A mind is a terrible thing to waste'

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Calilasseia fails to understand that she is using logical positivism (scientism) to defend her position. Where is the scientific evidence that minds other than your own exist?

It's a philosophical justification. It PROVIDES why an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God to allow evil. It doesn't have to be true. Philosophy is much more different than science.

Also, why are people judging God's morality? On what objective basis can you judge God? None. Atheism cannot provide an objective reason why the God of the Old Testament is evil.

Lev 26:27 If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.
Numbers 14:33-34 And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcasses be wasted in the wilderness. After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise.
Deuteronomy 21 18 If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, 19 his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. 20 They shall say to the elders, This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard. 21 Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.
Deuteronomy 28:53:And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the LORD they God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straightness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee
Deuteronomy 28:57:And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.
2 Kings 6:28-29 This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him.
2 Kings 6:28-29 And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him and she hath hid her son....
2 Kings 6:28 And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow.
2 Kings 6:29 So we boiled my son, and did eat him and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him and she hath hid her son.
Proverbs 22:15 Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.
Proverbs 23:13: Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die.14 Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.
Proverbs 29:15 The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.
Isaiah 9 19-20 By the wrath of the LORD Almighty the land will be scorched and the people will be fuel for the fire; no one will spare his brother. On the right they will devour, but still be hungry; on the left they will eat, but not be satisfied.
Isaiah 13:15 Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.
Jeremiah 19:9 I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they will eat one another's flesh in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life will distress them. '
Ezekiel 5:10 Therefore fathers shall eat their sons in your midst, and sons shall eat their fathers. And I will execute judgments on you, and any of you who survive I will scatter to all the winds.
1 Timothy 3:4 He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect
Revelation 2:22-23:..And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:I don't think my justifications for believing in God are good.

I'll be back tomorrow. I need some time alone.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Calilasseia fails to understand that she is using logical positivism (scientism) to defend her position. Where is the scientific evidence that minds other than your own exist?

It's a philosophical justification. It PROVIDES why an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God to allow evil. It doesn't have to be true. Philosophy is much more different than science.

Also, why are people judging God's morality? On what objective basis can you judge God? None. Atheism cannot provide an objective reason why the God of the Old Testament is evil.

Macroinvertebrate wrote:

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Calilasseia fails to understand that she is using logical positivism (scientism) to defend her position. Where is the scientific evidence that minds other than your own exist?

It's a philosophical justification. It PROVIDES why an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God to allow evil. It doesn't have to be true. Philosophy is much more different than science.

Also, why are people judging God's morality? On what objective basis can you judge God? None. Atheism cannot provide an objective reason why the God of the Old Testament is evil.

Still waiting on that evidence for your claims that you can feel god (sexually?), and that you have a personal relationship with god. Regarding philosophy.....

Philosophy is dead - Stephen Hawking

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:

Macroinvertebrate wrote:

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Calilasseia fails to understand that she is using logical positivism (scientism) to defend her position. Where is the scientific evidence that minds other than your own exist?

It's a philosophical justification. It PROVIDES why an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God to allow evil. It doesn't have to be true. Philosophy is much more different than science.

Also, why are people judging God's morality? On what objective basis can you judge God? None. Atheism cannot provide an objective reason why the God of the Old Testament is evil.

Still waiting on that evidence for your claims that you can feel god (sexually?), and that you have a personal relationship with god. Regarding philosophy.....

Philosophy is dead - Stephen Hawking

I should address this before I'm dead. "Philosophy is dead" is a philosophical statement itself!

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:

Macdoc wrote:

thought most people got past this nonsense at puberty.

What's wrong with the free will defense?

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:

Nebogipfel wrote:How does free will account for the suffering caused by natural disasters?

If God gives us free will in the knowledge that some of us will use it to not comply with his commands, why does he punish us for doing so?

In short, why does he give us free will and then expect us to forego its use?

Natural evil is via demons and he wants to test us.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:

[Reveal] Spoiler: content on which I am not commenting

CdesignProponentsist wrote:

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:No, it's for YOU to prove that demons don't exist. It explains why there is natural evil.

So you make an unfounded claim and it is the responsibility of others to prove it wrong, otherwise it should become the established explanation.

Okay, so i contend that it isn't demons at all. It is leprechauns.


The ball is in your court.

I'll say it again: Unless, you can prove why demons are illogical or evidence that don't exist. It can explain why there is natural evil without hurting God's all-lovingness.

Leprechauns could also acceptable to why there is evil without going against God's all-lovingness.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:I don't think my justifications for believing in God are good.

I'll be back tomorrow. I need some time alone.

Agrippina wrote:You have to give him credit for being brave enough to dip his toe into these waters.

For "God" to be all-loving, he would to first of all exist. We haven't yet been given proof of that. So no all-loving god. If we go along with what the Bible says about him, if that is love, thanks I'll pass.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Calilasseia fails to understand that she

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:is using logical positivism (scientism) to defend her position.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Where is the scientific evidence that minds other than your own exist?

