Thursday, September 24, 2015

Mortality, fidgeting and sitting

"As other studies have, the team found that longer time spent sitting was linked to mortality. Among women sat for more than seven hours per day and who didn’t fidget much, their risk of mortality was 43% higher than those who sat for less than five hours. (When the team adjusted for things like smoking and drinking, the mortality risk for sitting for more than seven hours a day was still higher by 30%.)
But what was really interesting was that being more fidgety seemed to counteract this effect: That is, the middle- and high-fidgeting groups didn’t have any greater risk of death even sitting more than seven hours every day."-forbes link

It seems that there is a way that might counteract the detrimental effects of prolonged sitting.  Simply moving a bit constantly appears to offset the increased mortality

Thursday, September 17, 2015

resveratrol alzheimer's trial

 QUOTE:
“This is a single, small study with findings that call for further research to interpret properly.”


Patients who were treated with increasing doses of resveratrol over 12 months showed little or no change in amyloid-beta40 (Abeta40) levels in blood and cerebrospinal fluid. In contrast, those taking a placebo had a decrease in the levels of Abeta40 compared with their levels at the beginning of the study.
“A decrease in Abeta40 is seen as dementia worsens and Alzheimer’s disease progresses; still, we can’t conclude from this study that the effects of resveratrol treatment are beneficial,” Turner explains. “It does appear that resveratrol was able to penetrate the blood brain barrier, which is an important observation. Resveratrol was measured in both blood and cerebrospinal fluid.”-link
END QUOTE
Resveratrol appears to show some effectiveness on initial trials and further research is to be done to confirm initial findings.

Monday, August 31, 2015

interesting snippet from an article from this year(2015)

"There’s been another shake-up in our understanding of the causes of cardiovascular disease. Cholesterol is still king. But it now shares explanatory power with a swarm of bacteria resident in the digestive tract. The first studies of these bacteria (reviewed here) found direct links between the chemical product of their metabolism and the vascular events leading to heart attack. Now studies are linking these bacteria to heart failure and even chronic kidney disease."-link

cool vid

Sunday, August 23, 2015

post on vr on kurzweilai

The fact that they accomplish things is what makes them real.-Spikosauropod

In the end it is not the effects on unconscious matter that matters, wind blowing in a planet never to be inhabited is meaningless. What actually matters is the effects upon conscious agents. And [full immersion] virtual reality allows direct manipulation of conscious states. Pleasure, pain, myriad experiences.-link

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Two interesting articles

 

On examination, they found that rat vibrissal cortex comprises about 500,000 neurons, the number and 3D distribution being remarkably preserved across animals. More importantly, the number of neurons per cortical column varied between 10,000 and 30,000 within individual animals.
 ...

“Instead, the organization of the cerebral cortex seems to be shaped by the information obtained at the peripheral sensory sheet, a finding that may pertain to other sensory systems and species, including people.-link
 This one suggests that the size of hypercolumns or macrocolumns is not constant but based on input. 

The models suggest that cortical circuitry interconnects most neurons across cortical columns, rather than within and that these “trans-columnar” networks are not uniformly structured: they are highly specialized and integrate signals from multiple sensory receptors.
 ...
 Neurons of all cell types projected the majority of their axon — the part of the neuron that transmits information to other neurons — far beyond the borders of the cortical column they were located in. That means information from a single whisker spreads into multiple cortical columns.-link
 Another interesting finding, showing the importance of transcolumnar connectivity

