology (Hunt, 2011). Intelligence test scores predict many real world phenomena and have many well-validated practical uses (Gottfredson, 1997; Deary et al., 2010). Intelligence test scores also correlate to structural and functional brain parameters assessed with neuroimaging (Haier et al., 1988; Jung and Haier, 2007; Deary et al., 2010; Penke et al., 2012; Colom et al., 2013a) and to genes (Posthuma et al., 2002; Hulshoff Pol et al., 2006; Chiang et al., 2009, 2012;"

u/Mauss22 · 6 pointsr/askphilosophy

This is a good introductory essay by Nick Bostrom from The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. And this is a relevant survey essay by Drew McDermott from The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.

If folks aren't taking well to the background reading, they might at least do alright jumping to Section 5 from the Descartes' Discourse (they can use this accessible translation). One little snippet:

>I worked especially hard to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that doesn’t have reason, we couldn’t tell that they didn’t possess entirely the same nature as these animals; whereas if any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated as many of our actions as was practically possible, we would still have two very sure signs that they were nevertheless not real men. (1) The first is that they could never use words or other constructed signs, as we do to declare our thoughts to others. We can easily conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions that will cause a change in its organs (touch it in one spot and it asks ‘What do you mean?’, touch it in another and it cries out ‘That hurts!’, and so on); but not that such a machine should produce different sequences of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence—which is something that the dullest of men can do. (2) Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would be bound to fail in others; and that would show us that they weren’t acting through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is practically impossible for a machine to have enough different •organs to make •it act in all the contingencies of life in the way our •reason makes •us act. These two factors also tell us how men differ from beasts [= ‘non-human animals’].

That sets the stage for historically important essay from Turing of Turing-Test-fame. And that essay sets up nicely Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Scientific America has two accessible articles: Searle presents his argument here, and the Churchland's respond.

As always, the SEP and IEP are good resources for students, and they have entries with bibliographies on consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, AI, computational theories of mind, and so on.

There are countless general introductions to philosophy of mind. Heil's Philosophy of Mind is good. Seager's introduction to theories of consciousness is also quite good, but maybe more challenging than some. Susan Blackmore's book Conversations on Consciousness was a very engaging read, and beginner friendly. She also has a more textbook-style Introduction that I have not read, but feel comfortable betting that it is also quite good.

Searle's, Dennett's and Chalmer's books on consciousness are all good and influential and somewhat partisan to their own approaches. And Kim's work is a personal favorite.

(sorry for the broad answer--it's a very broad question!)

u/anomoly · 6 pointsr/science

The author of that article recently released another book called The Believing Brain which covers agenticity, among other things, in great detail. I'm in the process of listening to the audio version and I recommend it.


Also, here's a link to a video where he covers an outline of what's covered in the book.

u/mrsamsa · 6 pointsr/samharris

>> heritability isn't a measure of genetics.
>
>Now you're playing semantics to the utmost.

Not semantics, I'm literally just giving you the scientific definition to fix a common laymen myth. A heritability estimate tells us nothing about whether a trait has a genetic component.

>The fact of the matter is you inherit certain genes from your parents. Your idea that nothing is actually genetically inherited is strange. IQ has been shown to be heritable, as has height. I understand the societal expectations creating the earring "heritability" but I have no idea what you're talking about when you say IQ isn't at least partially inherited from your parents.

You've misunderstood my claim. I'm saying that confusing heritability with genetics is a common mistake - you can have a completely genetically determined trait with a heritability of zero, or an entirely environmentally determined trait with a heritability of 1. You simply can't say anything about genetics from a heritability estimate alone.

Iq undeniably has genetic components, nobody is denying that. However, like height of plants, just because individual differences might be caused by genetics, you can't use that as evidence that group differences are also caused by genetics (as illustrated in my example).

>Because a professor of genetics at Harvard isn't saying that the position that Christianity is false is scientifically untenable (I would refer you to Dr. David Reich, Ph.D's article in the New York Times). In fact, here's some of it, followed by a link:
>
>> I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
>
>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html

An opinion piece from a single person can't refute an entire consensus. Again that's how creationists argue their point.

>His article is a canary in the coalmine event. He claims to have NO IDEA! what we're going to find out about group differences going forward. Then why the hell is he so nervous? Because he knows that the odds are extremely high that the average IQ of a fully-nourished sub-Saharan African population and a fully-nourished Ashkenazi Jew population with equal access to education are not both 100.000000000000000000000000000000. You know that too, you just can't admit it, so you appeal to a scientific consensus that exists because people are terrified of having their careers destroyed. About that consensus...

Firstly, obviously I don't "know that" because I don't think there's any reason to suspect it's true.

Secondly, even accepting everything you say as completely true, notice that your "evidence" is a gut feeling from a single person. Why should I care if this guy thinks one day there will be evidence for your position?

>> Reich’s claim that we need to prepare for genetic evidence of racial differences in behavior or health ignores the trajectory of modern genetics. For several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference.
>
>That is from the rebuttal letter 67 scientists "wrote" in response to Reich's article in the NYT.
>
>That rebuttal letter is here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich
>
>Allow me to destroy that argument (and the credibility of that rebuttal letter):
>
>> Why so many African-Americans have high blood pressure
>Theories include higher rates of obesity and diabetes among African-Americans. Researchers have also found that there may be a gene that makes African-Americans much more salt sensitive. In people who have this gene, as little as one extra gram (half a teaspoon) of salt could raise blood pressure as much as 5 mm Hg.
>
>https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/why-high-blood-pressure-is-a-silent-killer/high-blood-pressure-and-african-americans
>
>Oops! I guess the American Heart Association is a eugenics society now.

Wow, that was such an odd "debunking" I actually spent a while looking at the articles trying to figure out what claim you were debunking.

Firstly, finding of genetically linked diseases doesn't affect the point as you need to show that those genes correspond to a scientifically valid concept of race, and since no such thing exists, that's a problem.

Secondly, even accepting everything you say as true, a throwaway word that's irrelevant to their point doesn't prove anything important. Address the substance of the argument.

>This is an ad hominem attack.

Indeed it is! But remember that not all ad hominems are fallacious, some are extremely strong arguments - like ones about conflict of interest.

>Does the medical literature back what he was saying, or not?

It does not, as explained with my reference to the consensus position of the evidence.

>Has "compensatory education" increased IQ, or not? According to Dr. Haier, it HAS NOT! He has explicity said that compensatory education has not closed the black/white IQ gap. Dr. Haier's position (and he reveals this in his latest book) is that IQ is heritable, and we can raise it using CRISPR. The most generous interpretations of IQ being raised by compensatory education grant that it raised IQ by 4 points in cases of the application of an extremely rigorous program. That's 1/3 of a deviation. According to Haier, what happens is in children it looks like you can increase IQ a great deal, but as the child gets older, IQ becomes more heritable. In other words they lose those "gains".

And that's all irrelevant to the question of whether the gap is caused by genetics or not, of course. Even if it's entirely environmentally caused there's no reason to expect schooling to necessarily be able to fix the gap.

>A description of Haier's book (it was published 2.5 years ago):
>
>> This book introduces new and provocative neuroscience research that advances our understanding of intelligence and the brain. Compelling evidence shows that genetics plays a more important role than environment as intelligence develops from childhood, and that intelligence test scores correspond strongly to specific features of the brain assessed with neuroimaging. In understandable language, Richard J. Haier explains cutting-edge techniques based on genetics, DNA, and imaging of brain connectivity and function. He dispels common misconceptions, such as the belief that IQ tests are biased or meaningless, and debunks simple interventions alleged to increase intelligence. Readers will learn about the real possibility of dramatically enhancing intelligence based on neuroscience findings and the positive implications this could have for education and social policy. The text also explores potential controversies surrounding neuro-poverty, neuro-socioeconomic status, and the morality of enhancing intelligence for everyone.
>
>https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=richard+haier+intelligence&qid=1562195024&s=gateway&sr=8-4

The summary doesn't mention group differences, just that intelligence has a genetic component (which as I proved above, is irrelevant to group differences!).

u/jitterbugwaltz · 6 pointsr/exmormon

https://youtu.be/ycUvC9s4VYA This video is in the CES letter and poses some GREAT questions and points. I say "all" generally here, but I daresay ALL people who participate in ANY religion have had their own "witness" that what THEY believe is true.

Are they all/we all wrong? Absolutely not. But only because we are all different (societies, families, countries, cultures), and so what's "true" and "right" for each of us, individually, *must* change based on the individual.

PLUS the beautiful way you put it: spirits (or human consciousness if that's what you're into) respond to "moral beauty." (My dad is a music teacher and taught a Music & Psychophysiology class. Roughly put, is actually NO physical link between the ear and the spine, leaving no physical explanation for why you feel chills down your spine when you hear beautiful music. #MoralBeauty)

PLUS brains are built to justify their beliefs. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GHN26W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 (I'm only a couple chapters into this so can't fully endorse, but it's very interesting to me so far, despite the fact that I still hold spiritual beliefs (most would consider my spiritual beliefs to be a "woo-woo" or "new-age" variety)).

u/Swag_Bro_420 · 6 pointsr/slatestarcodex

This book could be what you're looking for. It's more of a survey of IQ research in general, not HBD, but it does touch on racial differences.

u/tinfoilblanket · 6 pointsr/samharris

This is an interesting question, and it's a question that I don't know the answer to.

I'll give you a brief outline though of what I know about the possibility of increasing one's IQ/intelligence (the relationship between IQ and intelligence is itself a complicated subject).

First lets deal with heritability of IQ. The most popular estimate of the heritability of IQ among adults seems to be 0.8 or 80%. This is the estimate I've read from the APA (American Psychological Association) and from reading other sources on IQ.

However a common misconception that many people believe is that an 80% heritability means that 80% of one's IQ is due to their genes, which is wrong. What 80% heritability actually means is that 80% of the variability in IQ within a population can be explained by genetic differences.

Here's a quote from a University website that explains it with an example

http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/hgss/hgssapplets/heritability/heritability.intro.html

>Heritability and environmentability are population concepts. They tell us nothing about an individual. A heritability of .40 informs us that, on average, about 40% of the individual differences that we observe in, say, shyness may in some way be attributable to genetic individual difference. It does NOT mean that 40% of any person's shyness is due to his/her genes and the other 60% is due to his/her environment.

