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>information integration theory

i do believe you mean integrated information theory? (btw. woah, i just had to delete an entire section from that page, because it was terribly written!)

moving on, i see you're indeed a fan of the eastern stuff. i'd like to just note here that this whole idea of "liberating" consciousness from "disturbance" is entirely value-laden (there's this whole historical developmental thing that comes into play), and as such, i myself don't consider it worthwhile. we could talk about it if you wish, but i'm afraid i would probably just disappoint you by merely attacking the ideas, not exploring them as such (i have a certain measure of experience with such ideas due to my time spent studying philosophy - philosophy of consciousness in particular, actually).

as for husserl - you should definitely read e.g. some merleau-ponty. he's a much less obscure student of husserl, and he's got some great perspectives to add. where husserl was a bit more formal or idealistic in scope, merleau-ponty opens up to some more "alive" angles - or at least, so it would appear on the surface of it, probably because husserl is older, and his tone is rigid, where MP moves in another time. let's say that the perspectives need more work to tease out in husserl than in MP.

but actually, if you're gonna read at all, you should start by reading some overviews. that's always a good idea, when touching a new field. this book is co-written by a former professor of mine, and it's pretty sweet.

you might even be delighted to find that some phenomenologists in recent years have begun to dig around in eastern stuff, to find similarities and establish connections. it's not something i personally found rewarding, but some probably like the culture, or just meditation in particular. verdict's not out yet on whether this actually makes sense in an academic context.

in your last part there, i don't entirely get how you're using the word "phenomenology", so i'm having trouble commenting on it. but it appears that you're making a dualism of some sort out of the study of consciousness on one hand, and the materiality of the world on the other. important to note: it's a major part of phenomenology to dismiss dualisms of this sort, in so far as they're setup by people who wish to describe the world in "layers" (as we see it with so many models of consciousness done by "fans" of the frameworks of modern natural science).

No. Very no. A few reasons:

First, the social problems caused by overpopulation discussed by others in this thread and books like The Postmortal.

Secondly, at best it would be really fucking boring after a while, but more likely it would turn into a nightmare. I suppose that if you knew you were going to be immortal, you could make some uber-safe investments and ride them until you were a bajillionaire, and then do whatever you want on this world for as long as it lasts; go back to school and get PhDs in everything and make all sorts of discoveries and inventions, and basically be a superhero. But after you've done all that, then you still have a literal eternity left to live. If you're smart you'll have devoted substantial energy to figuring out how you're going to get off of Earth and onto some other habitable planet before the Sun becomes a red giant. Maybe that's not even possible, in which case have fun enduring whatever surviving is like while the Sun incinerates the Earth. Even if it is possible to travel to another inhabitable world, you'll inevitably run into a similar problem wherever you go next, so in the best case you're probably going to spend untold trillions of years just traveling between different star systems. Which I'm sure is a spectacular experience at first, but anything will get boring after a thousand years, let alone ten billion. In any event, eventually your luck would run out and you'd end up on a planet with insufficient resources to allow you to get to another star system (again, that's probably the one we're on right now), in which case ultimately you'd just end up in a near-endless orbit around a brown dwarf star, waiting for the heat death of the universe to finally annihilate you. (Or not? What then?) Anyone who considers true immortality desirable doesn't understand what it would mean to be alive for literally eternity.

Finally, life just wears you down after a while. Have you ever talked to someone in their late 90s? They're almost universally ready to go. Not just because they're always in physical pain either: they have seen and done enough. Life contains a lot of joy but also a lot of pain, and it all gets to be really tiring after very long.

So no, I just wouldn't want to live forever under any circumstances. If there were some magical way to extend my life an extra 20 or 30, I guess maybe all the way up to 100 years or so, I might cautiously consider doing it, just because I'm curious to see what will happen in the future. But ultimately, I'm glad my life will someday come to an end.

I think they should be allowed to, but they wouldn't be competitive enough to participate in the top professional leagues. In the book Andy Roddick Beat Me with a Frying Pan, the author dedicates a chapter to the gap between men and women in sports.

He concludes that the top women in the world compete at about the level of 15-year-old boys. For example, the world records in track and field for women are right around the records of 15-16 year-old boys. Also, the US Women's National soccer team regularly scrimmages 14-16 year-old men's club soccer teams. They can beat the 14-year-old squads pretty easily but once they play against the 15-year-old teams, they start having trouble. They start getting beat regularly playing against the 16-year-old teams. It's the same in basketball.

Even in non-physical sports, the top women aren't really close to the top men. The author interviewed the top women's pool player in the world, Jeanette Lee, and she said that if she played in the men's tour, she would be ranked around 200.

