WIP

Sorry to hear about your troubles with this disorder, but mental disorders in general, are much more common than was known years ago before new findings from psychology and neuroscience became available. Today, I would have been diagnosed as ADHD with a mild form of dyslexia. Forty years ago, my difficulty in school was written off as laziness and lack of desire to pay attention in class. But, in all cases of mental disorders, very physical correlations can be made with brain function. There are no mental phenomena discovered that do not show distinctive patterns in brain activity. I noticed that one of the links I checked on derealization, says that both derealization and depersonalization are dissociative disorders that have a strong connection to anxiety disorder and in both cases the Amydala region of the brain, responsible for producing most of the neurochemicals that elicit emotional responses, seem to be producing an over-abundance of anxiety-related hormones. http://www.panic-anxiety.com/depersonaliza...-derealization/ My takeaway is that a person's sense of self cannot reach outside of the physical aspects of brain function, and disorders such as these, demonstrate that our sense of self, others and the world around us is a manifestation of physical brain function, not something from a separate source. For the last 20 years, since Benjamin Libet made the shocking discovery that we are not consciously aware of our own decisions before deliberate brain activity patterns have already established a course of action, there has been one study after another confirming that our conscious awareness is not the source of our decision-making, but the point at which the brain has made us aware at a conscious level of that choice. A study done a year ago at the Max Planck Institute showed that brain wave patterns can be identified up to 7 seconds before more complicated decision making than was done in the Libet experiments. There is another more recent study confirming these findings, but I forget the source; anyway, my point is that if our conscious decision-making process is a matter of being informed of a decision, rather than making the decision, how much stock can we place into subjective theories of mind and consciousness that are popular in new age and Buddhist philosophy?

Don't look now! But there's another missing link fossil for creationists to explain away. Five bucks says they will claim that it doesn't explain all of the changes between seals and their ancestors, and two missing links are now needed: A newly discovered prehistoric seal with "arms" is the no-longer missing link between seals' land-based ancestors and the ocean-dwelling, flippered creatures we know, a new study says. Perhaps spurred by amplified global warming and cooling in the ancient Arctic, the freshwater, amphibious seal is an example of the region as a hotbed of evolution, researchers say http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...ssing-link.html

Right! And if you take a flight on an airplane, do you want to fly in one designed by engineers applying scientific methodology, or post-modern relativists using your notion that truth and reality are subjective?

At some point, mystical obscurantism becomes nonsense. I am not talking about perspective or subjective awareness -- the simple fact is that the machine that processes sensory information about the world for us does not give us perfect representations of the outside world to even have the potential of absolute certainty. The visual processing centers in our brain try to produce maps of the outside world that will be useful for our funtion, and as mentioned previously, interpretation of this information makes us subject to illusions and misperceptions. Certainty is an abstract concept, not part of the way we interpret and process information in real life. Tell me, how limited are those reactions? Neurons are not computer gates with simple on/off switches. Neuroscientists studying the brain are still trying to determine the range of possibilities a single neuron is capable of: link link ?????????????????????? People who are blind from birth do not "see" anything, and the visual processing centers of the brain interpret auditory and touch sense information instead. A person who is blind from birth does not have visual dreams; their mental imagery does not include visual information, since they have no memories of any experiences with the sense of vision. Same as above! The neuron is not a simple gate switch, and not all neurons are the same. Our capacity for learning new skills and empathy for understanding others is dependent on special group of neurons called "mirror" neurons in the brain, which respond in the same way when they see an action performed, as when they are used to perform an action. There are if the mind is a manifestation of brain function. If the mind is the product of a separate source, let's hear it! And an explanation for the mind/body connection needs to be included in any dualistic theory of mind. Where is this consciousness in a comatose patient, or someone suffering from alzheimers, who's personality is slowly disappearing? If brain damage can cause someone to lapse into a coma or lose their memories, personality and act like an automaton, where is there consciousness? And if brain damage can destroy the mind, why should we expect the mind to exist after the brain is dead? What are the odds of that theory being correct in light of the avalanche of evidence against a young earth and a young universe?