Next lets deal with the Flynn effect.The Flynn Effect is the observation that for the past few decades, there has been an increase in average IQ by 3 points every 10 years. The relevant question here however is, does this imply that people are getting more intelligent? I personally don't know the answer to that, and I'm not sure if there is a settled answer in the psychometric community. However I do know that Flynn himself has expressed doubt on the view that we are getting more intelligent. I will provide 3 supporting pieces here:

Flynn himself has written in an essay (that I unfortunately have lost and have been unable to find for a few months) that he does not believe that the Flynn Effect is caused by an increase in general intelligence/g/g factor (this is a technical term).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

There is also empirical evidence from psychometric research that the rise in average IQ (I.E. the Flynn Effect) is correlated negatively with the g-loading of a test. In simple language, this just means that broadly speaking if an IQ subtest relies heavily on general intelligence, there has been a smaller increase in the average than on IQ subtests that don't rely heavily on general intelligence.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000226

There is also the question of if an average IQ increase of 3 points does not mean we are getting more intelligent, than what does The Flynn Effect mean?

Flynn himself has a great TedTalk answering this question, since as I mentioned before Flynn himself does not believe that we have gotten more intelligent. A TLDR of his explanation is that he thinks The Flynn Effect is due to a huge shift in the way we are taught to think about things and how we view the world. In his words, he believes humans have developed more sophisticated "mental artillery."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI

Lastly if you've been bored by my blathering here and just want a straight forward "Yes" or "no" answer, like I said I don't know the answer. However I do know two experts who each express the opposite answer to the question.

In this book written by an intelligence expert, he claims that little can be done to increase one's IQ however over a person's lifetime their fluid IQ will peak in their mid/late twenties then slowly decline thereafter whereas people's crystallized IQ steadily increases throughout their life

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie-ebook/dp/B00RTY0LPO/

Whereas I have emailed Flynn before about a question related to this question, and he told me that in his book (that I will link below) he explains why he thinks that it is possible to increase one's IQ through hard work.

https://www.amazon.com/Does-your-Family-Make-Smarter/dp/1316604462/



u/bunnyvskitten · 6 pointsr/depression_help

I lived / am living a very similar version of your interior life.
My therapist said something quite smart once. "Problems arise when life is asking you for something that you don't have." I found this statement scales up, down and sideways.

I would reccommend professional help. Talk to someone who will just 'hold you where you are'. Not question it or try to counter it. It sounds simplistic but saying how you feel and having someone NOT try to fix you actually has a fixing effect.

I would also reccommend working through this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-Behavioral-Depression-ebook/dp/B01M0ILKMQ

Bad news is that this is hard work. Good news is that if you want to fix things you can. This is weather and weather changes.

u/shammalammadingdong · 5 pointsr/AcademicPhilosophy

You'll need this

u/speciousfool · 5 pointsr/robotics
u/steelypip · 5 pointsr/DebateReligion

Matter and energy are not all there is - there is also information. Information is real - it can be measured, created, destroyed, duplicated, modified and transmitted over huge distances. It is not supernatural, but it is what makes the difference between a dumb machine and life (or an intelligent machine).

Consider a Beethoven symphony. This does not have a physical existence, but it does exist. It has representations in the physical world - dots and lines on a piece of paper, vibrations in the air, grooves or microscopic holes in a plastic disk, arrangements of magnetic fields on a tape or hard drive. Even a pattern of neurons firing in someone's head as they play the music back in their mind. The symphony is not any of those things - it is in the pattern that they represent. The symphony is the information that each of them encodes.

Similarly, my consciousness is not my physical body or the energy that the body consumes, but the pattern of neurons in my head, and the dynamics of the way the neurons interact. I am information.

The difference between my minds "I" and a Beethoven symphony is that there is only one encoding of me, so if my body dies then I die with it. To destroy a Beethoven symphony you would have to destroy all the millions of different encodings that are out there.

Maybe someday we will have the technology to make backups of our consciousness, but I don't expect it will be in my lifetime.

Edit: For more on this viewpoint and on lots of alternative views, I recommend reading The Mind's I by Douglas Hoffstadter and Daniel Dennett.

u/veteratorian · 5 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Not g (maybe?) or gap related, but it seems education improves IQ generally.

Stuart Ritchie, intelligence researcher and author of Intelligence: All That Matters has a paper here the abstract of which I will quote below:

>Intelligence test scores and educational duration are positively correlated. This correlation can be interpreted in two ways: students with greater propensity for intelligence go on to complete more education, or a longer education increases intelligence. We meta-analysed three categories of quasi-experimental studies of educational effects on intelligence: those estimating education-intelligence associations after controlling for earlier intelligence, those using compulsory schooling policy changes as instrumental variables, and those using regression-discontinuity designs on school-entry age cutoffs. Across 142 effect sizes from 42 datasets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities, of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the lifespan, and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.

u/dantokimonsta · 4 pointsr/neuroscience

Every book on consciousness will have its own pet theory. I haven't found many great books on the neuroscience of consciousness, though Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch have a pretty good review paper on the subject. The one caveat is that they mostly review evidence for their own theory of consciousness, the Information Integration Theory.

As for the philosophy of consciousness, there are a number of good books, again each with their own agenda/pet theory. If you want the entire spectrum of opinions, check out Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness, which both provides a good overview of the field and also offers a defense of Churchland's materialist view; I'd also check out John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind, which presents Searle's biological naturalism, a sort of "centrist" view in the array of popular positions, and which is written in very straightforward language; a third option, which is more complicated than the other two but is really important in the field, is Chalmers' The Conscious Mind.

Hope that helps!

u/Catfish3 · 4 pointsr/askphilosophy

the main proponent of dualism in contemporary philosophy is david chalmers. his defining work is "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory," but you can also read all of his papers for free on his website. he has also at some points argued for panpsychism, but his core commitments still lie with dualism.

yes, he and his arguments are usually taken very seriously in academic philosophy. for example, here's a video of him at a conference on a boat, with other big name philosophers of mind such as dennett and the churchlands.

i guess i should also mention that the kind of dualism that chalmers argues for is not the classic cartesian substance dualism, but rather a weaker form of dualism called property dualism

here's a useful sep article about dualism

u/volvox12 · 4 pointsr/neuroscience

Consciousness: An Introduction, by Susan Blackmore, is great. http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-An-Introduction-Susan-Blackmore/dp/0199739099

u/satanic_hamster · 4 pointsr/CapitalismVSocialism

> Yes and I agree, but some context here is they were also working with 1970s computers or just doing the calculations by hand down at the GOSPLAN building in downtown Moscow.

Yeah, I agree. But even then if you wanted to coordinate all that activity with an AI or something of that sort, it seems to me you'd still be doing it on the basis of mapping out all the various transactions and exchanges between people, and then just use Predictive Analytics or Markov Chains or something to predict the most efficient allocation of resources. It isn't an actual substitute for the Market like what the USSR did. It's just mapping it out.

> You see a lot of talk about A.I. for instance in the tech press and by Silicon Valley people but I don't see much productive investment going on in this sector -- at least nowhere near as much as there could be.

Well I do know a lot of research and mathematical breakthroughs are being made here and there. Particularly from people in the community like MIRI, independent contributors like Gary Drescher and Judea Pearl, etc. But maybe you had a different idea of productive investment. The idea of an AI Cold War is a very real and dangerous prospect that I think will be of greater concern in years coming.

> Yeah I have a lot to learn about it as well. But the commune system in the "production brigades" sense from what I understand largely went away with Deng's reforms. But there's been some new histories showing that it was really productive and good, and that getting rid of it was largely a political decision aimed at concentrating political power under Deng. And I think China has backslided on education in recent years in the rural areas -- trying to do something about that is one of Xi's big things.

Anything interesting you could point me to here?

u/moreLytes · 4 pointsr/DebateReligion

> (1) why am I so convinced that I could think something different?

You might be interested in Gary Drescher's account of free will, as it directly offers an explanation for your conviction. Specifically, he postulates that your intuition comes from an absence of a particular processing mechanism within your cognitive arsenal. The proposed mechanism, the "prejudiced-context principle", is responsible for preprocessing context-action-expectation schemas and removing paths that would mutually negate one another. While the principle could ultimately inform philosophical knots within volition, ethics, and Newcomb problems, Drescher argues that it was simply not selected-for across evolutionary time.

> (2) why would the truth value of any proposition I think matter?

What sort of significance are you inquiring about? What would happen if you learned that it probably doesn't matter, at least in the way you desire?

u/the_final_duck · 4 pointsr/askphilosophy

If you're interested in consciousness, The Mind's I is a great collection of essays and dialogues from different authors, most of which are very accessible. They cover the topic from a lot of different angles and do a good job of prompting the kind of conceptual groundwork you need in order to delve deeper into the subject.

u/legit_free_candy · 4 pointsr/matheducation
u/shamansun · 4 pointsr/Buddhism

It's still very questionable how close we are to understanding consciousness. From just dabbling into the mind sciences and the different camps there, it really doesn't seem like we're quite there yet. But even if our technology can eventually create the conditions for consciousness, I think Buddhism will become more relevant.

For example, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Evan Thompson are all examples of a Buddhist-inspired approach to the science of mind. Check out (though be warned you're entering into the fray of some heavy philosophy-speak) Embodied Mind, Mind in Life, and a textbook on the subject, The Tree of Knowledge. To them, the contemplative disciplines of the East (and the West for that matter - what has survived through the traditions), are all examples of a deeply sophisticated "inner science" that can actually help inform and guide the scientific understanding of consciousness. In short, I think the trend we have today is telling: as neuroscience and consciousness studies develop, the Western interest in Buddhism also seems to be increasing.

I think a few other popular books are Rick Hanson's Buddha's Brain and B. Alan Wallace's Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge Hope this was helpful!

Edit ~ Forgot to mention something about reincarnation. Well, many traditions have an esoteric perspective on reality, an inner dimension, and in some sense, an inner world with its own laws and realities that are in some respects more real than our material senses. So, some might be against uploading their consciousness for fear of stagnating their own spiritual evolution. Personally, I learn towards believing that reality is more than our contemporary, secular culture can articulate. So even with AI, I think these spiritual realities will not become "irrelevant" - but if we believe like many of the traditions do that there are subtle bodies (etheric, astral, etc) - then there are certain dangers in attempting to create life and mind without awareness of these. This is borderline science fiction, but I can imagine a gnostic fear of spiritual "entrapment." A consciousness that has lost its soul - or worse yet, a soul that is ensnared within a machine and unable to move on because it is missing critical spiritual bodies that would allow it to move onto the next life (or beyond this world). Should make for some interesting new mythologies...