Sunday, August 9, 2015

post on kurzweilai forums related to aging

I think we have solved the mystery of ageing. Ageing is what happens when imperfections in the body's ability to repair itself and clean up the waste which it produces is allowed to accumulate. Why is it allowed to accumulate? Because the selfish gene does not give a fig about damage or waste which negatively affects survival rates only after that period of time in which reproduction is likely to occur. As there are several very different causes of damage and waste we cannot look to one single way to tackle the causes of ageing but require instead a range of techniques for dealing with each of the seven deadly sins of ageing.-Extropia DaSilva
Some of the most metabolically active cells, and thus the ones producing the highest amount of damaging byproducts of metabolism, cells that do not even divide to dilute this damage, are neurons. What have we seen? Even with the exact same genes, nondividing neuron cells can live over twice as long as the original host when transplanted between species. That tells you that in some cases some of the cells already have active mechanisms sufficient to last at least twice as long as the host does. So what is going on? At the cellular level it seems over twice the lifespan is possible with existing genes, in some species, if the right genes were being activated.
The problem with Aubrey's view is that one might say the same SENS protocol might also be required to say triple a long lived species lifespan, say a bonobo's lifespan from 40 years to 120 years, yet we know humans with less than 2% genetic difference(most of the difference likely unrelated to lifespan extension.), accomplished this and many SENS protocols were not necessary. We also know that some species that appear not to age appear not to have undertaken some of the sens protocols like mitosens or WILT.
It is also said that there are closely related species were one ages and the other does not, suggesting that all that might be required are small amounts of genetic tweaks to reach negligible senescence.
It is also known that another mammal, the Bowhead whale, can reach 200+ and has possibly a theoretical lifespan of about 250 years!
Why the Bowhead whale is outliving so much the other kind of whales?-melajara

Some sources say the bowhead whale might not even age.
Because the naked mole-rat is better adapted to deal with the damage. I'm sure we could get humans to live to 200, if we for 10 000 years only allowed those with the oldest (grand) grand parents to get children.-Erik
Within the mouse the neurons have the capacity, the mechanisms, to live over twice as long as the mouse itself(probably even longer than twice if not indefinitely), these are the cells that are subject to some of the highest amount of damage of all cells due to their extremely high metabolic activity. Also unlike other cells these cells can't divide to dilute the damage in daughter cells. All the defense and repair mechanisms of these neural cells also exist in each and every cell of the mouse, as the genome is shared, and since most of the other cells have lower metabolic activity the mechanisms might actually be overkill as they can handle far greater generation of damaging byproducts of metabolism than other cells actually produce, plus others cells can dilute the damage by dividing.

LINK TO SOURCE

post on Josh Mitteldorf's blog

The thing is, that there appear to be quality control mechanisms that ensure dysfunctional mitochondria are eliminated.
“Thus, suggesting that mitochondrial dysfunction is a good enough reason for eliminating mitochondria and as Dr. Skulachev says, mitochondria follow the samurai’s law; “it’s better to die than to be wrong”.”-Mitoptosis, a Novel Mitochondrial Death Mechanism Leading Predominantly to Activation of Autophagy, 2012
We already have the sequences of animals(bowhead whale) that appear to live for multiple centuries, and that according to some do not even appear to age. As far as I know, I’ve not heard of evidence of mitosens like solutions having evolved to allow such extreme longevity. Even in mammals, afaik, humans do not have further mitochondria genes transferred to the nucleus compared to shorter lived species like bonobos or mice, the solution to extend lifespan proposed in mitosens, iirc.
For all we know the only reason mitochondria dysfunction might occur is either inheritance of sufficient mutation load from parents or age related downregulation of quality control mechanisms.-Darian S, link to source

Friday, July 24, 2015

Yet more evidence for programmed aging

Morimoto and Labbadia found the genetic switch occurs between two major tissues in an organism that determine the future of the species: the germline and the soma (the body tissues of the animal, such as muscle cells and neurons). Once the germline has completed its job and produced eggs and sperm -- necessary for the next generation of animals -- it sends a signal to cell tissues to turn off protective mechanisms, starting the decline of the adult animal...
"In a system where we can actually do the experiments, we discover a switch that is very precise for aging," he said. "All these stress pathways that insure robustness of tissue function are essential for life, so it was unexpected that a genetic switch is literally thrown eight hours into adulthood, leading to the simultaneous repression of the heat shock response and other cell stress responses."

The germline starts the slow suicide mechanism known as aging.