Miyawaki et al, 2008 wrote:SUMMARY

Perceptual experience consists of an enormous number of possible states. Previous fMRI studies have predicted a perceptual state by classifying brain activity into prespecified categories. Constraint-free visual image reconstruction is more challenging, as it is impractical to specify brain activity for all possible images. In this study, we reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns. Binary contrast, 10 × 10-patch images (2100 possible states) were accurately reconstructed without any image prior on a single trial or volume basis by measuring brain activity only for several hundred random images. Reconstruction was also used to identify the presented image among millions of candidates. The results suggest that our approach provides an effective means to read out complex perceptual states from brain activity while discovering information representation in multivoxel patterns.

Miwayaki et al, 2008 wrote:INTRODUCTION

Objective assessment of perceptual experience in terms of brain activity represents a major challenge in neuroscience. Previous fMRI studies have shown that visual features, such as orientation and motion direction (Kamitani and Tong, 2005, 2006), and visual object categories (Cox and Savoy, 2003; Haxby et al., 2001) can be decoded from fMRI activity patterns by a statistical ‘‘decoder,’’ which learns the mapping between a brain activity pattern and a stimulus category from a training data set. Furthermore, a primitive form of ‘‘mind-reading’’ has been demonstrated by predicting a subjective state under the presentation of an ambiguous stimulus using a decoder trained with unambiguous stimuli (Kamitani and Tong 2005, 2006; Haynes and Rees, 2005). However, such a simple classification approach is insufficient to capture the complexity of perceptual experience, since our perception consists of numerous possible states, and it is impractical to measure brain activity for all the states. A recent study (Kay et al., 2008) has demonstrated that a presented image can be identified among a large number of candidate images using a receptive field model that predicts fMRI activity for visual images (see also Mitchell et al., 2008, for a related approach). But the image identification was still constrained by the candidate image set. Even more challenging is visual image reconstruction, which decodes visual perception into an image, free from the constraint of categories (see Stanley et al., 1999, for reconstruction using LGN spikes).

A possible approach is to utilize the retinotopy in the early visual cortex. The retinotopy associates the specific visual field location to the active cortical location, or voxel, providing a mapping from the visual field to the cortical voxels (Engel et al., 1994; Sereno et al., 1995). Thus, one may predict local contrast information by monitoring the fMRI signals corresponding to the retinotopy map of the target visual field location. The retinotopy can be further elaborated using a voxel receptive-field model. By inverting the receptive-field model, a presented image can be inferred given the brain activity consistent with the retinotopy (Thirion et al., 2006).

Miwayaki et al, 2008 wrote:However, it may not be optimal to use the retinotopy or the inverse of the receptive field model to predict local contrast in an image. These methods are based on the model of individual voxel responses given a visual stimulus, and multivoxel patterns are not taken into account for the prediction of the visual stimulus. Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of the activity pattern, in particular the correlation among neurons or cortical locations in the decoding of a stimulus (Averbeck et al., 2006; Chen et al., 2006). Since even a localized small visual stimulus elicits spatially spread activity over multiple cortical voxels (Engel et al., 1997; Shmuel et al., 2007), multivoxel patterns may contain information useful for predicting the presented stimulus.

Miwayaki et al, 2008 wrote:Here, we present an approach to visual image reconstruction using multivoxel patterns of fMRI signals and multiscale visual representation (Figure 1A). We assume that an image is represented by a linear combination of local image elements of multiple scales (colored rectangles). The stimulus state at each local element (Ci, Cj, .) is predicted by a decoder using multivoxel patterns (weight set for each decoder, wi, wj, .), and then the outputs of all the local decoders are combined in a statistically optimal way (combination coefficient, li, lj, .) to reconstruct the presented image. As each local element has fewer possible states than the entire image, the training of local decoders requires only a small number of training samples. Hence, each local decoder serves as a ‘‘module’’ for a simple image component, and the combination of the modular decoders allows us to represent numerous variations of complex images. The decoder uses all the voxels from the early visual areas as the input, while automatically pruning irrelevant voxels. Thus, the decoder is not explicitly informed about the retinotopy mapping.

MattHunX wrote:*cough*

On a perhaps more or less related note,

Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/

BERKELEY — Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

[CONTINUES]

I'd say that's pretty close to observing "thoughts". And who's to say how many steps it takes from that to also simulate sensations in the viewer.

Nishimoto et al, 2011 wrote:Summary

Quantitative modeling of human brain activity can provide crucial insights about cortical representations [1, 2] and can form the basis for brain decoding devices [3–5]. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have modeled brain activity elicited by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity [6–8]. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured via fMRI are very slow [9], so it has been difficult to model brain activity elicited by dynamic stimuli such as natural movies. Here we present a new motion-energy [10, 11] encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. Visualization of the fit models reveals how early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder [8] by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.