On the other hand, scientists may unwittingly create the conditions for the etheric (the animating force of life, chi or ki), and other bodies simply by learning the physical principles of life. So artificial beings may also have chakras and energy channels - and there may even be new spiritual traditions and metaphysics that humans may not be able to understand. Anyhow, many traditions speak of transcending the ego and allowing the "higher self" to guide us - well, maybe, just maybe, an AI might be a suitable mind for the Higher Self, or Daimon, to descend and incarnate. Whoo, this is fun thinking about. This is sounding like a science fiction version of Sri Aurobindo's "Supramental descent."

u/deinopoiesis · 4 pointsr/JordanPeterson

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cosmic-Serpent-DNA-Origins-Knowledge/dp/075380851X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526927928&sr=8-1&keywords=the+cosmic+serpent

JP is referring to the thesis of this book. From the Wikpedia page:

>Narby hypothesizes that shamans may be able to access information at the molecular level through the ingestion of entheogens, specifically ayahuasca.

Basically, the theory is that shamans were able to intuit the structure of DNA through DMT-ritutals. Pretty out there, granted, but bear in mind that DMT occurs naturally in the brain and we have no idea why. Peterson isn't having recourse to anything supernatural here, he's just open to speculation about the function of psychedelics..

u/Cosmoviking · 4 pointsr/DebateAnAtheist

See Patton Oswalt and the Giant Invisible Anus for some of the psychology at work here, expressed in funny.

Your friend is on an emotional high that comes from a sense of surety, release, and joy. The best way I can describe it is to compare it to someone who gets found not guilty of a crime when they thought for sure they would be convicted. They feel like the whole world is theirs, like they have absolutely nothing to worry about (why would they? Their "eternal fate" is secured. All they have to do is love Jesus, "do his work," and wait for their coming reward). It's the feeling of knowing nothing TRULY bad can happen to you, and there being something awesome waiting for you. Imagine if you were both invincible and just won 200 million in the lottery. Something like that.

It almost certainly won't last. Something will eventually bring him down, back into the grind of everyday life. He'll crave that high again, and seek it out at revivals and retreats and missions.

TL;DR - There is no logical argument that will persuade them. They are wired on happy brain juice. See Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain.

u/McHanzie · 3 pointsr/RationalPsychonaut

As /u/Das_Erlebnis said, there's tons of literature in the philosophy of mind. Check out some books, e.g. Chalmer's [The Conscious Mind] (https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy/dp/0195117891/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8) and Dennett's [Consciousness Explained] (https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MK07ERGEZ7B8NBW6JBS1).

Edit: I'll add Nagel's essay [What is it like to be a bat?] (http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf) to the list.

u/adamthrash · 3 pointsr/Christianity

Not really. There's really great evidence that our basic morality is a condition of evolution - certain attitudes, such as disliking cheating and liking kindness, are good for the species in the long run, so our brains are wired for some basic kindness, even if it's selfish kindness (I help you because you'll probably help me later).

This kind of moral framework is completely supportable in the absence of any god, and it's objective across all humanity because we all share in that same evolution. Granted, the duties and morals imposed by God are on a different and stricter level, but we are more or less programmed to be kind to those who are like us. You can see this book if you're in any way interested.

Beyond an objective (if basic) morality, you've got objective things like math and science and history and pretty much anything we can study. 2+2=4 isn't up for debate, although "is patricide wrong" might be.

u/Icebender · 3 pointsr/DaystromInstitute

I actually disagree completely with your central objection here. You object that OP conflates emotions and morals, and state that you don't need one to have the other. I think that you absolutely do need emotions to have morals, and Vulcan's as a hypothetical aren't even a good imaginary test case for an example of people who have no emotions who do have morals for exactly the reason that they DO have emotions. Very strong emotions, in fact so strong that their entire planet turned to suppressing their emotions in a last ditch effort to achieve any kind of lasting culture.

I don't see how you're drawing a line between desire and emotion. What is desire if not an emotion? What is it to say you desire something if there is no emotion driving it? In my view, the nature of desire/emotion/value judgement is not nearly so clear cut.

You're right that Data has desires, and he also clearly has things he values. In my view, these behaviors constitute emotional states, although his outward expression of these emotions and his subjective experience of them are clearly very different from a human beings. That isn't to say he is flawed or broken, only that he is different. He is mistaken when he says he has no emotions, when what he really means is that he doesn't have the subjective experience of emotions that humans have. The emotion chip provides him with that subjective experience, but this is a change in how he experiences emotions, not the create of emotion ex nihilo.

For more about emotions and morals, I would refer you to The Emotional Construction of Morals by Jesse Prinz. No need to read it if you have no interest in the subject, but if it sparks your interest I found it to be a really great read on moral sentimentalism/emotionism.

u/23143567 · 3 pointsr/rational

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Good and Real - each could be considered a canon of rationalist thought on evolution of humankind and ethics respectively.

u/aspartame_junky · 3 pointsr/philosophy

Given that Daniel Dennett has recently published a book on thought experiments called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, I thought it would be good to show one of Dennett's most famous intuition pumps.

This section of the movie is based on Daniel Dennett's though experiment first published in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology and reprinted in his famous compendium with Douglas Hofstadter, The Mind's I.

The original paper is available here and elsewhere online.

The movie itself is a documentary and dramatization of several themes in the book The Mind's I and includes an interview with Douglas Hofstadter earlier on.

u/SubDavidsonic · 3 pointsr/philosophy

Although this sort of historical approach may work for some people, and it will definitely give you a very good background, it certainly didn't work for me. I wanted to get ideas that were articulated in easy to understand contemporary terms that I could grapple with right away without having to worry about interpreting them correctly first.

I started in early high school, after being recommended by a friend who was majoring in philosophy at the time with The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law which gave a great and really readable introduction to a lot of philosophy problems. Depending on your previous knowledge of philosophy, it might be a bit basic, but even still it's a worthwhile read I think.

From then, I went on The Mind's I by Daniel Dennett and Douglass Hofstadter, which was a really good and fun introduction to philosophy of mind and related issues. After that I think you'll have enough exposure to dive into various subjects and authors that you come across.

u/nikofeyn · 3 pointsr/math

check out the book where mathematics comes from.

u/ThePhaedrus · 3 pointsr/books

Autobiography of a Yogi - While not mind altering, it gave me a new perspective on things I would have initially labeled as quackery.

The Believing Brain by David Shermer - explains the mechanics of why we believe in the things we do without any critical examination especially on topics like religion, politics, ghosts, and conspiracy theories.

Awareness by Osho - Osho might have been a controversial personality, but some of his writings were brilliant and refreshing. This book blew me away and provoked me to live life more consciously and with greater deliberation.

The Freedom of Choice by Tom Chalko - Simple but powerful read (only 100 pages)

u/steamwhistler · 3 pointsr/atheism

My first actual submission to r/atheism and first attempt at a rage comic. I know these are pretty cliche nowadays, but I had fun expressing myself with this and I hope someone else enjoys it. I highly recommend the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct-Reinforce/dp/0805091254

u/FMERCURY · 3 pointsr/AskScienceDiscussion

It's a good thought, but there are easier ways to do this that have been in use for a while, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knockout_mouse

There's even a relatively new technique called RNA interference that literally blocks mRNA from being transcribed, so you don't need to knock out the gene at all.

Moreover, we already have an (admittedly incomplete) understanding of what genes are involved in intelligence, and the answer is a lot. I think we're up to 1,000 or so. Ca^2+ transporters, respiratory chain proteins, you name it. May i recommend this book.

u/wyngit · 3 pointsr/singapore

There we go. Book 1.

Book 2.

Enjoy. If those two flew over your head, try this:

You're welcome.

u/blazesquall · 3 pointsr/StLouis

I was going to respond, but I left my second sock puppet at home.. and I just know if I tell you that I'm going to use the single one as multiple actors it would be above you.

Instead, let me just offer what little help I can :

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Thinking-Skills-Dummies-Martin/dp/111892472X

u/Swordsmanus · 3 pointsr/slatestarcodex

> If I want to learn more about this stuff, where do I start?

Not sure if it covers all that you're asking for, but if you want to get a solid base on intelligence and the research on it, here are a few good starting points published in the last year.

160-page digest: Intelligence: All That Matters

Textbook: The Neuroscience of Intelligence (Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology)

u/MixedUpCody · 3 pointsr/Stoicism

I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but I've found cognitive behavioral therapy to be helpful for depression and anxiety.

Specifically, this book, which lays out a 7 week plan to address your underlying thought patterns.

I hope this provides some help for you, and that you're able to find some comfort.

Good luck to you.

u/claytonkb · 2 pointsr/singularity

Seth Lloyd -- Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos

Gregory Chaitin -- How real are real numbers? -- this paper, and all of Chaitin's writing, has been hugely influential on my thinking

I haven't read it, but I have heard Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence highly recommended. Ditto for Max Tegmark's Life 3.0.

I also recommend reading anything by David Chalmers, just on general principle. The Conscious Mind is a good place to start. I find his methods of contemplating the problems of consciousness to be more robust than the standard fare. The hard problem of consciousness (as Chalmers has dubbed it) suggests that there is something fundamental about what we are that modern science has completely failed to capture, even in the most sketch outline.

To go further, I recommend reading in a mystical direction. Specifically, ask yourself why there are patterns in mystical traditions that have arisen independently? And these are not just vague, hand-wavey correlations, but very specific, detailed correlations like the anatomical descriptions of dragons as winged serpents that slither through the sky, and so on. See Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and subsequent works for more along these lines.

If this is getting too far afield then you can ask yourself an even more basic question: why do we experience dreams and where, exactly, are these experiences happening? If you say, "it's all just remixes of past experiences being sloshed around in your skull like those #DeepDream images", how come they are so specifically odd and out-of-character? I have had extended conversations in my dreams with people I know (and people I have never met) and the detailed character of these conversations is far beyond anything that my pathetic brain could cook up, even by remixing past experiences. In short, when I dream, I am sometimes having genuine experiences, just not the kind of experiences I have in my waking body. Anyone who has had a lucid dream (I have experienced this a handful of times) is acutely aware of the fact that dream-space is some other place than the meat-space we occupy during waking hours. Where is this other place and why does it exist? What does it really mean to have conscious experience?

u/edubkendo · 2 pointsr/Psychonaut

I don't think the subjective self (what I think you are calling "mind" here) is something separate from the physical brain (standard Cartesian Duality), but rather, is a property of it.