I haven't read or otherwise studied Dr. Mate enough to say for certain, but he seems quite reasonable and well-informed in the interview I linked, and has excellent ratings on his books (including the one on ADD), which would seem unusual if he was as unreliable as you claim he is.

I would also note that there has come into being significant financial incentive for schools, doctors, and many scientists in the US (via a $40 billion annual psychotropic drug tab and additional money for schools if children are diagnosed/on ADHD drugs) to attribute ADD to biological causes instead of psychological ones, ones even though the biology of human children would not seem to have changed so much in the past 30 years or so to explain the huge upsurge in ADD/ADHD diagnoses in that time frame. I can only imagine it would be much more appealing for many parents to attribute the poor school performance and other problem behaviour of their children to biological factors instead of poor parenting as well.

When I said psychopaths were severely abused I actually meant serial killers (I mis-typed), though the amount of child abuse present in the world (see again http://board.freedomainradio.com/forums/t/23711.aspx ) would seem to cover the 4% of psychopaths quite well.

While I have heard intelligent people promote both sides of this topic, here is an interview with someone who has studied the topic in some depth (see his book here), and has come to the opinion that ADHD drugs are vastly over-prescribed, and are doing a lot of harm in the scope they are currently used in.

From the book description:

Robert Whitaker discusses his book 'Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America'

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation's children. What is going on?

Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix "chemical imbalances" in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals.

Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?

This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?

By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?

In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

No.

We'll start with a machine that has two parts: The Hard Drive, and the Reader. The Hard Drive must contain a pattern written in shorthand which can be interpreted perfectly by the Reader.

If the Hard Drive's atoms are all you're worried about, then in theory it's completely possible and in some cases even trivial to have a Hard Drive store a pattern that tells where each and every one of its own atoms is, including the atoms used to store the shorthand pattern. You just need a sufficiently complex Reader to be able to interpret and extract the pattern.

Things get trickier if you want the Hard Drive to store the atoms in the Reader in addition to its own pattern. What this means is that every single atom in the Reader also needs to follow an exact pattern, which it can itself interpret and extract.

So you have a Hard Drive which stores two pieces of information: The pattern that you can extract to tell where every atom in the Hard Drive is (which I will call Pattern A), and the pattern you can extract to tell where every atom in the Reader is (which I will call Pattern B). This means that Pattern A now needs to include a shorthand of Pattern B. Pattern A is now Pattern A + short(Pattern B). But wait! This means that Pattern A no longer describes every atom in the Hard Drive. It describes how it was before short(Pattern B) got added in. So now we have new(Pattern A) which contains the information of old(Pattern A) + short(Pattern B). But this means that old(Pattern A) no longer describes anything useful. Additionally, new(Pattern A) still doesn't contain all of the information, because it doesn't describe itself; new(Pattern A) = old(Pattern A) + short(Pattern B). Plus, we might need to come up with a new(Pattern B) which can read new(Pattern A), because this step has made the storage much more complicated. But then we'll need to make a short(new(Pattern B) and add it to new(Pattern A). And then we'll have new(new(Pattern A)) = new(Pattern A) + short(new(Pattern B)). And so on, and so forth, ramping up the complexity with each new step.

While each new step will look like it's getting close to perfect self-reference, it'll always change something minor that will have to be addressed in the next step. You'd need an infinite amount of steps and an infinite capacity for storage in order to perfectly store the pattern.

If this machine can't even describe itself, it can't describe the universe it belongs to. The universe includes the machine, so total information about the universe has to contain total information about the machine.

If you're really interested in this subject, I recommend reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. He goes into far more detail about it.

To this day there is still no greater book for opening up the world of thought than Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. This book is indispensable.

Aside from that the best advice, as many here have noted, is to simply read widely and often. Here are some other books I can personally recommend as being particularly insightful:

• Wind, Sand and Stars
  
• Einstein's Dreams
  
• Family Happiness
  
• Borges
  
• Kafka
  
• Tao Te Ching
  
• Book of Job
  
• The Stranger
  
• Prometheus Rising
  
• Shakespeare

If you'd like a richer understanding of the many factors tied into such a question, try reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.

Douglas Hofstadter talks about something like this in I am a Strange Loop. Here's an interview that talks about it a bit. I recommend reading the book, though you may enjoy it more after reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

You would probably really enjoy the book Four Systems, which I'm sad to see is out of print. It was a textbook in my Intro to Poli Sci class. It presents four different systems of government -- social democracy, individual democracy, communism and fascism -- each from the perspective of someone who advocates the system. As a freshman I came out of each section (plus the introduction, which covers anarchism) feeling like "Wow, yeah, this actually makes a lot of sense!"