Which doesn't explain why a baby hearing its mother speak would provide a survival advantage over other offspring.And it has been recognized that the growth of the human brain also has a high metabolic price tag accompanying it because of the increased need for protein and the demands put on the body's heating and cooling systems to keep everything optimal for this large brain. There is no definitive cost/benefit analysis yet that can explain exactly how it happened, but many published research papers like this one have noted that brain size has been growing in mammals in general already, even before humans arrived on the scene. In general, carnivores have larger brains than herbivores and scavenger, because hunting often requires stealth, planning and coordinated activity among group predators like dogs. Interesting side note that on average, the brain size of domestic dogs have decreased because they have gone from being a carnivore to becoming a scavenger dependent on humans for livelihood. So brain size does not have to increase; if environmental pressures turn the other way, brains can get smaller. In humans, many researcher like the one above, propose that the growing complexity of human social groupings put more stress on cognitive ability, and that would have given more intelligent primitives advantages over their more dimwitted fellow travellers.

I am not talking about whether objective certainty exists out there. My point is that limitations of brain function make it impossible to determine absolute certainty. We interpret information about the world that we receive through vision -- just google the term "change blindness" to see how just one aspect of how the simple act of looking out at the world is skewed by the fact that the visual cortices in the brain are hardwired to focus on moving objects. This, and other predispositions are part of the magician's toolbox of techniques that can be used to create illusions. Looking inward, our brain generates the illusion of one continuous mind or self. Everyone assumes that the internal perceptions of schizophrenics are flawed, because of the delusions they believe are real, but does the rational person have a perfectly reliable sense of self? We know this sense of unified mind is an illusion generated by the brain, likely for functional reasons, because of discoveries in neuroscience such as the previously mentioned experiments on split-brain patients that find the left and right hemispheres each have a separate consciousness, and when the corpus collosum nerve bundle that normally enables shared information is severed, the subject will be unable to coordinate information, and each hemisphere will function independently as if the person now has two minds instead of one. Even at the basic level, each neuron acts independently, deciding which information should be passed on through the synapses to other neurons, and which bits of information to ignore. The overall picture is that our sense of mind that interprets what and who we are, and the sense of the world around us, is produced by a physical system that cannot provide a perfect understanding of either; so certainty may be possible, but we have no way of reaching that goal because of our own physical cognitive limitations. I'll ask you the same question I ask everyone who claims to derive understanding through mystical insight - and I have practiced meditation on and off for the last 25 years, so I know what it feels like, at least at the basic beginner's level - your mystical insight has to be interpreted by the function of your brain; how do you know you have perceived a real awareness, and not just experienced one of the many delusions that can occur when normal brain function is altered through meditation. For example: well practiced meditators, such as Buddhist monks, exhibit a sharp decline in activity in the Parietal lobes of the Cortex -- an area of the brain that generates body maps needed for us to identify our location in space and time, and where our bodies leave off and the rest of the world begins. When the Parietal lobes severely reduce function while other areas are active, a materialist interpretation of the feeling of Oneness would be that a conscious person has lost the ability to mark time, and have a sense of where they are in time and space. The brain's G.P.S. system has been shut down, so is the sense of becoming one with the Universe, a real experience or an illusion created by a loss of sensory information? It may feel real! But does the belief it is a real experience make it real? And I would insist that when the body dies, whatever sense of consciousness is available would not contain any sense of personality that we have now. Our memories, emotions, thoughts are produced by the complex function of the brain, and once it dies, so does the mind that it generates. Chalmer's point is that we have no way to determine if anyone else has a sense of conscious self. He maintains that the sense of personal self must at some point depend on a capacity for consciousness must be part of the makeup of atoms or particles that make up the universe. If it's wrong, somebody needs to explain the mind/body problem that has torpedoed every dualist theory of non-physical mind. Way back in the time of Plato, he was confronted with this problem when a student asked: 'does my soul also get drunk when I have drank too much wine?'