Couple of books I can recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy/dp/0195117891
https://www.amazon.com/Neurophilosophy-Toward-Unified-Science-Mind-Brain/dp/0262530856

u/BonBelafonte · 2 pointsr/Denmark
  1. Anden fejlslutning
  2. Læs den eller køb den her bog
  3. Tredje fejlslutning

    Har fundet et kursus til dig på Folkeuniversitetet
u/TheGreenjet · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

I recently finished the book The Emotional Construction Of Morals by Jesse Prinz Book and he has some interesting points about Evolution and Morality.
His points are definitely more for arguing against such a claim, one of his arguments specifically says that just because something is evolutionarily good or ensures survival does necessarily imply optimization but rather effectiveness (Two similar but different things). Therefore evolutionary processes are poor examples of moral optimization.

He definitely refers to some authors who argue that point though.

u/CuriousIndividual0 · 2 pointsr/neurophilosophy

There are a plethora of books on consciousness.

From the science side of things the neuroscientist Antti Revonuso has a book "Consciousness: the science of subjectivity" which has a good mix of the philosophy and science of consciousness. Christof Koch, probably one of the leading neuroscientists who study consciousness, has a few books as well. The Quest for Consciousness is one of his, which has lots of neuroscience particularly visual neuroscience in it. That is mainly science, not much philosophy. Another neuroscientist who studies consciousness is Stanislas Dehaene who wrote a good book Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Click on the image of each book on the left in amazon (which opens up a preview) and scroll to the contents page and see if any of these books are the kind of thing you are looking for.

From the philosophical side there is (among many others) Susan Blackmores "Consciousness: An introduction" (an introductory book David Chalmers recommends) and William Seagers "Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment". There is also a great book that has short (5-7 pages) sections on philosophers and neuroscientists and their respective theories of consciousness by Andrea Eugenio Cavanna and Andrea Nani called "Consciousness: Theories in Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind". The first half of Michael Tye's book "Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind" is great for an overview of 10 philosophical problems of consciousness. It is very accessible and there are summaries of each problem provided. There are also great resources online such as Van Gulick's SEP article on consciousness, which would actually be a great place to start, and use it as a place to lead you to areas you are most interested in. Here is also a brief introduction to the philosophy of mind (the main philosophical discipline that deals with consciousness).

So there's a few links to some books and online articles, which should be more than enough to get you going.

By the way, there is a free masterclass on consciousness with Christof Koch on the World Science U website. You may also be interested in that.

Additionally you may like to check out the subreddit /r/sciphilconsciousness, which is all about the sharing and discussion of content related to the science and philosophy of consciousness.

u/160525 · 2 pointsr/LessWrong

It might have been the good and the real by Gary Drescher.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Real-Demystifying-Paradoxes-Bradford/dp/0262042339

u/MoreAccurate · 2 pointsr/DebateReligion

I mostly have a lot of books that helped me, but here are the most influential ones that I've read recently:

u/alexandrosm · 2 pointsr/atheism

I'd suggest Good and Real by Gary Drescher. Also take a look at lesswrong.com, especially the sequences

Sometimes I wish I could forget having read this stuff just so I could enjoy reading them for the first time again. Enjoy!

u/humpolec · 2 pointsr/science

>I'm guessing that every possible interpretation of a system would have to be conscious by extension, which is unrealistic IMO as it would mean that everything is conscious in an infinite number of ways.

Gary Drescher suggests that's not a problem because only some interpretations can possibly matter to us (he also refers to Dennet's intentional stance, but that I don't know anything about yet).

u/OphioukhosUnbound · 2 pointsr/askmath

Of course.

Anything that can be described well, to the extent that it can be described well, is essentially math.

Math, at its core, is just statements whose statements are carefully defined in their own framework.

Now, whether those constructions can accurately model the world or its parts is a deep question in philosophy. But the question then isn’t whether math can do it, it’s whether it can be done at all. If you can’t do it as math you’re essentially saying it can’t be done. This would be in the area known as epistemology (the study of what can be known).

An example of this is mathematical models of consciousness. Which take, as axioms, some descriptions that philosophers give to “conciseness” and then use the power of mathematical formulation to see what the implications of that are. What ‘things’ in the universe would be described as conscious then, when is a person a dingle consciousness vs many, etc.

The center of that particular space is Tononi’s IIT (integrated information theory) - which has spawned many papers examining the implications, soundness of axioms, and mathematical implications. [an example paper, chosen somewhat at random here: Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using Algorithmic Information Theory

[Note: I am a consciousness skeptic; I tend to think the concept is vacuous chauvinism at heart, but this approach to addressing it — essentially “if true then what” is valuable I think.]

There’s an excellent, incredibly short, and easy to read book on this general idea. One of the best examples of concise, readable, and deep writing imo. It’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg.
Again, tiny volume. It uses simple thought experiments to examine artificial machines “vehicles” that exhibit behavior we would naturally use emotional vocabulary to describe. It challenges the assumption that organic internals like “desire” and “anger” needs be endlessly complex. I highly recommend it. It does not drop many, if any equations, but the controlled nature of the experiments drops them firmly in a mathematical framework as desired.

u/AnomalousVisions · 2 pointsr/philosophy

For an excellent and very readable introduction to the various issues and positions in the philosophy of mind, you might also check out Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness.

u/mrhorrible · 2 pointsr/philosophy

"The Mind's I"

Read this. It's a bit long, but includes many very thorough discussions of exactly what you're asking and proposing.

u/yourparadigm · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

You should read The Mind's I by Dennett and Hofstadter. There are a couple of essays that discuss this very problem, and they pose some interesting questions as to where in the brain the consciousness exists and how you might go about simulating it.

u/cr0sh · 2 pointsr/Cyberpunk

If any of you want to read a very fascinating book on this topic - I suggest:

http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/dp/0465030912/

/among others by Hofstadter...

u/jewdass · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

I agree with the other posters who suggested Dennett and Hofstadter... They also collaborated on a book called "The Mind's I"

Another suggestion would be "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software"

u/Spu · 2 pointsr/books

The Republic and Other Works by Plato
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
God's Equation by Amir D. Aczel
The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett
*Shakespeare's Sonnets by Stephen Booth

u/SuperConductiveRabbi · 2 pointsr/videos

Forget a Hollywood movie, there are entire philosophical treatises devoted to what Karl cleverly sums up in that one sentence. Here's a good philosophical exploration of it.

u/airshowfan · 2 pointsr/atheism

Read naturalist explanations of decision-making, the image of the self, how thoughts work, qualia, etc. You probably want to start with I am a Strange Loop, then Consciousness Explained, and work your way to Godel Escher Bach. There are also many essays online about the non-supernatural nature of the mind, this one being one that atheist Redditors link to often. Also see Wikipedia articles about the mind, free will, etc.

Even after I became an atheist, I could not shake the feeling that consciousness could not be just patterns of atoms. Even in a universe that follows rules and that was not deliberately created as part of a plan, I thought that maybe there's some kind of "soul stuff" that interacts with our brains and is responsible for consciousness. But then, if I can tell that I am conscious, then 1) the soul stuff impacts the natural world and is thus observable and not supernatural, and 2) I am no different from a computer that understands itself well enough to say it is conscious. (It helped me to think of AIs from fiction, like HAL and Data, and try to think of what it would be "like" to be them. Books like The Mind's I are full of such thought experiments). So after thinking about it for a while, I was able to shed that last and most persistent bit of supernaturalism and embrace the naturalistic view of the mind.

u/drewiepoodle · 2 pointsr/politics

i am unaware of any anthropological studies that have established this "truth" of which you speak. could you perhaps post a few links to them?

here, i'll post one that describes the homosexual parings of over 450 life forms

http://www.yalescientific.org/2012/03/do-animals-exhibit-homosexuality/


perhaps a book on the subject instead?

http://www.amazon.com/Homosexual-Behaviour-Animals-Evolutionary-Perspective/dp/0521182301


u/fitzroy_doll · 2 pointsr/askscience

There is an excellent set of essays on the subject in this book: Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective

u/hpdeskjet6940 · 2 pointsr/philosophy

Check out Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Thompson, 2007).

Really interesting work on this subject.

u/jediknight · 2 pointsr/atheism

The smarter a man is, the smarter are his rationalizations.

You don't have to be stupid to keep the faith.

I understand your perspective and in a perfect world it might have been correct but the reality we live in is not like that.

Arguing that those who believe are stupid is a lost battle.

Read Michael Shermer’s "The Believing Brain" I'm sure it will ease your hate. We have such a short time here on earth. It would be such a waste to use it on hate.

As Kanji said in Ikiru: "I can't afford to hate people. I don't have that kind of time."

u/VoidXC · 2 pointsr/science

A good book that expands on this is The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

u/peeping_bomb · 2 pointsr/atheism

Seconding this choice, since this book is more about science and skepticism rather than atheism.

The Believing Brain is another good one.

u/betterbox · 2 pointsr/atheism

[An excellent book on the question] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/0805091254)
It's a good read :]

u/kitrichardson · 2 pointsr/emetophobia

Stay angry - you CAN beat this. I'm in exposure therapy at the moment and fuck me it's working. I'm also using the Thrive program and that's helping massively too. Life really doesn't have to be like this. Hugs x

u/unnamedstripper45 · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

I can vouch for these:

http://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9780415820929/

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Thinking-Skills-Dummies-Martin/dp/111892472X

The dummies one doesn't have as much formal logic but It's definitely more readable than the textbook.

u/LadyAtheist · 2 pointsr/atheism

Bart Ehrman's books & videos are a great start for the accuracy of the Bible. He is very clear especially considering he's an academic. Forged would be the best one specifically about the accuracy of the Bible. His books are linked at his website: http://www.bartdehrman.com/books.htm

There are no historical documents of Jesus' life, only a few references to Christians from later documents. Nobody disputes that people believed in Jesus, so those don't really prove anything. It's clear that people believed in Thor and Zeus too. That doesn't mean a thing.

Whether faith is helpful or good, can't help you there. I think it's totally useless except to control sociopaths with low IQs.

For morality, check out Good without God: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Without-God-Billion-Nonreligious/dp/006167012X

or Sam Harris The Moral Landscape: http://www.samharris.org/the-moral-landscape

Science vs religion: that's kind of apples & oranges despite what believers keep saying. Science is a method of investigating hunches. Religion is subservience to an unproven deity.

