40
   

Is free-will an illusion?

 
 
think rethink
 
  0  
Reply Mon 17 Apr, 2017 01:20 pm
@cicerone imposter,
Yes, language is important.
Important only as a utility, not as a literal existence.

Communication is important, but not as a literal living experience.

All dysfunction in miscommunication is rooted in this single error.

The Listener becomes offended because he believes that what he experienced is what the speaker intended.

In communication, not even emotions are conveyed.

It's more like a filter than anything else,
Narrowing down the options.

I love you,
Means that I'm not silent and passive, but am intending to convey something.
It also eliminates all contradicting possibilities as options,

And finally, the Listener creates a positive emotion, appreciating being loved
as unique as how his face looks,
Based on a self generated​ statement
Reflecting the matching words, he perceived.
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Mon 17 Apr, 2017 01:57 pm
@think rethink,
Yes, language is important to existence. Words are responsible for all actions of humans.
Olivier5
 
  1  
Reply Tue 18 Apr, 2017 05:00 am
@think rethink,
Emotions are what motivates us to do things. They also tell us a lot of important insight about how we interact with others, so they are a bonus, a strength. The idea that passions are bad and only reason is good - that is an old, tired and simplistic idea. Embrace your emotions as a form of wisdom, and you will be better of for it.
0 Replies
 
think rethink
 
  0  
Reply Tue 18 Apr, 2017 02:36 pm
@cicerone imposter,
I breath without verbal commands and so do you (at least as an infant)
Words aren't involved in any of the actions of an infant before it learns language and emotions.

Once the world of genuine existence is obscured,
Words initiate and control all actions.
0 Replies
 
Olivier5
 
  1  
Reply Wed 1 Nov, 2017 11:39 am
How a Focus on Rich Educated People Skews Brain Studies

Neuroimaging studies have traditionally scanned a thin and unrepresentative slice of humanity—but that’s changing.

Ed Yong, The Atlantic
Oct 31, 2017

In 1986, the social psychologist David Sears warned his colleaguesthat their habit of almost exclusively studying college students was producing a strange and skewed portrait of human nature. He was neither the first to make that critique, nor the last: Decades later, other psychologists noted that social sciences tended to focus on people from WEIRD societies—that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The results of such studies are often taken to represent humanity at large, even though their participants are drawn from a “particularly thin and rather unusual slice” of it.

The same concerns have been raised in virtually every area of science that involves people. Geneticists have learned more about the DNA of people in Europe and North America than those in the rest of the world, where the greatest genetic diversity exists. The so-called Human Microbiome Project was really the Urban-American Microbiome Project, given that its participants were almost entirely from St. Louis and Houston.

Neuroscience faces the same problems. When scientists use medical scanners to repeatedly peer at the shapes and activities of the human brain, those brains tend to belong to wealthy and well-educated people. And unless researchers take steps to correct for that bias, what we get is an understanding of the brain that’s incomplete, skewed, and,  well, a little weird.

Kaja LeWinn, from the University of California, San Francisco, demonstrated this by reanalyzing data from a large study that scanned 1,162 children ages 3 to 18 to see how their brain changed as they grew up. The kids came from disproportionately wealthy and well-educated families, so LeWinn adjusted the data to see what it would look like if they had been more representative of the U.S. population. That's called “weighting,” and it’s a common strategy that epidemiologists use to deal with skews in their samples. As an easy example, if you ended up recruiting twice as many boys as girls, you’d assign the girls twice as much “weight” as the boys.

When LeWinn weighted her data for factors such as sex, ethnicity, and wealth, the results looked very different from the original set. The brain as a whole developed faster than previously thought, and some parts matured earlier relative to others.

Natalie Brito, from New York University, says that this study “clearly shows how our interpretation of brain development changes based off who is being represented within the sample.” She adds that most neuroscientists would acknowledge or agree that representative samples are a good thing, but that there practical reasons why such samples are hard to get. Most obviously, brain-scanning studies are very expensive, so most of them are small and rely on “samples of convenience”—that is, whoever’s easiest to recruit.

Much more:
www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/how-a-focus-on-rich-educated-people-skews-brain-studies/544499/
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Wed 1 Nov, 2017 01:44 pm
@Olivier5,
Quote:
I disagree here. Emotions are a form of intelligence.

It sure is! Some people may age by years, but their emotional maturity has not kept up.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Wed 1 Nov, 2017 01:49 pm
@think rethink,
Quote:
Communication is important, but not as a literal living experience.


If you do not use language in your life experience, what do you use? We are the product of our genes and environment. They are the major influences of our lives we call experience. If you wish to do any traveling, you must understand the use of a vehicle and understand what road signs mean, or know which bus, boat, train or airplane to catch through language. Symbols are the same as language; they convey information.
0 Replies
 
 

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