Thursday, July 16, 2015

cool vid

Nice quote

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”-Richard Dawkins

Post on christianity over at kurzweilai

I am afraid I am out of energy and enthusiasm for this topic.
Spike signing off for now.-Spikosauropod, kurzweilai
Humanity has existed for over 100,000 years. Presumably all of these humans, if they're good, and all of those who do not hear of christianity now or in the future are so-called "saved". What purpose does the existence of that religion serve other than to damn many rational beings who will doubt it, and not accept it ,on mere witness testimony of known cultists? According to many of the faith, refusing to join the religion is an act of damnation(how convenient for them...). So even by its own logic, according to many, it is best forgotten, and no longer spread to children nor adults.
The idea that an omnipotent omniscient being commanded genocide, performed genocide, murdered children by animals devouring them for making fun of a bald men... A god that supposedly speaks the following
“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”-Yahweh

That such an obviously fictitious tribal god entity is related to the divine in any way is ridiculous. Anyone who reads the old testament knows the god being found there is a small pathetic petty and immoral monster.
We know adam and eve are fiction, we know noah is fiction, we know that moses most likely is fiction as well. A god of a work of fiction.
To claim you're that god, a fictional god of a work of fiction, a petty fictional immoral monster, is ridiculous. Originally people talked about original sin bringing death and Jesus ' need to die to redeem us in part from our inherited original sin, to save us from death caused by it. After all when asked why do we die? they said adam brought death into the world through disobedience, but now we know adam is at best a metaphor, death is part of the world through the designs of the world, and immoral behavior exists to the extent that it is beneficial evolutionarily speaking, so it too is part of the design.
Just look at the sheer ignorance of the original followers of Christianity, the founders

Romans 5:12-21
12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men[a] because all sinned— 13 for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. 14 Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.
15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. 16 And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. 17 For if, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
18 Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness[c] leads to justification and life for all men. 19 For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. 20 Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

1 Corinthians 15:22
22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

Neither Jesus nor his followers knew adam did not exist, and that death was part of the nature of the world from the very beginning as was humans ability to act immorally.

Friday, July 10, 2015

someone's video commentary on glymphatic system

Another post regarding aging on kurzweilai

[quote]
If de Grey had been serious, he would have funded the Fruit Fly Prize (1 month lifespan) instead a preposterous Mouse Prize (3 year lifespan) where it takes eons to measure progress!-melajara,kurzweilai
[/quote]


All it would take is extensive genetic tweaking with the changes that occurred in Michael Rose's flies to thoroughly break that record

 [quote]
Michael Rose, a population geneticist, used artificial selection to produce fruit flies with a life span of 50 days- 1994  book-link
[/quote]

Some other MORE RECENT[2011 article] comments suggest Rose has done well, since then, by now at least for average lifespan quadrupling it, exceeding even previous records

[quote]
Similarly, gene expression changes are the major explanation for the results reported by Dr. Michael Rose, who claims to have quadrupled the average life span of fruit flies merely by selective breeding.
 
“The idea that aging is just a cumulative process of damage is fundamentally incorrect,” Rose commented when I spoke to him about his work. As a coauthor of the new book Does Aging Stop? from Oxford University Press, Rose points out that some organisms already cease to age late in life. “We have fly populations where 40% of the cohort stops aging,” he says....-link
[/quote]

The thing is from what I hear evolution mostly conserves protein structure and mainly tends to change gene  regulation.  Drugs and nutraceuticals can change gene regulation, as can dietary interventions such as calorie restriction, obviously within limits, but already humans are quite long lived lasting decades free of disease, the jump from that to agelessness might require either extensive further changes in regulation or just a small tweak to reach agelessness.

My belief is that neurons are likely near ageless cells if kept in an appropriate environment(that is if accompanied by nonaging glia and nonaging vasculature), so the body does seem to have the key to agelessness of cells built in.

[quote]
"a mouse is fully worn out after 3 years when it takes 30 years to tear down a naked mole-rat."-melajara,kurzweilai
 [/quote]

Not all of the mouse is designed to break down

[quote]
In a new study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mouse brain cells implanted into rats survived as long as the rats did, double the average mouse lifespan.-link
[/quote]

And they say the neurons could likely live even longer with the exact same genes if they were transplanted into even longer lived hosts.