But, on the flipside, I can give you scores of theologians, especially Biblical textual scholars, who became atheists or agnostics (or at least dropped biblical literalism) such as Bart Ehrman, author of "Misquoting Jesus" who lost fundamentalism when he enrolled at the Harvard Divinity School and saw for himself the changes to the earliest manuscripts, by additions and omissions that were made as the manuscripts were copied. Having people like C.S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, or Francis Collins tell about changing from atheists to becoming believers in some form of Christianity or another religion, does not prove a whole lot, since they give widely different reasons for their adoption of religion. Francis Collins's conversion story is the most bizarre I've heard from any prominent spokesman: he tells us that while he was out for a walk in the woods on a winter's day, he came upon a stream that had frozen into three streams and immediately thought of the Holy Trinity -- which meant something to him, but it sounds to me like he must have already wanted to believe and found a symbol. Richard Dawkins asked sarcastically, if he would have become a Zoroastrian if it was two frozen streams instead. One thing that bothers me about these big name Christian apologists, is that there is a lot of money to be made writing books and doing the lecture circuit, telling Christians what they want to hear. The implicit message is an argument from authority -- this guy is a physicist or a geneticist, and he's a Christian -- you can't possibly be smarter than him, so why don't you share his religious beliefs? Of course, even if a guy is a scientist, like Collins, that does not mean that he is an expert in all things, and may not have very good reasons for his religious conversion. But the ones like Craig, Strobel, and C.S. Lewis, who try to write books that rationally prove their religions, have the paradox that if what they are doing is valid, they are eliminating the need to believe their doctrines on faith. If there is no role for faith to play in believing Christian doctrine, then salvation is jeopardized, because most Christian versions claim that salvation is dependent on faith, not coming to a rationally realization of doctrine. They end up trying to rationally prove beliefs that claim to be based on faith, rather than logic and reason.

Poll question: Has Christianity made people more civilized?, Benoit XVI & Europe For the most part - NO. Before Christianity, religion was tribally based, and the few wealthy people who could afford to travel, like the Greek historian Herodotus, assumed that every foreign land had roughly equivalent gods and goddesses, so the wealthy Greek, Persian and Egyptian traveller, would go to a foreign city's main temple to make an offering to their gods while they were on the road. The temple in Jerusalem even made provision for foreigners to make sacrificial offerings to Yahweh while they were in Jerusalem. When nations were conquered, the victors had no interest in changing the religion of the locals. But, all this changed when the 4th Century Roman emperor - Constantine, decided that the rapidly growing Christian religion could provide the unifying force for an aging, decrepit empire that was falling apart. This new religion eventually got around to mandatory membership, and religious wars and forcing conversions on colonized populations became the standard for many centuries afterward. Things wouldn't have been so bad, except that a certain Arab merchant created a religion that put his people as the center of God's focus, and also demanded that everybody would have to join. So now, we have two religions with over a billion people each, that claim to be the only legitimate religions in the world....and we wonder why the world is such a dangerous place today!

And how many manufacturing jobs are they creating? Within the United States that is! So, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and resuming the tax rate on income OVER 250,000 is going to kill small business? Anyone else believe this besides you and Joe the unlicensed plumber? Your debt problems won't be solved until Obama or some future president starts to dismantle the U.S. industrial-military complex of maintaining hundreds of foreign and military bases and buying billions of dollars worth of new gadgets for war that have consistently taken over half of your tax dollars over the years through times of peace and times of war. And it may come involuntarily like it did to Russia, when a collapsing economy forced them to abandon their empire.

This argument made no sense to me the first time I heard it when Alex Jones was on late night radio one night, and still doesn't make sense. There is no logical progression from WTC to WMD's to invading Iraq. 9/11 doesn't not fit the narrative, and that's why conspiracy theorists have to create convoluted schemes to fit it in. Before 9/11, the Bush Administration was trying to build a case that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMD production from U.N. inspectors, and they were totally pissed off when Mohammed El Baradei and even one of their own weapons inspectors - Scott Ritter, contradicted claims of secret WMD production. The truth is that, if there is a conspiracy, it is in the phony evidence, like the yellow-cake uranium from Niger, and the coaching of phony witnesses like the infamous "Curveball." That's where the scandal is, and if anything, 9/11 required a change of plans, because first, they had to invade Afghanistan to try to get Bin Laden. But, notice that Afghanistan's major operations were wrapped up in a hasty manner so they could get back to planning the Iraq Invasion. There are even a number of former Bush insiders, such as Paul Oneil, who claim that plans for an Iraq Invasion were being drawn up long before 9/11. 9/11 didn't help the invasion plans -- it was a temporary delay to the original goal, and that's why the reasons for the Iraq Invasion kept changing from week to week, throughout the Bush Years -- one thing they were never able to do convincingly, was to connect the dots between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- and that's where the conspiracy theory really falls apart -- it doesn't benefit the Iraq strategy. When I listened to Alex Jones and some of the other 9/11 conspiracy theorists, what bothered me most, wasn't the way they portray themselves as instant construction and chemical engineers - telling us what a collapsed building can or cannot do - what bothers me is the implicit assumption that America cannot have foreign enemies. A terrorist attack on U.S. soil could not be caused because America has real enemies who would want to carry out a terrorist attack -- instead, it has to be a government conspiracy -- so guys like Alex Jones, ignore or minimize Islamic terrorist groups. The assumption is that the only time they can be a danger, is if they are co-opted by the CIA.

