What Pseudoscience do you Believe?
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Does a grain of sand have agency? Does it want to be caught by a specific size of classification sieve?
Because that's exactly the level of agency that drives natural selection.
Agency is not will though. For sure genes have no will and neither does sand
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I'm guessing "agency" in this case is being used in a way that's very specific to that area of research and not exactly how people use it in normal conversation?
It's obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.
In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.
For people like Dennet, which I'm not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.
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I'm not sure what are you trying to tell me.
That you agree with me that "alternative medicine = not proven to work, but I'm wrong somehow"?
If your definition is that something can be called "alternative medicine" simply because we have no proof if it works or not, my magic stick that heals all wounds is alternative medicine.
What? There are no studies proving it doesn't work... and no, I won't let you touch it. But it's alternative medicine!
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Came across a list of pseudosciences and was fun seeing where im woo woo.
Lunar effect – the belief that the full Moon influences human and animal behavior.
Ley Lines
Accupressure/puncture
Ayurveda
Body Memory
Faith healing
Anyway, list too long to read. I guess Im quite the nonscientific woowoomancer. How about you? What pseudoscience do you believe? Also I believe nearly every stone i find was an ancient indian stone. Also manifesting and or prayer to manipulate via subconscious aligning the future.
Mind-body. That you can think yourself sick, or well. Not like magic, but a lot of the time. Like how people won't get sick until vacation a lot of the time, they say "don't have time to get sick" so then on the day off, the mind tells the body "ok now you have time!". All of my kids were born on a day off or weekend, same thing in a way. And once I read a book where the protagonist' hands were burned, very vividly described, and got blisters on my fingertips.
I just really believe a lot of physical illness, and health, comes from thinking.
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I kind of a little bit believe that dreams have some weird predictive ability. The scientist in me knows it's likely a mix of confirmation bias and information synthesis, but like... my family has a pretty strong history of dreaming about deaths and births a week or two prior to pregnancy announcements and deaths. My mom has had several dreams where a loved one has come and chatted with her in a dream and said goodbye, then later that day we learn they passed, for example. It's happened enough that I have a lot of trouble brushing it off.
Oh I believe in precognitive dreams, because I used to write down my dreams and had some that happened later. And I don't mean big things like deaths or pregnancies. I mean piddly details that meant nothing and can't have been foreseen. Once dreamed that I was at the local bank, three people were in line, I got on the scale they had there to weigh myself but the dial went backwards then I turned around and saw this girl Joann that is not seen since middle school. Wrote all this in the dream journal.
Couple of weeks later went to the bank. 3 people in line. I got on the scale but it was broken and said I weighed 30lb. I got off the scale and turned around, and yep, Joann from middle school, turns out she'd moved away but had moved back to town.
That's the one I remember and I would have just thought I had dejavu if I'd not written that dream down.
And honestly it pissed me off pretty bad. I want to believe in free will, that we can choose, that the future has not happened yet. The dreams kind of broke that.
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All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn't work anymore.
Some broken or malfunctioning machinery respond to incantations projected with emotion. Cuss a machine hard enough and it will start working again.
Another one I've personally experienced, but don't know of any studies for: the main casting of machining equipment such as mills or lathes is a big crystal with unique properties. Each machine has different frequencies it resonates at when cutting. You can hear and feel the vibration when cutting and tune the machine/program for more efficient cutting and tool life. Sort of like taking a guitar that is out of tune and tuning it to a pleasant chord. Two identical machines will need different tunings. This tuning can change over time due to wear, temperature, humidity or maybe the phase of the moon.
Unrelated to machinery: there are mountain lions in the deep south in the deep woods. I had one check me out once. The state wildlife agency denies the modern existence of mountain lions and I didn't believe in them until I was face to face with one. I had to growl and hiss at it to convince it that I wasn't interesting.
I had an old Mustang and used to say I could cuss start it.
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If your definition is that something can be called "alternative medicine" simply because we have no proof if it works or not, my magic stick that heals all wounds is alternative medicine.
What? There are no studies proving it doesn't work... and no, I won't let you touch it. But it's alternative medicine!
That's literally alternative medicine defined as per well, science. And you being silly doesn't take from it. In the past, viruses were considered alternative medicine (quackery even), until they were proven to exist and work as in theory.
If you hit someone with a stick and that person gets cured of cold, it's alternative medicine. When it's proven that there's causation between your action and the cure, then it's medicine.
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That's literally alternative medicine defined as per well, science. And you being silly doesn't take from it. In the past, viruses were considered alternative medicine (quackery even), until they were proven to exist and work as in theory.
If you hit someone with a stick and that person gets cured of cold, it's alternative medicine. When it's proven that there's causation between your action and the cure, then it's medicine.
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Yeah I kinda adhere to the simulation thing too. As a videogames programmer, every time I try to learn about quantum mechanics I learn about some new quirk that really makes it sound like some game engine limitation
On the surface, it does seem like there is a similarity. If a particle is measured over here and later over there, in quantum mechanics it doesn't necessarily have a well-defined position in between those measurements. You might then want to liken it to a game engine where the particle is only rendered when the player is looking at it. But the difference is that to compute how the particle arrived over there when it was previously over here, in quantum mechanics, you have to actually take into account all possible paths it could have taken to reach that point.
This is something game engines do not do and actually makes quantum mechanics far more computationally expensive rather than less.
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You might want to check out wikipedia.
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You might want to check out wikipedia.
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ask for more and i will give.
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why not go full panpsychic it actually makes even more sense and has been seriously studied for millenia
I guess fundamentally I see the mind as arising out of physicality and emergent constructs within that physical system rather than being fundamental. The reason the Gaia hypothesis appeals to me then is because it is just an extension of that emergence idea but across the whole world
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sry i'm too tired rn
maybe another time
here's a short summary:
plants produce life out of the four elements (water, air, sunlight, earth), so they are producers of life. animals/fungus are consumers of such life (they eat fruit) and decompose it into urine, air, shit, and heat/energy. so it goes full-circle.
what, however - you may ask -, is in it for the plants? why produce food only for animals to eat it? it is because the plants get something for it, and that is that animals transport the seed in the fruit around and drop it somewhere far away. so plants get movement or transport from the animals. and that advantage is, in fact, large enough for the plants for it to even bother producing food in the first place. so quite big. that's not really pseudoscience btw, more real biology done by real biologists, but still interesting
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