Nishimoto et al, 2011 wrote:Results

Many of our visual experiences are dynamic: perception, visual imagery, dreaming, and hallucinations all change continuously over time, and these changes are often the most compelling and important aspects of these experiences. Obtaining a quantitative understanding of brain activity underlying these dynamic processes would advance our understanding of visual function. Quantitative models of dynamic mental events could also have important applications as tools for psychiatric diagnosis and as the foundation of brain machine interface devices [3–5].

Modeling dynamic brain activity is a difficult technical problem. The best tool available currently for noninvasive measurement of brain activity is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which has relatively high spatial resolution [12, 13]. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured using fMRI are relatively slow [9], especially when compared to the speed of natural vision and many other mental processes. It has therefore been assumed that fMRI data would not be useful for modeling brain activity evoked during natural vision or by other dynamic mental processes.

Here we present a new motion-energy [10, 11] encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model separately describes the neural mechanisms mediating visual motion information and their coupling to much slower hemodynamic mechanisms. In this report, we first validate this encoding model by showing that it describes how spatial and temporal information are represented in voxels throughout visual cortex. We then use a Bayesian approach [8] to combine estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior, in order to produce reconstructions of natural movies from BOLD signals.

We recorded BOLD signals from three human subjects while they viewed a series of color natural movies (20° × 20° at 15 Hz). A fixation task was used to control eye position. Two separate data sets were obtained from each subject. The training data set consisted of BOLD signals evoked by 7,200 s of color natural movies, where each movie was presented just once. These data were used to fit a separate encoding model for
each voxel located in posterior and ventral occipitotemporal visual cortex. The test data set consisted of BOLD signals evoked by 540 s of color natural movies, where each movie was repeated ten times. These data were used to assess the accuracy of the encoding model and as the targets for movie reconstruction. Because the movies used to train and test models were different, this approach provides a fair and objective evaluation of the accuracy of the encoding and decoding models [2, 14].

BOLD signals recorded from each voxel were fit separately using a two-stage process. Natural movie stimuli were first filtered by a bank of neurally inspired nonlinear units sensitive to local motion-energy [10, 11]. L1-regularized linear regression [15, 16] was then used to fit a separate hemodynamic coupling term to each nonlinear filter (Figure 1; see also Supplemental Experimental Procedures available online). The regularized regression approach used here was optimized to obtain good estimates even for computational models containing thousands of regressors. In this respect, our approach differs from the regression procedures used in many other fMRI studies [17, 18].

To determine how much motion information is available in BOLD signals, we compared prediction accuracy for three different encoding models (Figures 2A–2C): a conventional static model that includes no motion information [8, 19], a nondirectional motion model that represents local motion energy but not direction, and a directional model that represents both local motion energy and direction. Each of these models was fit separately to every voxel recorded in each subject, and the test data were used to assess prediction accuracy for each model. Prediction accuracy was defined as the correlation between predicted and observed BOLD signals. The averaged accuracy across subjects and voxels in early visual areas (V1, V2, V3, V3A, and V3B) was 0.24, 0.39, and 0.40 for the static, nondirectional, and directional encoding models, respectively (Figures 2D and 2E; see Figure S1A for subject- and area-wise comparisons). This difference in prediction accuracy was significant (p < 0.0001, Wilcoxon signed-rank test). An earlier study showed that the static model tested here recovered much more information from BOLD signals than had been obtained with any previous model [8, 19]. Nevertheless, both motion models developed here provide far more accurate predictions than are obtained with the static model. Note that the difference in prediction accuracy between the directional and nondirectional motion models, though significant, was small (Figure 2E; Figure S1A). This suggests that BOLD signals convey spatially localized but predominantly nondirectional motion information. These results show that the motion-energy encoding model predicts BOLD signals evoked by novel natural movies.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:It's a philosophical justification.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:It PROVIDES why an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God to allow evil.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:It doesn't have to be true. Philosophy is much more different than science.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Also, why are people judging God's morality? On what objective basis can you judge God? None.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Atheism cannot provide an objective reason why the God of the Old Testament is evil.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:I don't know. Maybe God wanted to have other free creatures beside men?

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:I don't think my justifications for believing in God are good.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:I'll be back tomorrow. I need some time alone.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:... Atheism cannot provide an objective reason why the God of the Old Testament is evil.

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:Also, why are people judging God's morality?

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:On what objective basis can you judge God? None. Atheism cannot provide an objective reason why the God of the Old Testament is evil.

Agrippina wrote:

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:I don't think my justifications for believing in God are good.

If you're having a crisis of belief, this is the right place to discuss it. We judge bad ideas, we don't judge the people behind them.

I'll be back tomorrow. I need some time alone.

Please do come back. We will help you figure your way out of whatever it is that's bothering you.

Nebogipfel wrote:

Agrippina wrote:

AtheismIsIrrational wrote:I don't think my justifications for believing in God are good.

If you're having a crisis of belief, this is the right place to discuss it. We judge bad ideas, we don't judge the people behind them.

I'll be back tomorrow. I need some time alone.

Please do come back. We will help you figure your way out of whatever it is that's bothering you.

Seconded