And so they should! Although one of the objections that U.S. progressives make is that all of the tax talk is about income tax. When it comes to payroll taxes and social security taxes, the rich are not paying the bill -- it's the middle class. The top 2% of income earners have a large onus of blame for the dismal state the U.S. economy is in today - producing funny money schemes instead of actual manufactured products. These are the people who have had leadership roles in the private sector economy. New York has benefited from the ridiculous growth of the financial services sector over the last 20 years or so; but this growth - reaching 21% of total U.S. GDP - occurred at the same time that manufacturing shrank to 12% of GDP, largely from outsourcing the making of real, actual products to countries like China and India. Much of the growth in wealth on Wall Street (not including the phony wealth bubble created by new derivative investments) came directly from the sharp rise in stock values of blue chip companies that improved the bottom line by sending their manufacturing overseas to lower their production costs. That may have helped Wall Street, but what did it do for Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina? How were they helped by free trade and lower income taxes and estate taxes over the Bush years? The hollowing out of manufacturing is slowly turning the U.S. (and we have the same trend up here) into something resembling most third world countries -- where there are a few filthy rich people running the economy, and controlling the government, a not much larger middle class, and a vast underclass of poor people who provide cheap labour if they work at all. So how much should those richest 2% be paying for destroying the middle class through their selfish greed and shortsighted policies?

Nice hook! Normally I would have ignored this, but now I have to ask what kind of "man of virtue" are you when you are sleeping with your ex-wife? If you are a man of virtue, why are you divorced? If it wasn't your fault, and she was a total bitch, how is that she lets you sleep over now? The impression I get is not a man of virtue, but a cad who doesn't know how good he's got it because he's enjoying the sex without commitment. And you wonder what's wrong with society today! Is this that gay phobia surfacing again? If you are looking for original causes, blame technology and modernization -- because the main motivation for change in the roles of men and women in society comes from the simple fact that most work today can be done as well by a woman as a man. There isn't a lot of pick and shovel jobs left any more. Most of them have become obsolete because of new technology or free trade moving them to third world countries with cheaper labour. Besides work, we're not living in caveman days anymore, where a man had to guard his womenfolk armed with a club. This sort of anarchy only happens in recent times among nomadic tribes wandering the deserts of North Africa and Asia -- and that's a likely reason why Arabs and other Muslims are digging in their heels to resist the changing power-dynamic between men and women -- they glorify nomadic virtues the same way Americans mythologize the Old West. Which creates a paradox here, since many of the same people who are yelling and pointing fingers at what the Muslims are doing over there, are arguing for a return to patriarchal values over here! We need neither! What we need are people who are able to adapt to a changing world. If being a real man means having control of one or two or more women, you might end up with lots to gripe about because running around proclaiming yourself to be "head of the house" might not carry a lot of weight if your wife is working -- even less if she makes more money than you do. Better suck it up and accept the fact that you're not going to get your way all the time.

