241–250 of 278 posts
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If you've had a beer, or a cup of coffee, you've tried mind altering drugs. That was part of the point of the article.
You're argument is like saying "you'll go over the speed limit some day, therefore you will be a criminal". A book can alter your mind more than any drugs. So what's your point?
You might be surprised...
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Fraud you say? Perhaps you should inform Imperial College, one of the UK's most prestigious science and engineering institutes, where he currently holds a chair in neuropsychopharmacology.
If you follow Alex3917's link, you'll see he argues that Nutt is intellectually dishonest. That's of course different than being regular dishonest (i.e. fraudulent).
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Why are things illegal? In the most purely naive idea, it is because government is supposed to prevent us from damaging ourselves. Tobacco and liquor are damaging things, they are literally poisons. Caffeine is also damaging. I would be personally be much more inclined to believing the scientists whose entire career is the study of these illegal substances rather than the politicians who have to continue pushing the…
I never said it should or shouldn't be illegal. I'm saying that if you use the word "drugs" the way it was used in the parent, then 99% of everyone will understand it as being referred to illegal drugs. edit: spelling error
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>It poses a real problem to (his) atheism Theism hardly solves the problem of consciousness. It shuffles the question onto a deity without actually answering it.
To a substance, the soul, not a deity. And that, actually, is an answer.
Edit: also, you're describing substance dualism, not theism. You can be a dualist but not a theist.
Wow. From the article: On my first trip to Nepal, I took a rowboat out on Phewa Lake in Pokhara, which offers a stunning view of the Annapurna range. It was early morning, and I was alone. As the sun rose over the water, I ingested 400 micrograms of LSD I can't imagine what it must be like to be someone who would do something like that. I just... can't. Is that a sign of good judgment, or of cowardice?
People that do LSD in places like this tend to have a bit of a bulletproof mindset, or are young enough and foolish enough that they still feel immortal and untouchable. You don't do it if you're worried or insecure about ... well anything much, IMHO.
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http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...
Right now "the mind is the brain" theory still uses the magic of brain to explain what we observe. Everytime you hear someone saying "the brain does this or that", they act like it's a known thing and the mind is the brain and the brain has some yet unknown and unexplained properties that give rise to "this or that". So, yeah, magic.
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The soul is an immaterial substance - the supernatural, unexplainable. It is, by its very nature, am unknowable question. How can that be an answer by any reasonable definition?
You should make a distinction between what exists, and can be named, and what can be known and explained. These are two distinct categories. There are things the exist and can be explained, but nothing allows us the say that there aren't things that can't be explained. If what we known to exist and understand can't explain all observed data (our thoughts and inner experiences) than we are forced to infer the existenc…
Yes, but there is a difference between "outside our understanding" and "impossible to understand". There is simply no good reason to believe that consciousness is impossible to understand.
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Regarding point 4, most of the calories that come from red wine is alcohol. Alcohol isn't metabolized the same way as other foods, so comparing calories from alcohol to other foods is misleading. http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/AlcoholCaloriesAndWeight.ht... The rest of what you write doesn't really validate your conclusion. Actually, there has been a study indicating the reverse. People who drink live longer. http:…
1. You're right: it isn't metabolized the same way as other foods. If you want to get really technical, you should look at the impact of alcohol on fat oxidation. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3280601 . The term "beer belly" is not a misnomer. 2. The study you cited looked at people above the age of 55. There was another similar study published in 2009 that also looked at alcohol consumption above the age o…
From mine, "Alcohol contains calories, but drinking alcohol doesn't lead to weight gain, according to extensive medical research, and some studies report a small reduction in weight for women who drink" This is about as clear as you can get that alcohol doesn't lead to weight gain. Care to directly address this?
2. That's a false dichotomy, You can eat fish and drink wine, too.
Also, you seem to be shifting goal posts. First you write that alcohol can't be considered "perfectly healthy", and now you write that it is premature to be suggest that it can be considered "perfectly healthy" and will lengthen your life.
Why does something need to extend your life to be perfectly healthy?
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If you've had a beer, or a cup of coffee, you've tried mind altering drugs. That was part of the point of the article.
You're argument is like saying "you'll go over the speed limit some day, therefore you will be a criminal". A book can alter your mind more than any drugs. So what's your point?
No, it's nothing like that.
It's more like someone who claims never to have programmed a computer, right after saying they've written shell scripts and python applications and what they mean is they haven't written any Ruby or Java yet.
>> A book can alter your mind more than any drugs. So what's your point?
That saying "I find it odd that the author of the article assumes his daughter is going to try drugs one day. Personally, I never have" is silly when he has actually taken drugs, particularly some of the ones that are referenced in the very section of the essay he's talking about.
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Your comparisons are all extremely unfair in the same way: they involve unjust disregard for the well-being of others. There are victims in each of your analogies. There are no victims if I safely use a mind-altering drug like LSD. Responsible drug use has more in common with using a neat programming trick to accomplish a personal goal than it does with hacking. Still, I come across this comparison often: like people…
His analogies are apt. His point is that in all those cases the signal itself is meaningless and inconsequential to the end. The victim, in his examples, is the achievement of the end goal, which becomes a casualty of focusing only on the signal. It probably applies to stimulant drugs more than it does to drugs like LSD. But like the original essay suggests, there's probably an evolutionary reason why we don't consta…
The rest of your argument is that "drugs" - which you lump together as one, despite having just read an essay about that very thing - decrease incentive to work. You say this as if your hasty logic is a good substitute for fact.
There are drugs that do short-term or long-term harm to one's self, drugs that decrease motivation to work, and drugs that do nothing of the sort. Without data to back your position up on any drug, though, we're relying solely on our subjective perceptions. It sounds like you've already formed an opinion, but I'd urge you to do so on the foundation of fact going forward.