Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

This is pretty interesting. It seems like more and more studies are finding pretty tangible links between our micro-biomes and our overall health or mental status. The autism link is intriguing and it also makes me wonder if based on this, there might be further studies to determine what drives the micro-biome in these impacted individuals. Does the mother lack the proper biome? Does the biome change with age and that impacts things? Is it changes in diet/etc? Super fascinating stuff.

Well it is an epidemic. The CDC states 1 out of 68 kids born are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and it's just getting worse as time goes on. And it is worse in boys than girls. 1 in 42 boys versus 1 in 189 girls are diagnosed.

Although it is important to keep in mind that the way and means by which they diagnose the condition has changed since the early days. It becomes hard to determine if rates have actually gone up, or we're just detecting it more/have increased the range at which someone will be diagnosed as autistic.

Or what if "autism" has just become a catch-all term that's being over used so much that it doesn't mean anything anymore? Maybe it's been co-opted by shitty parents that are disappointed they didn't raise perfect little Stepford children and lazy doctors that want to keep their smoking hot pharmaceutical rep happy.

reavor said:

seems to me to be a general misinterpretation of standard chemistry, biology and physics. it's been quite conclusively shown that consciousness is an after-the-fact rationalization of pre-determined responses to stimuli put in a social context. some people don't like it and, like this guy, try to rebel against the fact that we are all robots engineered for social savvy. he doesn't approach the subject of false memories, self-deception and social rationalization because they easily undermine his argument. him trying to liken a single-cell eukaryote to the synapses in the nervous system is another example of not understanding the underlying chemical mechanics of the situation. he asks if life derived from pi resonance in important carbohydrates, which it did just as much as from other electron interactions.

Click to expand...

Speech about movement, and how our entire brain developed to facilitate prediction required for complex movement. Every movement you do is effectively run through a simulation of "how it should go" a split second before you actually do it, and its the 'noise' between how it actually goes and how we think it will play out that allows us to hone our reactions to stimuli (And its why locomotion for animals is so fluid).

Going off what you said here, consciousness may just be a product of us being able to alter that simulation/predictive ability in far more abstract ways. We can effectively simulate things we're not just about to do, in order to prepare ourselves to build new reactions. But in the moment, as you said, nothing you do has a conscious control. The belief that we do is a lie to keep us from freaking out (The hemisphere brain tests they did are mind boggling on this.)

But its the ability to simulate and essentially "prepare" to learn new reactions/stimuli without randomly discovering it through trial and error which might define consciousness. Or we're like a plane that flies only with auto-pilot. We believe our conscious minds are pilots, but we're not, we never actually fly the plane...What we can do though is alter the auto-pilot so it can fly the plane in various ways, the more complex the change, the more difficult it is to alter the 'code'. (Which is essentially what practice is.)

Anyway, not sure how precise all the above is, but its an interesting set of theories as to why we have a 'conscious' mind if its not in control from moment to moment.

Yes, lets drain this water source. What could go wrong?

We piss off Godzilla?