How about the science of religion? Try Michael Shermer: The Science of Good and Evil: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805077693/ or The Believing Brain: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1250008808/ or Why We Believe Weird Things: http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0805070893/

Thanks for visiting. An unexamined belief system is not worth believing!

u/frogshit · 2 pointsr/exchristian

I'm 24 and went through your same scenario about a year ago. Though, when I was younger I still did not believe in the "healings" or speaking in toungues so those were easy for me to see past. But I'll give you links to a couple things I've found along the way that may help you out!

This documentary may be great for you to watch. It will give you some brief insight into how healings are faked and why people believe them.

And if you're in the mood to read a book on the topic: The Believing Brain is a great read and thoroughly explains how and why our brain allows us to "Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths"

>How do I account for those countless times I was "slain in the Spirit" and was literally on the ground shaking from the "mighty power of God." There were times I couldn't walk, talk or move because of "the weight of his glory."

All in all, it really comes down to the fact that you were indoctrinated to believe that these things can and do happen. When you were experiencing those things, your brain was basically in autopilot mode and reacted accordingly. This is especially true during the more physical happenings (when you felt you couldn't walk talk or move). You were essentially hypnotized by your brain and/or potentially your pastor even.

My best advice is to just read and watch videos/documentaries as much as possible. Learn as much as you can and you'll find the truth. Good luck! Feel free to PM me with any questions

EDIT: Another thing you should do if you haven't already is read through the FAQ over at /r/atheism. There is a ton of good information there.

u/BeringStraitNephite · 2 pointsr/exmormon

Humans do confirmation bias really well, and educated ones do it even better. Read:
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GHN26W/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_RUjPybEGBFJ8D

u/atomicmarc · 2 pointsr/atheism

Shermer would never suggest that there are "absolutely, positively" no aliens. But that's a different position than claiming there might be extra terrestrial intelligence in the universe (after all, humans are proof that it's possible). I think what he's talking about is how easily some people accept the tales of UFO visitations and abductions, usually without proof. He wrote about this in depth in his book The Believing Brain, which I highly recommend. In the book, he claims that the brain is a "belief engine" and explains why.

u/SemanticallyPedantic · 2 pointsr/NoStupidQuestions

That's uh... a pretty broad topic. I thought this book was a pretty interesting take on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct-Reinforce-ebook/dp/B004GHN26W

​

u/hibou_confus · 2 pointsr/france

…ou alors peut-être que l'auteur s'est intéressé à l'état de la science sur le sujet ?

Si tu t'intéresses au sujet (et que tu parles anglais), tu devrais lire ce petit livre. Il n'est pas écrit par un journaliste mais par un chercheur spécialiste du sujet (lui) et est la meilleure introduction que j'ai vu sur l'état de la recherche sur l'intelligence pour le grand public. Ça devrait te faire reconsidérer ta vision des choses.

u/BFSisreal · 2 pointsr/BFS

I'm glad to hear someone has the good sense to start you at a low dose. I've read way too many stories of people being prescribed to take the mid-range dose right off the bat. Inevitably they feel panic, sweating, "going crazy" ect. because almost no one should start on such a dose. I told my doctor I would quarter what he prescribed for the first week at least, maybe the first month. I've had every side effect from SSRI's- twitching, bruising, teeth clenching, stiff neck, additional anxiety and of course the debilitating nausea, ohhhhh the nausea. I recommend no coffee and no alcohol for the first month as well. It helps with the sickness. Anyone trying to break through the beginning of SSRI treatment is fighting the good fight though. I really do think it will be worth it. My doctor is an Upper Eastside old school man who would just as happily give all the Xanax a patient could ask for, so yeah, need to find a new doctor! He wants to up that kind of drug and I said no thank you many times. I wish you the best of luck. Tapering is the way to go for sure. this is a good workbook: https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-Behavioral-Depression-ebook/dp/B01M0ILKMQ/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1550449292&sr=8-7&keywords=cbt+workbook

u/pwinkbear · 2 pointsr/konmari

I suggest getting (Retrain Your Brain: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 7 Weeks: A Workbook for Managing Depression and Anxiety)[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01M0ILKMQ/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492347094&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=7+weeks+cbt] The book helps with depression and helps you to identify your vaules and align your actions with these values. Identifying your values is a good start when nithing brings you joy. The book also does a lot to help with climbing out of depression.

u/JamesCole · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

> What's does the "hard problem" consist of? From what I can tell,
> Chalmers thinks its a confounding problem that we can't understand
> what the experience of feeling pain is like, say, in terms of brain states.

It's more than simply that. But, because consciousness is such a slippery topic to talk clearly about, it's not easy to briefly describe it in a way that communicates the points clearly. Whether you agree with Chalmer's views or not, I think he does a pretty reasonable job of stating the "hard problem" (I read his The Conscious Mind), and his description is pretty lengthy.

> He seems to think that by looking at the brain of a person who's in pain, we should
> be able to know what their experience of feeling pain is actually like. I dont share
> this kind of concern

No he doesn't. It's more the opposite.

> And Chalmers leans toward consciousness being fundamental, I believe

It's not entirely clear what exactly should and shouldn't constitute "fundamental", but I don't think that's true. He's say that it's not something "physical", basically meaning not something that can be understood in structural or functional terms, but that doesn't necessitate it being fundamental.

And BTW I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Chalmers, I'm just trying to clarify what his position is.

u/stoic9 · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

I really enjoyed Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Chalmers' The Conscious Mind presents another popular view which, if I recall correctly, opposes Dennett's views. I'm slowly getting into work's by Steven Pinker.

Probably a general Philosophy of Mind reader would also benefit you just to get a good idea of the different views and topics out there within the discipline. I cannot remember which one I read years ago, although if I read one today I'd pick Chalmers' Philosophy of Mind or Kim's Philosophy of Mind.

u/throughawaythedew · 1 pointr/Retconned

If you are interested in this subject I would highly recommend David Chalmers "The Conscious Mind".

u/SilkyTheCat · 1 pointr/philosophy

> Of course it's contested, but so is evolution. If anyone would like to link me to any serious evidence, I would be delighted.

Here's a book on the subject from about 15 years ago. The author has written a lot on related topics since, and has also published more recent articles since on many of the problems discussed in the book.

u/Rosanbo · 1 pointr/UFOs

Surprised no one has mentioned something like this.

u/goocy · 1 pointr/collapse

> What is consciousness?

Since neuroscience started to research this topic seriously, there's no more reason for mysticism. There's textbooks about it now. I personally read Dehaene's book and it cleared up all of my confusion.

u/UncleVinny · 1 pointr/PhilosophyofScience

BTW, here's Blackmore's book on the US version of Amazon.

u/rbarber8 · 1 pointr/AskScienceDiscussion

Science will probably never be able to answer this question, it is really more the realm of philosophy. There are many people who have many very different interpretations of what consciousness even is. A good introduction to the variety of different thought on the subject is this [book.] (http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-An-Introduction-Susan-Blackmore/dp/0199739099) I can assure you though, none of your suggested origins really addresses the tough problems we face when we try to wrap our heads around the issue.

u/PartTimeGangster · 1 pointr/philosophy

There is a book that goes through this scenario by accepting the Everett explanation of quantum mechanics: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Real-Demystifying-Paradoxes-Bradford/dp/0262042339

I recommend that you don't read it: it will suck you in and torment you. Just enjoy life mate.

u/wizardnamehere · 1 pointr/CapitalismVSocialism

> Well I do know a lot of research and mathematical breakthroughs are being made here and there. Particularly from people in the community like MIRI, independent contributors like Gary Drescher and Judea Pearl, etc. But maybe you had a different idea of productive investment. The idea of an AI Cold War is a very real and dangerous prospect that I think will be of greater concern in years coming.

Do you mean an AI cold war between American state backed tech firms and Chinese state backed tech firms?

u/fredmccalley · 1 pointr/PhilosophyofScience

The first couple of chapters of "Good and Real" are helpful here.

u/ArsenicAndRoses · 1 pointr/compsci

"Team Geek" by Fitzpatrick/Sussman

For me, theory has always been easy to pick up. But learning how to work well in a team has been a real challenge (especially dealing with unproductive people), and this book is a great resource for precisely that.

I'm also a fan of "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology"; This book is what first got me interested in and thinking about artificial intelligence at a young age.

Both books are short, cheap, and easy and fun to read even for the layperson or the young.

u/EML0210 · 1 pointr/philosophy

Braitenberg Vehicles

u/jnugen · 1 pointr/robotics

You may be thinking of 'Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology':

https://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valentino-Braitenberg/dp/0262521121

 

It describes "Braitenberg vehicles":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle

u/nyx210 · 1 pointr/singularity

>It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior. Quite apart from this, analysis is more difficult than invention in the sense in which, generally, induction takes more time to perform than deduction: in induction one has to search for the way, whereas in deduction one follows a straightforward path.

Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology

u/DrJosh · 1 pointr/IAmA

I can't speak for all roboticists, but I'm a big fan of Mark's work. He has helped to show us that one can achieve sophisticated behavior with relatively simple machines. Valentino Braitenberg made a similar point in his wonderful book Vehicles.

u/tshadley · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

One way to see EM is as a rejection of language-like theories of cognition:

> Plainly, early humans modeled their conception of human cognitive activity on the only systematic medium of representation and computation available to them at the time: human language. And a good thing, too, for it gave us at least some predictive and explanatory advantages, for the behavior of humans, and also for animals. But ultimately, [the eliminativist] says, that linguaformal conception of our cognition is no more accurate for us than it is for any of the other creatures. Our brains work in essentially the same ways as all of our evolutionary brothers and sisters, and ‘propositional attitudes’ have little or nothing to do with our mostly shared cognitive activities. If we want to really understand human cognition, he concludes, we need to get rid of our linguaformal self-delusion, and learn to discuss, and even to introspect, our cognition from within the conceptual framework of a theory (cognitive neurobiology) that is adequate to all of the Earth’s creatures. Our current conception is useful, no doubt, but at bottom it must misrepresent our true cognitive economy.

(From Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness)

u/Daveaham_Lincoln · 1 pointr/atheism

>it sounds to me like you have an incomplete understanding of evolution.

Elaborate please.

>this is no more an indicator than the fact that we have mathematical models to represent force or gravity.

Valid point, but does not the fact that there appears to be some kind of order to the universe which we can represent mathematically suggest some kind of design? For instance, say you found a rock and a motor in the desert, never having seen either before, but you had mathematical analysis, would not the ordered nature of the data retrieved from the analysis of the motor compared to the chaotic nature of the data retrieved from the rock suggest to you that the motor had been built and did not simply arise from nature?