Now look at that the neurons are one of the most metabolically active cells of all the cells, and most of their energy goes towards their function, if I'm not mistaken.   Despite this intensive use of chemical energy, which should result in side-products of metabolism, the cells can handle it, and even without any genetic change they can live more than double the original mice host lifespan.

Think about that for a second most cells do not need to perform functions as energy intensive as neurons, and even neurons themselves can last for over double the lifespan of the host.    That is the mouse genome already has a genetic program that is able to allow its cells to last at the very least twice as long as mice last yet mice don't last that long.    If that doesn't smell of programmed aging I don't know what to tell you.   It is clear the mouse has the genes to protect cells even with extensive metabolic activity(metabolic activity related mainly to function) in such a way as to double the lifespan of the component cells, yet it doesn't do so for the rest of the body.

One of my posts regarding aging on kurzweilai

De Grey talks about garbage accumulation and recycling it in situ as a solution, but usually unless you have energy to spare the intelligent thing to do with garbage is not to recycle it on site, but to throw it out, and for someone or something to pick it up and take it to an appropriate disposal area.(eventually it exits the body and after that it is somebody else's problem, and someone else eventually recycles it.)

The body has the lymphatic system, and the brain has the glymphatic system

[quote]
Throughout most of the body, a complex system of lymphatic vessels is responsible for cleansing the tissues of potentially harmful metabolic waste products, accumulations of soluble proteins and excess interstitial fluid. ...

[In the brain the glymphatic system performs this function... ]
The breakdown of the brain’s innate clearance system may in fact underlie the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s disease, in addition to ALS and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. -link
[/quote]


[quote]
Even our brains need to take out the trash.

Researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center found that a waste-flushing system in the brain, called the glymphatic system, is most active when we sleep -- nearly 10 times more so than during periods of wakefulness, in fact.

Plus, during sleep, brain cells shrink in size by 60 percent to better allow for the removal of waste from the brain.-link
 [/quote]

Despite aging glia and aging vasculature(in part due to the telomere shortening), the oldest human lived for over 122 years, they didn't have dementia when they died, iirc, and died from choking according to some sources.   Those exact same billions of single cell neurons were alive at high metabolism for those entire 122 years without failing, providing mental sanity even till the end of life, even with aging surrounding tissue adversely affecting them(tissue responsible for garbage removal, nutrients, etc). 

[quote]
Using this method, Dr Frisén has shown that most cells in the body are less than 10 years old. -link
[/quote]

  If garbage accumulation was a problem for a cell with an insignificant fraction of that[neural] lifespan, as most of the rest of the cells in the body are, pray tell how did these billions of cells managed to continue working at all decade after decade after decade?

Also to still be able to sustain high metabolic activity even at 122 years of age, the mitochondria must be working to at least some decent degree, probably a bit adversely affected by surrounding aging tissue, but there seem to be mechanisms to preserve mitochondria quality like mitoptosis, there appears to be genetic regulation that keeps mitochondria quality in check, and it is dysfunction of this regulation that may be behind a loss of mitochondria quality.

[quote]
Thus, suggesting that mitochondrial dysfunction is a good enough reason for eliminating mitochondria and as Dr. Skulachev says, mitochondria follow the samurai’s law; “it’s better to die than to be wrong”.-link
[/quote]

As for cancer we have the case of cancer free centenarians who smoked two packs a day for decades, and died cancer free.   Would be very unlikely cancer didn't actually pop up.   The likeliest scenario is it popped up and the immune system handled it, at least this seems the case for some fraction of the population.-link to original thread

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

heads up

I've heard this july 15 2015 might be prime day over at amazon.com and might have more and better deals than black friday.