I generally agree here but I think you might be painting a broad brush on conservative perspectives.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052FF7YM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_88EOzbAX3DX47

https://youtu.be/ONUM4akzLGE

2017 Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-OKOpQlHyR4k5h

I think here the question become do the ends justify the means. In order to allow for a system that is built upon people being chattel for others, it requires actively subjugating them, and society has to be actively molded to allow for that subjugation.

Slaveholding changed southern culture. I think Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll: The world the slaves made does a very good job illustrating this. He states slavery created "a paternalism accepted by both masters and slave--but with radically different interpretations." Which requires masters "to see their slaves as acquiescent." These types of attitudes then shaded most of what is considered "Southern culture" to the point that it created a society of Slavery, that was actively maintained through the rule of law.

I've been an atheist for most of my life. Just because this is how I think doesn't mean I should expect others to adopt my thinking.

Suggested reading: http://www.amazon.com/The-Belief-Instinct-Psychology-Destiny/dp/0393341267

There are billions of religious people in the world. Do you think we are so good at teaching? I wish we were!

You might want to read The Gift of Fear...

https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Gavin-Becker/dp/0440226198

If you haven't read it; I highly suggest Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett. It's an entire book dedicated to this question.

Hey, you might find something like this book a good start.

I think the matrix representation and is similar to the letter representation just might allow for a little more incite either way your trying to formalize thought. A lot of this is talked about in the emperors new mind by roger penrsoe and I would serious take a look into it. Its really cheep and goes into a lot of cool math and AI and I think will get you closer to answering your question.

On top of that I would suggest learning about Buddhism and vipassana meditation. I know reddit has a negative disposition toward religion but just take a look at it, Buddhism doesn't have any of that Dogmatic blind faith their is in other religion. The reason I suggest this is because your going to be limited in try to understand thought through symbolic thought alone and direct observation will likely be more insiteful. Also because your talking about looking for something that's bigger then us, which comes into play with the idea of not self.

One difficult aspect of your question is that it involves incite into the nature of thoughts. Your not going to get that just by using symbolic language your also going to have to look at thoughts. Another things that I learned from Buddhism is not self. I can't fully explain it because I don't fully understand it but I think this concept would be helpful in understanding your question since a created thought implies a creator but if there is no creator of the thought then there is just the thought.

So going along these lines my guess is that thoughts are just the same as any other event in life and we only think we are creating them. For example a thought about a alarm clock is just the image of an alarm clock or word description of an alarm clock or some combination of all of them that arises when the brain is preforming a small level of Synesthesia where instead of mixing scenes your mixing the memory of a bell and clock. Many times we mix memory with a purpose but that purpose is usually driven by something other then us. So one way of looking at the creating of the though of the alarm clock is really just an event occurring similar to two liquids mixing. So in this case I would think there are an infinite number of thoughts since there are infinite number of possibilities of an event.

So with this description of thought we might even be able to say most thoughts are original because the event called thought isn't likely to occur twice in exactly the same way. The question of whether all thoughts exist before the thinker thinks it would now be released as do events exists before they occur. But then what does exist even mean?

I'll just leave this here...

https://www.amazon.com/S-J-Abrams/dp/0316201642

For further discussion, read "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts". Some excellent discussion on memory and interactions with motivation and actions.

Could you please rephrase your question in the form an Edwin Starr song? :)

1. War can provide huge spoils to the winners. (But this is not always true.)
   
   
2. War can be good for surviving males. Since war deaths are disproportionately male, war can ease the competition for females. This is especially beneficial in countries in which males already outnumber females. China is such a country, which inspired this Forbes article.
   
   
3. Similarly, the deaths of many males can be good for the broader population. This is because having a lot of males with time on their hands can lead to large problems. As the Forbes article mentioned above notes, "An entire class of potentially angry, frustrated, relatively poor and uneducated single men can mean serious threats to societal stability, if this group builds a class identity that feels antagonized by society as a whole." (In addition to demographic trends such as China's, polygamy can also lead to a lot of mateless males. I've read that this can lead to instability, violence, and even war; I can't recall where I read that, though, and all I can find is this 2007 piece.)
   
   
4. According to Mancur Olson, the pioneering theorist of collective action, war can destroy the morass of rent-seeking that seems to exist alongside every government. As The Economist said in its 1998 obituary of Olson, "In any human society, he said, parochial cartels and lobbies tend to accumulate over time, until they begin to sap a country's economic vitality. A war or some other catastrophe sweeps away the choking undergrowth of pressure groups." The relevant book is The Decline and Fall of Nations.
   
   
5. Similarly, fighting a war against evil can lead to the evil side losing, which is an upside to fighting. (Caveats apply!)
   
   So war does, or can, have benefits, and some of them can be big. But in my opinion wars in the real world are almost never worth the costs.
   
   Edit: Added polygamy bit.