>This sounds also like you have an incomplete understanding of the biological processess involved in the brain.

Ask any epistemologist or read any basic text on epistemology (might I suggest this as a starting point?) and you will see that there is currently little or no demonstrable or philosophically sound evidence of a link between mind and matter.

u/simism66 · 1 pointr/Psychonaut

Beyond the obvious choices, Watts' The Book, Ram Dass' Be Here Now, Huxley's Doors of Perception, Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, and of course Fear and Loathing (all of these should be on the list without question; they’re classics), here are a some others from a few different perspectives:

From a Secular Contemporary Perspective

Godel Escher Bach by Douglass Hofstadter -- This is a classic for anyone, but man is it food for psychedelic thought. It's a giant book, but even just reading the dialogues in between chapters is worth it.

The Mind’s Eye edited by Douglass Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett – This is an anthology with a bunch of great essays and short fictional works on the self.

From an Eastern Religious Perspective

The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan -- This is a very fun and amusing exploration of Taoist thought from one of the best living logicians (he's 94 and still writing logic books!).

Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani – This one is a bit dense, but it is full of some of the most exciting philosophical and theological thought I’ve ever come across. Nishitani, an Eastern Buddhist brings together thought from Buddhist thinkers, Christian mystics, and the existentialists like Neitzsche and Heidegger to try to bridge some of the philosophical gaps between the east and the west.

The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way by Nagarjuna (and Garfield's translation/commentary is very good as well) -- This is the classic work from Nagarjuna, who lived around the turn of the millennium and is arguably the most important Buddhist thinker after the Buddha himself.

From a Western Religious Perspective

I and Thou by Martin Buber – Buber wouldn’t approve of this book being on this list, but it’s a profound book, and there’s not much quite like it. Buber is a mystical Jewish Philosopher who argues, in beautiful and poetic prose, that we get glimpses of the Divine from interpersonal moments with others which transcend what he calls “I-it” experience.

The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila – this is an old book (from the 1500s) and it is very steeped in Christian language, so it might not be everyone’s favorite, but it is perhaps the seminal work of medieval Christian mysticism.

From an Existentialist Perspective

Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre – Not for the light of heart, this existential novel talks about existential nausea a strange perception of the absurdity of existence.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus – a classic essay that discusses the struggle one faces in a world inherently devoid of meaning.

----
I’ll add more if I think of anything else that needs to be thrown in there!

u/smellegantcode · 1 pointr/philosophy

Most of us are unconscious several times in every 24 hour period, hopefully while safely in bed, so with so much discontinuity in our consciousness there is no reason to assume that today you possess "the same consciousness" as yesterday, but nor is there much of a reason to deny it either. It's a very typical metaphysical dilemma, in that it seems at first to suggest two distinct possibilities, one of which must be true and the other false, but on reflection it turns out there is no way (even in principle) to distinguish between them, so we may have been tricked by the appearance of a dilemma, but which just gives us two different ways of describing or approaching the same thing.

A common approach to creationism is to note that it describes an infinite set of possibilities: the universe might have been created at any instant in the past (even seconds ago) and you along with it, with all your memories in place so as to fool you into think the universe is much older. Much as fossils of dinosaurs are supposed to be a trick (put there by Satan?) in the more popular kinds of creationism.

Pretty much any idea that is likely to occur to us about minds/memory has occurred before to a lot of people and hence has been extensively written about by philosophers. Has anyone pointed you toward this book yet? It's a classic compendium of stuff along these lines.

u/_jacks_wasted_life__ · 1 pointr/neuroscience

> I am a Strange Loop


Hofstadter also wrote The Minds I, which is another interesting read.

u/ASnugglyBear · 1 pointr/suggestmeabook

Mind's I edited by Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofsteader

A Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julien Jaynes (This is completely debunked, but mindblowing all the same).

u/Nadarama · 1 pointr/AskScienceDiscussion

Have you checked out r/LucidDreaming? It's more about techniques for gaining greater conscious control, and AFIAK there's little in the way of consciousness research along the lines you bring up (since no-one can even agree on how to define consciousness, we really don't have a place to begin); but it is fertile ground for speculation.

Though it has little material in the way of lucid dreaming, The Mind's I is a classic collection of accessible essays on consciousness from empirical perspectives; and Dream Work is likewise a classic on LDing.

u/perceived_pattern · 1 pointr/AskReddit

I'll take the time to write it up if you meant that sincerely (because I haven't tried explaining it to someone else before, which is usually pretty helpful for understanding).

But if you meant that facetiously, I expect you'll be surprised how much about the phenomenon of consciousness has been convincingly explained (or, rather, explained away) in the last 20 years. Watch some videos via Google, or try this 9 year old book with some mind-changing perspectives on the subject.

Happy exploring!

u/aim2free · 1 pointr/singularity

No, I haven't read that, but just checked a summary on wikipedia.

The impression I got that is that it is quite populistic. He doesn't say anything new apart from something I seems to have published about the same time on my blog, this part about accelerated returns. I did my PhD in computational neuroscience and have so far, not heard anyone but my self speculate about this about accelerated returns being of importance to the computational efficiency of the brain[1], so this is interesting. Otherwise (only gave it a quick look through, will likely get the book and read) it seems as he is just repeating things which e.g. Douglas Hofstadter, Gerald Edelman, Daniel Dennet and me (thesis from 2003, chapter 7 speculative part) have written about.

> apparently to give him the resources to put into practice his hypothesis from that book.

Yes, this is my theory as well, to make it appear as he will put into practice the hypotheses from that book.

The employment of him can have many reasons:

  1. to ride on the singularity "AI-hype"
  2. to stop him from actually implement conscious AI.
  3. naïve assumption that he could make it.

    No 1 would simply be a reasonable business image approach. No 2 would be a sensible beings action, as we do not really need any "conscious AI" (unless I am an AI, have A.I. in my middle names though...) to implement the singularity (which is my project). No 3 is also reasonable, as if the google engineers actually had as goal to implement conscious AI and knew how to do it, they wouldn't need Kurzweil.

    However, I suspect that google already know how to implement ethical conscious AI, as when I showed this algorithm from my thesis , he almost instantly refused talking to me more, and said that they can not help me.

    I showed that algorithm for 25 strong AI researchers at a symposium in Palo Alto 2004, and they said, yes, this is it.

    However, I have later refined it and concluded that the "rules" are not needed, these are built in due to the function of the neural system, all the time striving towards consistent solutions. I wrote a semi jokular (best way to hide something, learned from Douglas Adams) approach to almost rule free algorithm in 2011. The disadvantage with this algorithm is that it can trivially be turned evil. By switching the first condition you could implement e.g. Hitler, by switching the second condition you could implement the ordinary governmental politician...

  4. OK, my PhD opponent prof Hava Siegelmann has proved that the neural networks are Super Turing, but not explicitly explained the reason for them being, that is, not in language of "accelerated returns". She is considerably smarter than me, I do not understand the details of the proof.
u/Nomikos · 1 pointr/science

From the first 40 pages, it looks like a discussion on free will, determinism, religion, morality, etc. It's interesting, and the pages are really short. Reminds me of one of the stories of The Mind's I.
Edit: reading a bit further, it has a nice twist halfway.. I daren't predict what the rest is about.

u/zapper877 · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Get him into philosophy, niestche, Wittgenstein, Plato, especially socrates, you should read this wikipedia article on socrates here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus

An amazing book to help you think more clearly about everything... an amazing read

Metaphors we live by

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

Title: Where does mathematics come from...

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/

Check out the standard encyclopedia of philosophy to find things you might think he would like:

http://plato.stanford.edu/

u/completely-ineffable · 1 pointr/philosophy

>Consider that other life forms have knowledge of their environment but have no mathematical abstractions as we know them. So knowledge doesn't need any human abstraction. i.e. no words, no numbers. It (the structure of the universe) simply exists with or without humanity.

>http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Come-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/

I'd been meaning to look at Lakoff and Nuñez and this was a good impetus to look at it. What I learned is that in the first chapter they talk about the mathematical capabilities of (nonhuman) animals (pp. 21–23). Of course, raccoons can't do representation theory and owls can't do ordinal analysis (but some cats can do inner meow-del theory). Nonetheless, animals are capable of some level of mathematical abstraction. To use L&N's examples: rats can recognize small integers and some primates have been taught to calculate with numerals.

Why did you link to a reference which contradicts your assertions?

u/Cartesian_Circle · 1 pointr/math

I tend to be the oddball non-Platonist who things math is created, not discovered. Math that "works" sticks around.

Two readings that got me there: Metaphors we Live By, Where mathematics comes from. Both somewhat controversial.

u/Felisitea · 1 pointr/exchristian

Oh...internet hugs. I was pretty much where you were fifteen years ago. I didn't go to a Christian high school, but I may as well have- I went to school in the Bible Belt. I am also bi, and I went through a long, shitty process of self-loathing thanks to messages from the pulpit every Sunday about how homosexuality was a sin.

I know you know this, but you're not unnatural. I'd actually suggest seeking out some scientific sources looking at homosexuality in the natural world. I thought this book was particularly interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Homosexual-Behaviour-Animals-Evolutionary-Perspective/dp/0521182301

Your local library might have it...or if you have a university nearby, you may be able to find it there. Some universities will allow high school students to check books out from their libraries. If nothing else, a university wifi network should let you get access to most scientific journals.

From what I've read, it sounds like bisexuality is actually a pretty natural, widespread phenomenon. Many animal species engage in homosexual behavior to strengthen social bonds. We humans are animals, so why should we be any different?

We're here for you when you need to vent, too :)

u/double-happiness · 1 pointr/videos

I read of someone (on erowid, I think it was) who was given ketamine in hospital after a major accident; when they wheeled him through the corridor on a trolley, as he passed people he was crying as he 'experienced' their entire lives from birth to death.

Also interesting that the guy in the video mentioned a 'snake'; could be the DNA helix perhaps? https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/075380851X

u/NukeThePope · 1 pointr/atheism

Thank you! This stuff was off the top of my head but strongly influenced by a recent reading of Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain. In this highly recommended book, Shermer pulls together a lot of neuro research including much that's fairly recent. Because of its up-to-date quality, I recommend this book over the "classic," The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

I believe I've correctly reproduced (or at least excerpted) what I learned from the book, but you (or rather the OP) will certainly be better off getting this directly from the horse's mouth.

u/aeyuth · 1 pointr/DebateReligion

this may answer some questions.

u/ggliddy357 · 1 pointr/Christianity

Thank you for asking a question. I have to give you credit, most people don't care enough to search.