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Best ps4 graphics e3 2015

Watch in fullscreen 1080p directly on youtube for a better experience.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

another kurzweilai forum reply

BTW it is not nonsense to believe in souls since there are NDEs, some of which do seem to refute the idea that consciousness requires a functioning brain.-extropia

Give a memory disrupting chemical to a person, and even if they're conscious for hours after taking it they won't remember a thing, fully living fully breathing fully conscious, and won't be able to say what happened and will claim they weren't conscious. These near death experience, the thing is they are memories recorded in the brain otherwise they couldn't report them, which suggests they're the product of some brain function, if they weren't recorded in the brain we would have the same outcome as happens when brain memory function is chemically disrupted in fully conscious humans, they can't report it.

That is whatever happened took place within the brain, unless we were to claim that the brain has some supernatural way of recording things that happen outside the scope of brain function. Which would be dubious as we know the process of memory storage is physical process of physical change in the brain via physical molecules interacting.-castiel

Saturday, June 27, 2015

nice quote

" If the heart is a biological pump, and the nose is a biological filter, the brain is a biological computer, a machine for processing information in lawful, systematic ways.

The sooner we can figure out what kind of computer the brain is, the better."-link

Kurzweil ai reply on computation and the brain

At the end of the day the computer metaphor is just that... a metaphor and it does little to illuminate the actual workings there in.

/End thread.-purpose

Unless what the brain is doing is actual information processing and algorithms.   A traditional computer can do anything that can be done through algorithms, and it is a machine that does information processing.

Now, let's ask what function of human activity...   Remember the main purpose of brains was to act in the world, so their main purpose is functional, improving survival.   So again, what function done by humans is beyond computers' ability to perform?   Most anyone serious will say there is nothing any animal, including humans, can do physically upon the world that a computer cannot do given the same body.

Actually I'll say computers will not only be able to do the same, but with the right algorithms they will be better at survival than any animal even humans, beating brains at their own game.

Now there are those that say consciousness is nonfunctional, and thus that will be the one thing that can't be done.   Well as a conscious entity, it seems like consciousness provide a HIGH BANDWIDTH ACCESS simultaneously to data from all sensory modalities, it definitely feels functional, and I'm highly skeptical of it being epiphenomenal.  In the end even if this were the case[epiphenomenality], which I'm doubtful of,  that we can achieve functional equivalence or even superiority without this, well the reality is it wouldn't actually matter now would it?  AGIs could still outperform humans, again unless there is some fabled function humans physically perform that a computer cannot given the same body.

What are the odds that rather than finding common computational algorithms, in the landscape of possibilities, to solve problems[with researchers saying they've shown the brain doing algorithms we use on our cell phones like the kalman filter], or gain fields[which have been observed in artificial neural networks], evolution found some special nonalgorithmic way of processing information and generating survival?   What's the prediction you'd make from such a hypothesis?   That algorithmic processes to survive do not exist[an algorithmic machine for survival cannot be built]?  That evolution somehow evaded these?   That such traditional algorithms appear to exist in some brain functions for unknown reasons and do NOT actually contribute to brain function?  -Darien S, kurzweil ai reply

video on automation

Friday, June 26, 2015

cool vid on automation

tricke down economics



Nice quotes:
 "Of course trickle down economics doesn't work. In an age of mass production you need a mass domestic market. If you put the squeeze on the people who provide that mass market. you leave yourself vulnerable to cheaper imports and destroy your own industry. In doing that you progressively increase dependency on welfare and increase the tax burden of paying for it on the mass market you have already put the boot into and expect to consume the home produced goods you have made unaffordable to them. It's economic suicide and always has been. A triple whammy on your own economy. How can massively increasing the purchasing power of 1% and reducing the purchasing power of 99% possibly stimulate a mass production economy? It can't. It can only lead to a progressively shrinking share of your own domestic market and the exodus of manufacturing to countries with cheaper labour, worsening the trade deficit and increasing debt as social welfare balloons. Oh well, never let the facts and the prosperity of the country get in the way of making the rich richer. Let's just put it all down to a word, "globalization." Then government doesn't carry the can for economic  incompetence and putting the interests of the rich before the interests of the nation."-2001 perseus

