recycle

Holy Cirrhosis Zencat, good article. In a goofy way it makes me glad to be an alcoholic. I never have to worry about how much is ok to drink. I have my answer, and the answer is zero. That makes it easier to take of myself today. The past is, well, in the past. The future is completely unknown, so it does not make a lick of sense to worry about it. That leaves now...What am I going to do now to care of myself?

NYCDoglvr

One terrific source of science of addiction: HBO, which ran an in-depth series on all aspects of addiction. Visit the website: HBO: Addiction

Supercrew

Just read a book last night called "the Craving Brain"...
The craving brain: a bold new ... - Google Books

I don't know whether this link works yet, but google search it if it doesn't. It made alot of sense to why people become addicted to things like alcohol, and also even made sense to why programs like AA works for many people. It also discussed the drug Fen Phen which was able to help people lose weight and it was also helping people with alcohol addiction before it was taken off the market. I understood some of the concepts of dopamine and serotonin before I read the book, but this book sort of put everything into perspective for me. It's a pretty easy read, about 160 pages, and I got through it in one sitting. Anyone who has any knowledge of the book, or ends up reading it I would love to discuss it further.

raindancer11

This is one of my favorite threads! I'm learning so much. I'm going to check out The Craving Brain. Just reading the excerpt is motivating me to exercise. Enjoyed all the articles on here, especially the one on Learned Helplessness. Thank you!

findingt

Wow what a wealth of info on addiction, read a couple of the articles, gonna keep reading more. It's all so very interesting, I was shocked to read that a study done by a governmental agency showed a success rate of 5% for the most popular program out there... whaaat???

Guess I shouldn't believe everything I read huh? lol...I read a post by someone that mentioned a 90% success rate, shocker.

LaFemme

Welcome to our corner of SR findingt

Please be careful mentioning formal programs in this section even by innuendo ...its easy to get into trouble.

That's said...please feel free to ad to this thread...we are a curious bunch and love new information!

findingt

hehe duly noted LF, thanks!!!

Zencat

Another jewel of scientific understanding.

Prelude to Passion: Limbic Activation by “Unseen” Drug and Sexual Cues

LaFemme

Hi all!

OK...I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I hope you "know" me well enough by now that its not the case. I just read this article the other day and found it fascinating and was wondering what you all might think about it. P.S. - It's not about addiction but it is about science

Rabbi Adam Jacobs: A Reasonable Argument for God's Existence

Supercrew

Basically what the Rabbi is saying is because we aren't able to explain it now, then there must be a God. I don't buy it. Just because we aren't advanced enough now to explain and understand things like our existence, doesn't mean it is magic. I could make the argument that this forum this world and all of human lifeforms are just a dream that a person is having in another universe that already figured out the science behind his own existence. We are just a figment of someone else's imagination. Can you prove we aren't?

People hate not knowing, so it is easier just to make stuff up to explain stuff.
(That there is a scientific sentence to the nth degree!)

recycle

I have seen his scrabble type argument with increasing frequency. The idea that it is all too unlikely to have happened to have happened without god does not get much traction with me. I am quite happy not knowing, reason appears to be incapable coming up with a plausible answer without a leap of faith, and it is quite likely that we are not smart enough to figure it out. Heck most of us cannot conceptualize what we do know: Space-time continuum; quantum entanglement; walking in high-heels; etc.

LaFemme

Thanks guys

But I want to see you walk in high heels

Supercrew

That's why I have a wife....so I don't have to.

She is the only one allowed to perform miracles in my house.

Murray4x5

I'll stick with evolution, otherwise it was one amazingly unimaginative God working here on Earth; two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth, four appendages, a thingy for liquid waste and another for solid waste, repeat thousands of times for different critters...

Murray

LaFemme

The sign of a wise man is when he realizes that the wife is God!:rotfxko

vinepest

I think it's sad. The whole God versus science thing is a big red herring, yet it keeps popping up with astonishing regularity.

The existence of God is not made more likely by the lack of explanation for phenomenon X. This is true even for evolution. Suppose, for instance, that we could somehow show that common descent is absolutely false, and that evolution is hopeless to explain biodiversity. In that case, we are absolutely no closer to showing that God exists.

There is no reason to prefer the God hypothesis over any other arbitrary hypothesis you can imagine. The idea that we should privilege God over other ad-hoc stories seems prevalent in our society, but it has no rational foundation whatsoever. When the Rabbi lays out his case for God as a negative case against abiogenesis, he's committing himself to that fundamental error.

Zencat

I need to see proof for gods existence. Not some conjecture based on the unexpanded.

recycle

I don’t require proof of God’s existence, I would be wholly satisfied with a strong intuition, or even experience. Proof is a construct of reason which is only a subset of knowledge. There are many true but unprovable statements that I accept as true. For example, I have cannot prove you are conscious, I choose to believe that you are conscious because I have experience that tells me I am conscious and you seem to similar to me, and you tell me you are, so I believe you. The fact that lots of other people tell me they are conscious doesn’t constitute proof either. It is a matter of faith on my part that I believe you and others are conscious.

Circling this back to recovery, I held a number of delusions about truth that helped to keep me drunk. I am still sorting through many of them, but the idea that something had to be provable to be believable was one of the first to go.

LaFemme

Proof is an interesting concept...but I could go way off into existential la la land here so I will refrain

vinepest

I think we can make a sufficiently strong inductive argument for the existence of other minds which warrants belief. In particular, we have models of our own experience with open links where we should expect other real experiences to lie. Put in more familiar terms, we observe that our own mind has an orderly association with our physical brain, and we infer inductively that other brains which exhibit similar orderings have their own associated minds. This seems to me entirely consistent with the standards of induction to which we ordinarily appeal.

There are other defenses for the rationality of belief in other minds, for instance the argument that such beliefs are psychologically unshakable and therefore not subject to epistemological critique. But none of these defenses are compatible with an argument for the existence of God.