Science (neuroscience specifically) has led me to believe that consciousness is a byproduct of the evolved complex brain. This completely changed my views of personal spirituality and religion. It has also made me a vegetarian.

Thanks very much for the read man!

Thank you! That makes much more sense to me now.

Is there really a debate though? I mean, I've done a lot of dumb work in my life that I certainly didn't get any happiness out of (other than that of finally being able to do what I deem good). However, I did that work nonetheless. Or is the argument more like whenever you do something you are always doing it for at least a couple reasons, only one of which will be simply to do it?

[...] as to whether anything can be done for its own sake, or if the reward at the heart of it just becomes more obfuscated.

Do you mind elaborating? I don't think I understand.

I think it might be because of the little vibrations in the instruments sounds that we normally don't notice because when played at regular speeds they sound more like one whole note instead of a vibrating one. The low to medium-low notes of the piano for example, or the broken up sound of a shaker. At speed they sound fine, but when slowed down they wobble and scratch a bit more as our ears have more time to pick out individual bits of what's really going on.

Also, the dissonant notes and runs within the chords pop out a ton more in the slowed version because they're given more time to their selves. Normally dissonant or jazzy notes don't sound too bad to us because they're short and eventually come to rest on a more pleasing chord. But in this, they're all stretched out so it comes off more harsh as you said, and yields a more dark, dissonant sound (which is why you see such dissonant notes drawn out in a lot of dark classical orchestra pieces).

Just my thoughts. I could way totally be wrong.

Perhaps I am just an outlier, but out of the 9 AP classes I've taken, only one was intellectually stifling. Intellectual curiosity was far higher in them than in any regular class I ever took. The demand to keep pace up to learn enough material for the test wasn't strangling us to death, but simply made sure that we weren't wasting too much time. We spent a lot of time in each class doing creative exploration of topics and many fun projects and whatnot. Most of the time we were learning a lot and loving what we were learning. It was only in the two or three weeks before the AP exams that we cracked down and began focusing strictly on problems we would encounter on the AP test.

Compared to the non-AP classes, we learned far more, did far more, and were more free to learn how we wanted to and do projects that we wanted to.

Could you work to define what you meant by consciousness? I have a very hard time comparing the consciousness of a human or a dog with the 'consciousness' of an entire ant colony combined. I feel like they are two completely different things currently, but you write as if they are one in the same.

Help me out here?

I put it a little too simply, but yes. They tend to all involve higher functions, because most everything in our daily lives involve them.

Well it depends on how you're talking about love.

The feeling of love, similar to sadness or anger (although not exactly the same), is not a higher function.

The development of the relationship with a person that yields a feeling of love, though, certainly involves the neocortex heavily, on account of the higher function processes needed to build and analyze a relationship.

So love isn't a higher function; it is somewhat a byproduct of it.

This is from a Ray Kurzweil book, in case anyone wanted the source. How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is the title.

This is actually a really interesting topic, considering the neocortex is typically associated with higher functions like consciousness, language understanding and production, cognition, abstraction, problem solving, motor and sensory integration, etc. Normally, emotional things like love and empathy will be associated with the limbic regions, which are really considered the 'emotional core' of the brain.

However, since we as people have to evaluate others' behavior (body language, behavioral patterns, general emotional signals, etc.) so often, emotions really begin in the parts of our brains responsible for logical analysis. After we process the data, it becomes closer to love.

As far as his idea that you lose a part of yourself when a loved one leaves, it's not wholly understood why we get sad; his idea is just one of theories. Some more, relatively easy reading if you're interested here

Hell yeah, thanks for the link!

It's not just you man, it holds true for 93% of Facebook users too. Whoa.

I wasn't going to respond to this until I noticed it is tagged under livelonger.

The study discussed doesn't show causation at all, simply correlation. In fact, it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know about education.

The only real thing to note from the study was the lowering of rates of all diseases as people got a ninth year of education in Sweden. However, considering the sample size of only one country, and a lack of other comparable international studies, we can't make much of that 8-9 year education barrier. Even the reasoning proposed by the head researcher of the study seemed pretty sketchy; he "speculates that the ninth year helped students develop a different attitude about themselves." A Stanford professor claims "the additional year contributed to the students' long-term ability to understand health messages, think effectively and manage their lives", which sounds better, but is very vague and without much evidence.

What I'm trying to get at, is that studying more doesn't necessarily help you to live any longer. The study only concluded that people who are more well educated tend to have lifestyles that are healthier because they have better jobs, thus leading to them being more healthy. Something that is fairly intuitive.

For anyone else that was confused about why this really holds true, I thought this read was helpful.

You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends. There are 12 people who have a friend who has 12 friends, but there is only one person who has a friend who has only one friend. And, of course, there is no one who has a friend who doesn’t have any friend. Yet there is actually only one person who has 12 friends. So “12” gets counted only once when you compute the average number of friends that people have, but it gets counted 12 times when you compute the average number of friends that their friends have. Hence the seeming paradox that your friends have more friends than you do.

Who says Apple is the only winner here?

To be honest, this is an overall gain for everybody involved with iOS. Developers who spend huge amounts of time coding and styling apps who just want a buck or two for their work are less likely to be pirated from, and thus more likely to keep coding and making those cool iOS apps. iOS users subsequently get more content from developers since the main source of app piracy (ie: Installous) is down. Apple benefits from the increase of good content.

As for the claim that jail breaking is gone as a whole with it? Well, there are plenty of other reasons to jail break other than pirating apps (like most cydia tweaks, Zephyr, Gridlock, etc.). We will probably see the community go down for good in a couple years, but only as we see Apple grow away from their simple sleek OS and embrace the huge amount of their users who want more options for their phones' and tablets' interfaces. Either that, or jailbreaking for iOS will stop because everybody interested in unrooted freedom will shift to platforms the encourage it, like Android.

Also, if people still want to steal their apps, there are still multiple ways to do so (Appcake, vShare, etc.)

Don't fret about the nitty gritty definition of dark matter and its effects; I understand what you're meaning to say now.

Would you rank these analogies you speak of above logical arguments?

I don't want to get ahead of ourselves by putting words in your mouth, but I am curious why (if I'm not mistaken) you think a figurative connection between our observations of dark matter and your definition of a god is a greater truth than the reasoning that would show matter does not necessitate the existence of your idea of a god.

Reading this makes me feel like such a dry person.

Your idea is quite creative and poetic. Yet that is all it seems to me. It sounds like an artistic analogy, not one that holds much logical or philosophical merit. There is no warrant for your connection.

Perhaps I am confused. Why is it that dark matter, specifically, is the thing that you feel demonstrates a god's existence, and not any other type of matter or energy?