" The biggest lie every sold to the public originates with the right wing intentionally confusing the effective tax rate with the top tax bracket.  Let's say income over 1 million is taxed at 70% and the tax rate is 35% for income below that. If you make $1,000,001 you only pay the 70% tax rate on that last dollar. The right wing has INTENTIONALLY convinced the public that because you made that extra dollar you now have to pay $750,000.70 in taxes, even though you actually only pay $350,000.70. They KNOW this. They're not stupid. The people that swallow the lie are stupid though. They KNOW that people will still try to make that last dollar, because they GAIN 30 cents rather than LOSING $400,000.70." -Reaves MO

"The misrepresentation of "job creators" is the most destructive myth of our economy. Consumers who spend and create demand are the job creators, not billionaire multinational CEOs who own companies that hire people at the lowest possible wages to produce supply. If no one can buy your products, then demand goes down and people are laid off in droves, like during the financial crisis. This seems like the most basic tenet of a consumer economy, and yet all of Washington is somehow oblivious. How are they "job creators" if they are responsible for a net loss of U.S. jobs? It doesn't even make mathematical sense. It's consumer demand that creates jobs. We have fetishized "entrepreneurs" as if that's where our supply comes from; it's not, no one gets loaned money to start a small business anymore because there's already too many Wal-Marts everywhere. The Waltons didn't create those jobs, demand for cheap products created those jobs, and all the better-paying local businesses that shut down when Wal-Mart came to town supplied the employees (who are now subsidized by the government so they can afford food). Wal-Mart is not an American success story, it's the purest example of the fundamental failures of the U.S. economy over the last 30 years."mediumvillain



Power of chocolate?

Chocolate-loving Sarah Knauss is the second oldest person whose age has ever been authenticated. She was a youthful 99 years old in the picture above. She lived another 20 years. The only person ever proven to have lived longer than Sarah Knauss was fellow chocoholic Jeanne Calment - who lived to be 122.-link

Nice quote

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Nice neuroscience news article.

Our brains track moving objects by applying one of the algorithms your phone's GPS uses, according to researchers at the University of Rochester.-link



A nice article that suggests the brain uses algorithms similar to those devised by engineers in our technology.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Programmed aging article

ABSTRACT
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on mean-field assumptions, hold that programed mortality is untenable, as it opposes direct individual benefit. We show that in spatial models with local reproduction, programed deaths instead robustly result in long-term benefit to a lineage, by reducing local environmental resource depletion via spatiotemporal patterns causing feedback over many generations. Results are robust to model variations, implying that direct selection for shorter life span may be quite widespread in nature.-link

Study provides more support for the viability of programmed aging theories.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

cool exercise machine

Nice quote from a theguardian.com article

Norman Reimer, executive director of the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers, was less circumspect when he recently spoke about this issue:
"Bail is used as ransom to extract a guilty plea. Fact."-Link

Monday, June 8, 2015

Video with comments regarding strong ai

interesting vid on ai

Comment on a Q&A I saw on the site reasonablefaith

Comments on an answer regarding God
   You state your fundamental question as follows: How do we know that God is good?Now at one level, as I explained in last week’s Question #294, that question is easy to answer: it is conceptually necessary that God be good. That is to say, goodness belongs to the very concept of God, just as being unmarried belongs to the concept of a bachelor. For (i) by definition God is a being worthy of worship, and only a being which is perfectly good would be worthy of worship; and (ii) as the greatest conceivable being God must be morally perfect, since it is better to be morally perfect than morally flawed.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cRvGSh7H

Notice,  That this doesn't answer what is good?  Is it what humans define as good?  What is moral, is it humanity's morality that defines all morality?   It also assumes that there is such a thing as absolute or objective morality, it is an open question whether such truly exists.(some have even argued that morality requires authority, which is another open question).   