No, because food should take precedence over fuel. All this stupid ethanol scheme has done is to drive up corn prices. Detailed analysis reveals that ethanol production from corn, contributes more pollution than gasoline, because of the oil-based fertilizers needed to grow more corn. Of the 19 Canadian ethanol plants listed at the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association,, only three are producing ethanol from biowaste products. The others are taking corn and wheat to make ethanol. And it has to be subsidized and trade barriers have to be put up to stop Brazilian ethanol, which is much cheaper and more efficient, because it is produced from sugar cane waste. The whole scheme makes no sense other than enriching agribusiness and giving conservatives a figleaf to hold up and claim that they are developing sustainable energy resources. The whole thing started with a lie, and it is a farce from top to bottom and needs to be ended now, and replaced with a real renewable energy strategy.

I'm surprised the usual suspects haven't chimed in yet to give us the Jack Bauer theory of preventing terrorism -- the ends justify the means. Torture may have been conducted covertly in the past, but it was never approved as official policy before. In 1774, when the American Revolution was at a crossroads, General Washington ordered his men not to seek revenge against 1000 or so captured mercenaries (I forget the battle), even though these German mercenaries were known to have tortured and murdered captured Americans. They clearly fit the modern definition of "enemy combatant," and yet Washington established a principle before the nation began that the rule of law must be adhered to even where circumstances would favour breaking the rules. Too bad Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't agree with this lesson. BTW how is it that Christian conservatives who claim to follow higher principles, are complete moral relativists when it comes to scoring a win against the enemy?

Nice! You lose your argument, so the only alternative is to parse a quote to change the meaning and turn it into a straw man argument. Is this what they're teaching you at your local Rush Room?

The problem with apologists like Strobel, Alvin Plantinga, Ravi Zecharias and William Lane Craig, is that these guys are claiming they can prove their religion by using logic and reason -- something that Christian doctrine itself says cannot be done! The whole point to faith is that it is needed where knowledge is lacking. Having religious faith is believing a claim is true without having adequate evidence to prove it. If knowledge is complete, there is no need for faith, since the outcome is already assured. The Apostle Paul wasn't interested in using reason to prove his beliefs to the Greeks: 1 Corinthians 1:22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: 1:23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; So, why are Christian apologists trying to prove Christianity? If it is possible to do so, there is no space for faith to operate. An airtight rational argument would render faith redundant or unnecessary. If Strobel or some other apologist succeeds, he rationally proves that his religion is true, but one of the truths of Christianity is that Christianity cannot rationally be proven to be true. How does he succeed to rationally prove a religion that is not supposed to be proven rationally.

No I didn't! How many times have I mentioned the reports of melting permafrost freeing up vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere! It's not a competition between greenhouse gases; CO2 has been measured for a long time now, and its effects are better understood than methane -- but it doesn't matter which one is the worse environmental threat -- they're both increasing. I've asked you a number of times before if there is an upper limit to CO2 levels or other greenhouse gases. Many years ago in high school, I learned that carbon dioxide has a greenhouse effect -- does that effect remain static even when CO2 levels increase? And when did we ever have 7 billion people before? When was an animal species ever exploiting the earth's natural resources in a manner that is unsustainable before? A lot of things are unprecedented, and one of them is that there are enough of us, and we are exploiting the earth's natural resources enough to have an effect on climate. Now, that is total bullshit! Take away the direct and indirect subsidies that oil, gas and coal companies enjoy and give the tax incentives to the companies that are designing and building windmills, solar panels, geothermal and wave power systems. The poor, that you are so worried about, are sacrificing more by following the present course of action. If it's about helping the poor, why isn't some money invested in Indian efforts to get rid of crude cooking stoves that are the main source of Indian-produced carbon emissions and give off huge quantities of carbon soot in India's major cities, that ruins the health and shortens the life spans of the poorest city dwellers. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution would help the poorest people in the world -- doing nothing will further degrade their quality of life. No they don't! The Greenland ice sheets are getting thinner and moving faster because the melting leaves liquid water at the base of the glaciers, allowing them to slide more quickly into the sea. Oh brother! Have you heard of mass extinctions? And how badly do you want to see one in your lifetime? There are no historical ranges for the oceans any more than there are average atmospheric temperatures. There is no natural equilibrium here. Paleontologists studying the late Permian Extinction have found that the effects on the world's oceans were the most severe, with more than 96% of ocean species becoming extinct.