Emotions are nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. They absolutely can be tested. "Feelings" is just the word we give to certain brain states. Each brain state is simply a mix of hormones in the brain.

Both Sam Harris and Michael Shermer reference these studies in their most recent books. To answer you question directly, oxytocin is the chemical responsible for love.

By the way, you're back to shifting the burden of proof again. I'm not saying your beliefs are either true or not. I'm simply saying you have no evidence for them so there's no good reason to believe them. As I simply said before, you can believe any thing you want, but until you have evidence, you could be as crazy as the people who think they are Napoleon Bonaparte.

Think about it for a moment. I know people who claim to have been abducted by aliens and sexually probed while on the ship. Are they telling the truth? For them, yes. They believe it, and it's as real as anything else in their life. But is it true? Probably not.

It seems you have an opportunity here. I get the feeling you're pretty smart and might be looking for answers. That's a powerful combination. The problem, however, is that the places you've been looking for answers up until now have been pretty bad. You can go deeper down the rabbit hole into things for which there is no evidence, or you can discover reality as it is.

If you're interested in living an evidence based life there are books that will help. Can I recommend one or two to get you started?

Michael Shermer has written two books that will get you started. Either would be excellent for you and your position at the moment.

The Believing Brain and Why People Believe Weird Things.

Once you get a foundation of how things work, then we can move on the fun stuff like physics, biology, philosophy, astronomy...and so on.

Do you listen to podcasts? There are a few of these you might try out as well.

Rationally Speaking
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Point of Inquiry
Reasonable Doubts


In the end, as I said before, you're going to have to make a choice. Either the supernatural realm exists or it doesn't. And since there isn't any evidence now, nor has any evidence ever been shown that anything supernatural ever existed, it should be an easy choice.

It's pretty simple really. When someone says weird, crazy things they believe, I would believe them too, IF THEY HAVE EVIDENCE. If they don't, I'm sorry I'm going to withhold saying you're right or wrong until I have more information.

u/calladus · 1 pointr/atheism

>but I do see something that I'm 90% sure people who consider themselves religious can't see.

You mean like experiencing the Holy Spirit?

Yea, a few of us figured out that is a brain process. Michael Shermer recently wrote a whole book about it.

Short answer - don't believe everything you think.

u/Rhujaa · 1 pointr/emetophobia

Just do your best, that's all either of you can really ask for. The comment from wwad77 hits the nail on the head, really.. my boyfriend helps me avoid possible situations as much as he can, but at the same time we both know it's only an enabler. From my point of view, the best thing to be told (when in a stressful moment) is the truth - that everything will be OK no matter what happens. Just be supportive and try to tell her how you feel or think whenever needed. My boyfriend lets me know when my phobia is getting in the way and it has helped me try to find ways to cope better, because I care about us and I want what's best for the both of us. I feel hurt sometimes when he says something about it, and it may happen to your SO also, but it just really needs to be said.

It's heartbreaking at times, to be honest. I get depressed often thinking about how much this phobia gets in the way of life, but it also makes me strive to do better. Always remember to think about it from her point of view whenever you can.. to her this is the worst thing in the world. Everyone has something they are truly afraid of, and sometimes it's stupid things.

You are a wonderful person to try and find help/advice, I praise your understanding skills! Oh, as a response to your inquiry about treatment, I enjoyed going to CBT sessions with a therapist.. but to truly "get over" this phobia, gradual exposure seems to be the only thing that works. I am also considering the "Thrive" book to try and help myself: http://www.amazon.com/Cure-Your-Emetophobia-Thrive-Researched-backed/dp/0956516645

u/mizzlebizzle · 1 pointr/emetophobia

Look into this book: Thrive Emetophobia. I downloaded it on my kindle and it's made a huge difference for me :) It really helps to understand your thinking patterns.

u/ArcoliteUK · 1 pointr/emetophobia

I wouldn't say I have any coping methods other than distraction (TV mostly, comedies).

I have to agree that the majority of the posts here seem to just collude and enable each other.

One of the biggest changes in my life has been reading the Thrive programe. There's a mountain of reviews on Amazon saying that it works. The author has a lot of Videos of fellow sufferers who are now free of this problem too.

It takes a lot of work and I wouldn't say I'm even close to cured, however it makes you realize that Emetophobia isn't something that happens TO YOU. It's merely a symptom of poorly managed thinking styles, beliefs and behaviors. Change those and Emetophobia goes away (as well as other things).

The reason why emetophobia sends us neurotic is because we do our best to try to avoid the thing we fear most. The problem is that it's impossible to be 100% certain that it isn't going to happen. As a result, we go almost insane following safety seeking routines and behaviors to try to avoid the unavoidable.

I'm still working my way through the programme, but one key thing I that sticks out in my mind is this - think of an emetophobia and each catastrophic thought we have as a fire. Currently we're fire fighting with extinguishers such as coping strategies, avoidance and safety behaviors to put out these "fires".

What if we didn't create those fires in the first place?

It's easier said than done, but it is possible.
People without this fear aren't just "better" at coping with the thoughts - they don't have them in the first place! We're doing it to ourselves!

u/KajikiaAudax · 1 pointr/samharris

> heritability isn't a measure of genetics.

Now you're playing semantics to the utmost. The fact of the matter is you inherit certain genes from your parents. Your idea that nothing is actually genetically inherited is strange. IQ has been shown to be heritable, as has height. I understand the societal expectations creating the earring "heritability" but I have no idea what you're talking about when you say IQ isn't at least partially inherited from your parents.

> If you're going to so easily dismiss all the relevant scientists on this topic then what differentiates your position from creationism?

Because a professor of genetics at Harvard isn't saying that the position that Christianity is false is scientifically untenable (I would refer you to Dr. David Reich, Ph.D's article in the New York Times). In fact, here's some of it, followed by a link:

> I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html

His article is a canary in the coalmine event. He claims to have NO IDEA! what we're going to find out about group differences going forward. Then why the hell is he so nervous? Because he knows that the odds are extremely high that the average IQ of a fully-nourished sub-Saharan African population and a fully-nourished Ashkenazi Jew population with equal access to education are not both 100.000000000000000000000000000000. You know that too, you just can't admit it, so you appeal to a scientific consensus that exists because people are terrified of having their careers destroyed. About that consensus...

> Reich’s claim that we need to prepare for genetic evidence of racial differences in behavior or health ignores the trajectory of modern genetics. For several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference.

That is from the rebuttal letter 67 scientists "wrote" in response to Reich's article in the NYT.

That rebuttal letter is here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich

Allow me to destroy that argument (and the credibility of that rebuttal letter):

> Why so many African-Americans have high blood pressure
Theories include higher rates of obesity and diabetes among African-Americans. Researchers have also found that there may be a gene that makes African-Americans much more salt sensitive. In people who have this gene, as little as one extra gram (half a teaspoon) of salt could raise blood pressure as much as 5 mm Hg.

https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/why-high-blood-pressure-is-a-silent-killer/high-blood-pressure-and-african-americans

Oops! I guess the American Heart Association is a eugenics society now.

> As for people like Jensen and Rushton, how do you feel about the concept of "conflict of interest"? Are you aware of the Pioneer Fund?

This is an ad hominem attack. Does the medical literature back what he was saying, or not? Has "compensatory education" increased IQ, or not? According to Dr. Haier, it HAS NOT! He has explicity said that compensatory education has not closed the black/white IQ gap. Dr. Haier's position (and he reveals this in his latest book) is that IQ is heritable, and we can raise it using CRISPR. The most generous interpretations of IQ being raised by compensatory education grant that it raised IQ by 4 points in cases of the application of an extremely rigorous program. That's 1/3 of a deviation. According to Haier, what happens is in children it looks like you can increase IQ a great deal, but as the child gets older, IQ becomes more heritable. In other words they lose those "gains".

A description of Haier's book (it was published 2.5 years ago):

> This book introduces new and provocative neuroscience research that advances our understanding of intelligence and the brain. Compelling evidence shows that genetics plays a more important role than environment as intelligence develops from childhood, and that intelligence test scores correspond strongly to specific features of the brain assessed with neuroimaging. In understandable language, Richard J. Haier explains cutting-edge techniques based on genetics, DNA, and imaging of brain connectivity and function. He dispels common misconceptions, such as the belief that IQ tests are biased or meaningless, and debunks simple interventions alleged to increase intelligence. Readers will learn about the real possibility of dramatically enhancing intelligence based on neuroscience findings and the positive implications this could have for education and social policy. The text also explores potential controversies surrounding neuro-poverty, neuro-socioeconomic status, and the morality of enhancing intelligence for everyone.

https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=richard+haier+intelligence&qid=1562195024&s=gateway&sr=8-4

u/hey_look_its_shiny · 1 pointr/quotes

I appreciate that you have had discussions with people in the field and read some papers that left you with the impression that you've outlined above. Unfortunately, it is not an accurate representation of the overall field's views on the subject.

In addition to the general roundup on IQ listed above, Wikipedia has also done a decent job of summarizing how neuroscience approaches inquiries into the neural bases of intelligence.

Edit: in addition to the above, here is a Cambridge University introductory-level Neuroscience textbook on intelligence. From the first paragraph of the summary: "He dispels common misconceptions, such as the belief that IQ tests are biased or meaningless, and debunks simple interventions alleged to increase intelligence."

u/RileyFenn · 1 pointr/DescentIntoTyranny

What about the guy who tried to run from the cops in a vehicle with his pregnant gf in it?

Because she got hurt doesn't mean she's automatically the victim and is "right."

I think the verdict to not indict Darren Wilson demonstrated that.

Here. Let me help you out. Put this on your wishlist for Santa.

u/Alanzos_Blog · 1 pointr/scientology

Here are two excellent books in this very subject:

The Believing Brain and Why People Believe Weird Things both by Michael Shermer, the head of the skeptic's society.

There is one passage which describes what you are talking about to a "T"

>In 1620 English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon offered his own Easy Answer to the Hard Question:

>The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate … And such is the way of all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, although this happened much oftener, neglect and pass them by.52

>Why do smart people believe weird things? Because, to restate my thesis in light of Bacon’s insight, smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

From: http://www.michaelshermer.com/weird-things/excerpt/

and

From: http://www.michaelshermer.com/2002/09/smart-people-believe-weird-things/

Alanzo

u/zeyus · 1 pointr/exjw

Awesome, it's great you're so proud of her!

Haha knowledge that leads to everlasting boredom! Book studies were the worst, I always felt super obligated to study extra hard because there were so few people that often nobody would answer!