 It is also questionable to say that the greatest conceivable being must necessarily be either good or moral, at least by human standards, and even without human standards, this depends on objective goodness and objective morality existing.   All that it needs to be is perfect, and we can't say humans definition of perfection is necessarily equivalent to true perfection.    An entity of absolute knowledge and power,  a truly perfect divine being, might have arrived at a rational basis for action that could be entirely alien from a human perspective, it could very well be beyond human morality and human definitions of good and evil.



Thus, the source of our moral duties is God’s commandments. That’s why what Herod did was wrong: he transgressed a divine command to not murder. Now since God presumably does not issue commands to Himself, it follows that He has no moral duties. Hence, it is logically incoherent to allege that God has done something which He ought not to do.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cRzCRr7o

Notice that the commandments require very high level of proof to say they are tied to a divine being, also note that archaeological evidence regarding the exodus story is scant.  IT is looking highly likely that like Noah, and Adam and eve, this too is yet another fictional story in the bible some ancient writer made up.    How can we claim the writings from some ancient uneducated man emerge from a divine being?   These were believed to be literal events that took place, but if they're made up, we have no more reason to hold them up than say the Illyad or Harry Potter.


Does that mean that God can just do anything? No, for God cannot act contrary to His own nature. God is essentially loving, fair, patient, consistent, and so forth

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cS08WX6L

Again we observe that what human's consider good, moral, just, perfect are being attributed to the divine.   But the imperfect products of evolution, whose morality is nothing more than a bare code to act in a social setting, is in all likelihood inadequate to match any objective morality there may or may not be, nor are humans' visions of the perfect necessarily correspondent with what is truly perfect. 

Now in another question and answer it seems the fallibility of man is accepted


Still, some attributes, such as moral perfection, omniscience, and omnipotence are evidently great-making properties.
You ask, “Even if we could imagine a greater being, can it not just be that those ''greater/higher attributes'' are unnecessary and therefore not really greater attributes?” Of course, as the examples just given show. But that is very different than disputing that God is the greatest possible being. We might mistakenly esteem an impassible God to be greater than a God capable of suffering, but that only shows that we failed to form an adequate conception of the greatest conceivable being. God is necessarily the greatest being possible, even if our concept of what such a being is like is fallible and so capable of correction and refinement.


Read more:http://www.reasonablefaith.org/why-cant-god-be-just-the-greatest-being 



 Well omniscience and omnipotence, within certain constraints are reasonable.   It is interesting to note that true omniscience basically requires determinism, and seems incompatible with true randomness.   Of course true randomness, like free will seems like a nonsensical concept if you look deeply into it.    Yet without free will, an incoherent concept, human beings are not truly morally responsible for their actions.   Thus they're guilt free, especially in a deterministic system, which it likely is, where it would be the one who set everything in motion upon whom all the moral responsibility would fall upon, as the initial conditions would determine all that was to come... unless this entity too was internally complex, and it too was deterministic then the blame would fall on no one.



Saturday, May 30, 2015

Comment on the immortal's dilemma

The problem with expansion in my view is that it assumes that adding more states yields ever more meaningful differences in experience.

But look at say resolution, say 480p, go to 720p, go to 1080p, go to 4k, keep going.  All the larger resolutions are either scaled up versions of the lower resolution content or stitching-up(mosaic-like) of chunks of the already seen content at the lower resolution.

Say you exhaust all content at 1080p.   Can you expect to find meaningful differences in the 4k set of images? Nope, the 4k consists of stitching up the 1080p images, and the 1080p images not only have zoomed up chunks of the 4k image but they also have scaled down, zoomed out versions of entire 4k images.  At 4k you won't find meaningful differences, and this likely holds for all higher resolutions you go to.

That is vision, basically the most important sense, scaling up eye sensors will basically not get you outside of the finitude of the possible, no more meaningful content differences can be extracted.    The rearrangement of small sequences deals meaningful differences, but once you reach a certain threshold of sequence size up to which you've seen all sequences, further increases do not add further meaningful differences.