I don't care if they historical events to back their causes; the problem is misrepresenting the actual historical events that they are referring to. Actually, from you list, it seems that Gandhi was the only one who made a legitimate comparison with the Boston Tea Party, since it was the same British East India Company that was given tax advantages to give them a tea monopoly, also was given a monopoly of the salt production and trade in India.

Thanks! Now I just hope we can get rid of him before he comes up with any more great Republican ideas.

Simple! Certainty is an impossibility! I've gone over this a number of times already, but in brief, our physical hardwiring does not make us capable of arriving at absolute certainty. We should try to make sure our beliefs are as accurate as possible, and be willing to make adjustments when necessary; but we don't arrive at certainty and more than the scientific method leads to absolute truth. Like the quest for knowledge, it never reaches a final goal. You're really hung up on how neurons function, aren't you? There's nothing we can do about the fact that there are physical constraints on our abilities to understand both ourselves, and the world around us. That's just the way it is! . Instead of going over that point, over and over again, how about if you tell me how you are able to go beyond your physical cognitive constraints and determine absolutes like truth and certainty. I don't know if you've thought about this before, but if you're a Christian, your own religion says that you cannot have absolute certainty, and that's why you have to depend on faith. Many theologians have echoed the point made by the apostle Paul in I Corinthians, that Christians should not depend on reason like the Greeks, but must rely on faith that they are on the right path. I can't speak for all atheists you understand. My views certainly would not fit Marxism or Objectivism, which each claim to have determined some sort of absolute truths and values. If you're talking about humanists, what we consider objective values are shared, common values that are agreed upon by some form of consensus. Aside from that, we don't accept any sort of divine knowledge that is revealed to us. And I guess that's where you would need faith; because divine revelation could be scrambled and misconstrued by the limitations of brain function we've discussed already. Chalmers offers this example as a thought problem, not an engineering concept. The zombie is sophisticated enough to fool others, so how does an outsider know that the zombie is a conscious individual, or is instead an automaton? The debate between property dualists like Chalmers and the various materialists like Dennet, John Searle, and Paul & Patricia Churchland, argue that the "hard problem" of consciousness can be resolved through incremental increase in understanding of how the brain creates mental imagery. Who knows!

Is it really an extraordinary claim to make, that humans have had an influence on climate? Long before the Industrial Revolution, there was overwhelming evidence that humans had caused mass extinctions and turned forests into grasslands, and grasslands into deserts because of agriculture. Why should it be an extraordinary claim that the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 measurements is caused by human activity, and that the natural greenhouse effect that carbon dioxide has, will affect the climate? The extraordinary claims are that we are having no impact on our world despite our population and exploitation of natural resources -- that's the claim I find hard to believe. We get a steady stream of reports of collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, and these are coming at a time of almost non-existent sunspot activity -- just what many of the AGW deniers have told us was the link to global temperatures. In a few short years, the sun will be going back into an active cycle, so what can we expect then when temperatures are still increasing now? And what about carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans! Poisoning the world's oceans should be considered a cancer, and reason enough to take action now! Third world countries in the tropics are already facing increasingly severe droughts and floods because of the increased energy in the planet's weather systems, so what kind of favour are you guys doing them by making severe weather-created famines a feature of their already difficult lives? The prospect of failure looks much more serious now that Kyoto targets are either ignored or nations signing on have had to buy their way out through the carbon credits purchase scheme. The likelihood that the nations will not do enough before it is too late is where my skepticism comes in! Eugenics was advocated before Darwin and the theory of natural selection was proposed. It's real origins come from the study of selective breeding of animals that had been done for centuries, and the results were extrapolated to humans. The claims that eugenics is based on evolutionary theory are bogus, since American and Nazi advocates of eugenics did not get their ideas from studying Origin of the Species. It would certainly be a more serious situation if some future government uses their theories to form government policy. A situation something like this happened in South Africa, when they elected a president who believed the theories of a fringe group that denied a connection between HIV and AIDS.As long as it is not a matter of public policy, they are free to advance their claims, and those of us who are unconvinced, are free to raise objections to their findings and the methods they use to arrive at their conclusions.

But you can't deny it because you may have read about the Boston Tea Party when you were in highschool, and you know that your conservative friends are trying to re-invent American history on this and other issues.