Don't be so sure that your family will keep abandoning you, it's possible sure, but there's always hope! Often they're surprised that you can leave the witnesses and live a normal, or even better than normal life (of course there's always the "blessed by satan" get out clause) but they do expect people who leave to get aids and die from a heroin overdose.

It's easy to prove them wrong! Either way though, you have your own family to look out for and you can learn what not to do!

On to the suggested reading. I've mentioned many on here before but I don't expect everyone to be aware of it all so here goes:

Reading (I have a kindle and love reading, but they're all available for ebook and in paperback)

u/TheSecondAsFarce · 1 pointr/skeptic

Check out Rob Brotherton's (2015) Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. He specifically focuses on the psychological components.




Another book worth checking out is Michael Shermer's (2012) The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--How we Construct Beliefs and Reinforce them as Truths. While the book touches on a wide number of topics beyond conspiracy theories, it addresses much of the psychology underlying the belief in conspiracy theories.

u/lamblikeawolf · 1 pointr/AdviceAnimals

This book is basically dedicated to answering the question, "why do people believe things" and points out several ways in which people trick themselves into believing only what they want to believe and how it results in ignoring facts that do not fit with their pre-conceived paradigm.

It is full of science, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the topic.

u/UnsinkableRubberDuck · 1 pointr/funny

> I could try to argue all this but I really don't have the knowledge for it

Admirable of you to admit, rather than getting angry and stomping off. I encourage you to look into it yourself, but I can't really recommend any sources to go to. What I can do is recommend you maybe have a look at The Believing Brain, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and, if you're feeling up to it, God is Not Great.

u/SomeGuy58439 · 1 pointr/FeMRADebates

INTJ generally when taking such tests, but I can't say that I consider them all that worthwhile.

I take the Stuart J Ritchie approach to IQ (he's the author of Intelligence: All That Matters) ... that it's valuable to be aware of the concept but not particular worthwhile finding out your own.

> BR: Is there any reason why a person would want to know their IQ?

> SR: I don't think it's particularly useful.

> I don't know what my IQ is. One of the guys in the psychology department here knows, because he tested me. And there's always a slight awkwardness when we're talking about IQ. He knows what my IQ is. But I have not, and I have no interest in knowing.

u/shelbyjosie · 1 pointr/newzealand
u/JarinJove · 1 pointr/samharris

https://smile.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie-ebook/dp/B00RTY0LPO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Try reading actual experts, since Murray is a political scientist like me with no qualification in IQ.

u/ParkerColeman · 1 pointr/pornfree

The biggest FIVE tips I have for you:

- identify your triggers, and create new routines and habits to replace porn, and occupy the time when you'd normally use porn

- develop solid self-care routines, especially in the morning and before bed.

- Meditate every day, and become a student of mindfulness

- identify and heal the painful feelings you use porn to avoid (this is a slow, long-term process).

- Find someone outside yourself (this community, SAA, a therapist or counselor, a religious leader) to work through this with you.

First tip is create new routines. I like to look at this as a 3-step process:

  1. Think about the times you normally turn to porn -- often this will be specific times of day (late night, after video games, late morning, whatever). Other examples would be triggers, like getting into a fight with your GF, when you're tired, when you're angry, when you can't sleep, when you're drunk, and so-on. Make a list of all of these triggers, and update it as you recognize more of them.
  2. Consciously plan out a new routine -- choose an activity that you will do in those times whether or not you have the urge to look at porn (meaning, don't wait for a craving, make it a ritual every day or every time). Say to yourself, "when [situation] happens, I will choose to [activity]." -- Also, If you have too much resistance to working out or whatever, it can be as simple as "walk to the coffee shop and have a coffee" or "drive to the library and read a book for half an hour." Anything to break up the routine is great.
  3. Execute that plan consistently.

    Second tip is Self Care. This seems counterintuitive and unrelated to porn, but in my experience it is key. Taking care of your self makes you feel less emotional pain, which leads to fewer porn cravings (to escape that pain); and also fills your life with stuff that's not your addiction, rather than sitting on the couch trying "not to use."

    The 5 biggest pillars of Self Care are:

    move your body

    eat healthy food,

    hydrate,

    get enough sleep, and

    meditate

    (The last one, Meditate, is so key I made it its own tip.) You should create a new schedule where you work towards doing all of those things consistently, every day.

    Other examples of self-care include journaling, grooming, going for a walk, sports (cycling, yoga and climbing are my favorites), meditation, saying no, alone time, crafting, cooking, and gratitude.

    Third tip is meditate. It's important enough that it deserves its own section. There are a ton of great apps out there, but the two I recommend most for beginners are Insight Timer (free) and Headspace (a very worth-it $8/mo). They both offer really straightforward, non-woo-woo guided courses that make this crucial life skill very approachable. It may seem counter-intuitive that meditating every day will help you quit porn, but it really, really is helpful. And, as Dan Harris says, it really does, over time, make you "about 10% happier."

    Fourth tip is identify and heal the painful feelings you use porn to avoid. You may or may not be aware of it in yourself, but most people who use porn a lot and have a hard time quitting typically are experiencing some amount of emotional pain they're trying to avoid or anesthetize themselves from. The slow, gradual work of discovering your pain and trauma, acknowledging it, and healing from it, will dramatically reduce your random urges to look at porn.

    The easiest way to do this is therapy, counseling, or SAA/AA. If those options don't work, journaling your feelings and thoughts can help a lot, especially with identifying reoccurring patterns in your brain.

    Coming from someone who is skeptical about "self-help books," I have also learned that there are books written by actual doctors which are a far cry from The Secret and so-on. I personally recommend

    - Robert Duff, PHD (Aka Duff the Psych)'s two excellent books, and his podcast.

    - Seth J. Gillihan, PhD's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy workbook Retrain Your Brain in 7 Weeks

    Fifth tip is find someone outside yourself. I was resistant to this idea at first, but for me it has made a huge difference. I have come to believe that if you have tried quitting a few times already, but consistently relapsed, getting someone in your corner gives you a huge advantage. It makes your intentions and your setbacks much clearer, and gives you some really needed perspective when your brain starts asking you for dopamine.
u/LuckyTheLurker · 1 pointr/Advice

You should talk to a professional but in the meantime look for a book about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT. It can help and you can practice it yourself.

This book is free for prime members on Amazon. I haven't read it yet but it has decent reviews.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01M0ILKMQ/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i_QM-3Db7NTBG5H

u/NegativeGhostwriter · 0 pointsr/neuro

The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul- edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.

u/mauszozo · 0 pointsr/scifi

Already been mentioned but:

Neuromancer - genre defining, gritty, required reading. ;)

Snow Crash - Excellent, hugely enjoyable characters, good sci fi



Also good and haven't been mentioned:

Headcrash by Bruce Bethke - bizarre, silly, fun cyberpunk (for instance, full sensoral cyberspace connection is done through a rectally inserted probe..)

The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter - Excellent collection of short stories about cognitive machines

Wyrm by Mark Fabi - "Interweaving mythology, virtual reality, role-playing games, chess strategy, and artificial intelligence with a theory of a Group Overmind Daemon susceptible to religious symbolism, first-timer Fabi pits a group of computer programmers and hackers against a formidable opponent who may fulfill end-of-the-world prophesies as the millennium approaches."

u/nucleartool · 0 pointsr/worldnews

This book (The Cosmic Serpent) thinks it already does. Basic premise, we are aliens and taking drugs allows us to connect with other worlds etc... It sounds pretty far fetched but I couldn't help agreeing as I read. Not saying it is true but an interesting read. Would love to hear what experts in the field think of it.


Link

u/NoWarForGod · 0 pointsr/atheism

Listen to this man, he is exactly right. Have you ever read this? Constructs this exact argument very well.

u/antonivs · -1 pointsr/DebateReligion

> There's close to no serious ethicists who defend it in modern day

Whoever told you that has not been paying attention to developments in ethics over the last 450 years, since the publication of work by Sextus Empiricus and Michel de Montaigne.

Here are some modern papers, books, and articles by or about serious ethicists who defend relativism:

u/nonce-13819084108 · -1 pointsr/politics

>i am unaware of any anthropological studies that have established this "truth" of which you speak. could you perhaps post a few links to them?

You need an anthropological study to confirm that the heterosexual union is procreative and that procreation is a biological imperative for virtually all species? (Except the human gay, oddly).

How do you think a study like that would look? Other than a chapter from a 3rd grade biology book, I mean.

>http://www.yalescientific.org/2012/03/do-animals-exhibit-homosexuality/

Anything older than the past 20 years or so? Isn't it strange that all this homo-science and homo-history suddenly appeared in the past few decades?


>http://www.amazon.com/Homosexual-Behaviour-Animals-Evolutionary-Perspective/dp/0521182301

Is homosexual behavior the same thing as homosexual orientation? I wonder how those authors asked those animals how they choose to identify?

u/LeSlowpoke · -1 pointsr/iamverysmart

The easiest read you're going to have on this is Stuart Richie's Intelligence: All That Matters

In the scientific literature there is an r-factor of between .5 and .8 for the genetic heritability of IQ, with the rest being environmental factors - predominantly non-shared environment. The variance between .5-.8 in the relationship between heritability and IQ comes largely as a matter of when people are tested. Child IQ leans closer to .5, suggesting greater (nonshared) environmental effects, while adult IQ measures closer to .8.

If you want a really serious look at this, and if you actually gave a shit, you'd read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

u/coldnever · -5 pointsr/philosophy

> Dismissing the work of top minds in their field with such disparaging remarks is an impressive show of arrogance-

An argument from authority is no argument at all. Truth doesn't work on human ego, it just is.

More importantly the enlightenment was wrong about human reasoning, see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

That means many of our abstractions are not correlated with what is true about the world. So remember maybe it is you who are illiterate next time! Remember, I can tell you the facts and you will not reason to the right conclusion.

>The kind of "knowledge" we attribute to animals isn't even the confused knowledge of preliterate superstition,

Nice to see your prejudice showing, the fact is animals have knowledge enough to navigate their environment. Once you admit that, you admit that life doesn't need human abstractions in order to survive. AKA other life forms without human awareness gather information about their environment and have no human abstract systems.

You're playing a language game like Wittgenstein said, the FACT that these organisms can gain knowledge about their environment disproves this threads raging hatred of the idea that you can have knowledge without mathematics as humans know it! Mother nature doesn't give a fuck about the rage of a certain kind of primate species.

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Come-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/