You could say that, although I've not the math to show it, it is my intuition that a similar phenomena to what is seen in computation happens with regards to content.   In computations, once you reach a certain threshold of versatility in the workings of a machine, that is universality, increasing the versatility of the machine beyond that does not allow you to compute things beyond the simpler machine's capabilities.  

I suspect that it is the same with regards to content, once you reach a certain threshold in the complexity of sequences you're dealing with, a certain length or size, further increases do not yield meaningful differences.  

Infinity in essence is bound by the finitude of the possible.  Which refers to the hypothesis that there are a finite number of meaningfully different possibilities, and anything else is just rearranged combinations of these finite possibilities, that do not add any further meaningful difference.

That said, even if you end up trapped within a loop for eternity, so long as you controlled the transition between states, it shouldn't truly matter that you repeat.   The problem with mortality is not only that you die, missing out on many potentially pleasing experiences that you could controllably experience indefinitely, but that without certainty of the finality of death you do not know, for sure,if you will continue to exist in some manner outside your control.

Immortality grants control and certitude(when accompanied with adequate technology or means), if you're in a pleasant state and can guarantee it indefinitely, one might consider the endless repetition pathetic in a sense, but I don't see why the lack of novelty must objectively and necessarily truly mean it would indeed be pathetic.-coolball 

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Monday, May 25, 2015

Comment on kurzweilai regards future bodies

quote: For example, page 307 in Singularity is near says: Lets consider where we are, circa early 2030. We ve eliminated
the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, kidneys, bladder, liver and more..

Page 303: Redesigning the digestive system, reasonable mature by late 2020s.-andmar74

The problem I see with singularity is near is that it assumes hard nano not only is feasible, but that it can work outside of specialized environments in manufacturing or research facilities.  

IMHO, it is likely that soft nano is the only nano that is viable in a wide number of real world environments.    Unless you design hard nano with a similar ease of dis-assembly and repair of components, it will have serious trouble dealing with failure of an internal component, let alone multiple components.   I find it highly unlikely that energy extraction, constant high speed motion, and bombardment with external agents*(high energy particles, especially in outer-space) can be withstood for long periods of time without failure of some internal component.    A biological cell can withstand countless multiple simultaneous failures of its internal components at the same time, how many can hard nanobot designs withstand before becoming nonfunctional?  in case of becoming nonfunctional how easy is the dis-assembly and repair?   The answers to these two questions will determine viability.

That said it is indeed likely that at least soft nano will be used to replace all of our internal organs with far superior versions.   Endogenous synthesis of all vitamins, and countless beneficial compounds will occur.   Long term storage of excess necessary trace elements to withstand possible suboptimal nutrition, and the ability to tolerate toxic amounts of these substances by storing some and mass disposing of unnecessary excess.  Also vast detoxification capabilities for poisons, the ability to withstand prolonged oxygen deprivation without damage, higher radiation tolerance, and cancer immunity with agelessness, and vast scar free regenerative potential.

IIRC, the idea of cartridges, belts or something like that was mentioned to deal with waste and provide raw materials and nutrients, this can possibly be accomplished with soft nano too.

Theoretically a linking system towards the blood supply could be designed, with a safe plug-n-play design, that would connect the body to an external machine that could provide nutrients and take waste materials and recycle them externally while using a computer or vr technology.

IF fusion reactors can be built and miniaturized or alternatively using wireless electricity, wastes would not need to go outside the body as there would be sufficient energy to internally recycle all internal waste produced and digest 100% all food, there would be enough energy to transform excesses into anything... say flowers?   Though with the advent of augmented reality food, excess consumption is unlikely.

Way I see it is likely that nutrient and waste exchange will occur while asleep, or if we do away with sleep while sitting or relaxing some, through a plug-n-play wire or if desired cartridge system, though plug-n-play wire seems less cumbersome.

Augmented reality food will dispense with most need for managing digestive waste, and aided by a system that harnesses either wireless electricity or nuclear fusion(less likely) it should be possible to handle real food without producing nonpleasant waste.   Wireless electricity would also allow for sufficient energy to recycle all internal wastes.