Ever since Harper got in, I've had my suspicions that his close ties with American evangelicals would signal a Bush-like contempt and hostility towards science. They're only happy with science when it is building new guns and gadgets for war -- they want the engineering that basic science can provide, but they fear new discoveries that threaten their beliefs that souls are magically planted into newly fertilized eggs, and that evolutionary biology will ruin their 6000 year old God-created world. Ann Coulter caught wind of the growing hostility towards science and scientists three years ago, when she wrote a goofy book called "Godless," and used her lawyering skills to argue a case that university academics are part of a liberal godless conspiracy to take Jesus away from the common people. Since many of the new evangelical churches here in Canada are branch plants of U.S. affiliates, it should come as no surprise that they are reading from the same playbook; so the more religious right people Stephen Harper brings into the Conservative Party, and the more he puts into his government, the more we will see our government distance itself from science and try to defund scientific research and science education that is perceived as a threat to their religious worldview. The U.S. has already lost its leadership role in stem cell research to Europe, when the top scientists left for Europe when Bush pulled the funding from new stem cell lines three years ago, just as they lost their primacy in experimental physics to CERN, when the Superconducting Supercollider project in Texas was scrapped back in the 90's. Looks like one more reason to get Harper out of office before he has a chance to imitate any more failed Bush policies!

The deniers are the guys on the fringe, not the ones representing the broad consensus of scientists who study climate processes and monitor the changes that are occuring. And just like the 9/11 truthers and the Discovery Institute, they have the burden of proving their claims and overturing the established general opinion. Unless you are also denying that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing, that the oceans absorb about half of the CO2 added to the atmosphere, and the resulting effects of ocean acidification and growing dead zones, you need to explain why you want nothing done about increasing carbon dioxide levels.

And again, determining "truth" is a verification process that ranges from highly unlikely to highly plausible and dependable information. Since you share the same cognitive limitations posed by brain function that I and everyone else has to deal with, how do you make the breakthrough to certainty? Especially considering the other problem that the feeling of certainty is generated at an unconscious level that we do not have conscious access to. In all honesty, no truth can be determined as absolute fact, except by people who cannot or will not accept their own cognitive limitations. Every "truth" that is placed out here in the objective world of shared experiences has to given a grade as to its reliability. Some "truths" may be considered to be considered to be reliable enough to become part of our common wisdom, while others are so improbable that only a few people on the fringe will find them convincing. . What you are describing here is vitalism; a discredited theory of living biological processes that was abandoned a century ago as new knowledge became available about biochemistry and genetics. There is no need (or evidence) for a life force to be animating living creatures, and if you are proposing such a force, you have the burden of proof to demonstrate its existence. I said before that I am not insisting on physicalism, but if there are other, undiscovered forces, I want to see some evidence to support them before I start believing in them. Which I have not done. What I reject is the notion that is referred to by philosophers as "substance dualism," that we have a non-physical spirit inside us that is the source of our sense of self. Critics of materialistic theories of consciousness usually insist that physical processes cannot provide a personal sense of existing, or being alive -- David Chalmers created the Philosopher's Zombie paradox to explain the problem, arguing that a sufficiently complex machine could simulate being a conscious person that would be convincing to others, without having any sense of personal awareness or conscious experience. Chalmers argues that physical processes cannot explain the personal subjective sense of awareness called Qualia, and claims there is an explanatory gap that cannot be bridged by reductionism, functionalism, emergence, or other materialist explanations of consciousness. He calls it the Hard Problem of consciousness, but many materialists such as Daniel Dennett, believe that the "hard problem" is not a barrier to materialism, but instead will be resolved by the steady increase in knowledge about brain function, just as so called irreducible complexities in evolution have been explained by new information. Even if Chalmers is correct, he is not arguing for a spirit world or souls or supernatural forces. Chalmers's dualism is usually referred to a Property Dualism, since he believes that the particles that make up our universe have conscious properties as well as their physical properties. Property dualism would propose that an atom is too simple or basic to have conscious self awareness, and a complex system, such as the human brain, is still necessary to create a higher order of consciousness. Right now, there is not enough evidence to narrow down these theories of consciousness; it could be property dualism or one of the materialist theories of mind -- but which ever one is right, they still fit with a naturalistic description of our world.