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Wow, this was fun to read over again. Is Juan still here or was he banned?
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http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Motivated_skepticism As for the rest of your questions, if you were educated enough in the field to have a general understanding of the basic findings/reasoning behind their conclusions, we could debate specific points. At this point, the amount of information I would have to spoon feed you is honestly too much for me
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"Thats a truism. If you cant answer the question, which conclusion seems inescapable at this point, just bow out gracefully." Hah. You asked how I knew that brains that exhibit syaesthesia were uncommon. You accept as a truism that a sample 3 standard deviations from the mean is uncommon. 1 in 60 people have colored grapheme synaesthesia.
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They are uncommon because their prevalance in their relevant population is like 3 standard deviations from the mean! edit: I need to start compiling my disbelief to one post, in case it looks like I'm spamming. The brain processes information, as well as determining physical actions. I'm not sure if you are trying to be clever or if you actually
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Don't pretend you know anything about the scientific standards these studies hold themselves to, it's not like you've read any of them. Oh wait, I forgot that this community is now infested with conspiracy theorists and science-skeptics.
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I think brains 'create' consciousness and agency, or the illusion thereof. As do the majority of cognitive scientists/biologists. I could explain the physiology of synaesthesia, prosopagnosia, and many other symptoms of 'uncommon' brains. The work has already been done for me, however.
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You might want to read some actual academic papers then. BTW, brains produce 'agents' (or the illusion of them) which produce behavior. So... edit: behavior does not mean activities. For example, people with injuries to specific parts of the frontal lobe become hopelessly addicted gamblers. Does this mean the frontal lobe determines if you are
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How specific are you going to want me to be? If I said "Subjects with a uncommonly functioning fusiform gyrus, whether by genetics or injury, when compared with the average functioning temporal lobe (approximated from years of random sampling data across all populations), exhibit exceedingly uncommon perceptual symptoms and behavior. would you
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Neurologist and neurosurgeon are careers. Synaesthesia is a perceptual disorder. One is studied by cognitive scientists, the other isn't. The point isn't to just study uncommon behavior, as that can be the product of many different things, most being irrelevant to the neurologist's trade. The point is to study 'rare' brains (1 in
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"Yes, people with head injuries act differently than they would without the head injury, even unto avoiding the risk of further cranial trauma. How is that different from ceasing to engage in snowboarding? " Some people with brain damage change their entire personality. Some become uncontrollable emotionaly, some become violent, etc. It's