yagami

I dont think there is as problem with answering difficult questions but this particular question is actually impossible to answer. I explained why a couple of post ago. At the same time I think Steph makes an even better case that none of this will really matter as a free society will be able to deal with these once in a life time events. We should really be focusing on what will get us to a free society and not these questions.

From what I have read the calories question is pretty simple. If you take in more calories then you burn then you will gain weight. The question is why does the human body have a disire to consume more calories than it needs. Clearly a person who is inactive doesn't require a lot of calories but yet our bodies will still send a signal to our brains to eat. This happens for two reasons. 1. The signal is sent because we need calories for energy: This is the more obvious out of the two. Calories are the energy source we use for everything in out body. If you dont have calories you cant blink. With that being said a couch potatoe is clearly not someone that needs a lot of energy so they shouldn't need a lot of calories. 2. The signal is sent due to malnutrition: This is the one that most people are unaware of. When we think of malnutrition we think of( or at least i do) starving children in Africa that look horribly skinny. Everyone in america would look like that if we were not so rich a country. When you dont have enough nutrition in your body your body will send a signal to your brain that says go get nutrition. Our bodies are not smart enough to know exactly what foods exist int he world. Our body doesn't even know what an apple is. It can only tell what the nutrients are once the nutrients have entered into the body. Interesting fact about eating is that from your perspective when you eat food that food is not considered inside the body until it has entered into your blood stream through the intestines. So what all this means is if you dont need anymore calories then the only reason you could be hungry is because you are lacking in nutrition. You body sends a signal to your brain to eat. You go out to eat and the signal stops temporarily. As soon as the food leaves your stomach the signal is sent again because it takes time for the food you just ate to get to the intestine and into the bloodstream. Myth about healthy eating: It's actually not possible to eat "healthy". What you can do is avoid all the bad foods that I mentioned above but avoiding bad foods isn't the same as have a healthy diet. The problem with trying to eat healthy is that all food (outside of meats) is grown from the ground. These foods absorb minerals from the soil and we eat the minerals from the plant. These minerals have been converted from a nearly unusable form to a very absorbable form by the plant (remember this point for later). We eat the plant and we get the minerals that way. Keep in mind I said minerals and I didn't say vitamins amino acids or essential fatty acids. This is because plants can actually manufacture these nutrients by themselves. Nothing can manufacture minerals because minerals are just rocks. These rocks were put here when the planet was formed and there are a limited amount of these on the planet (kinda scary when you think of it). The mineral conversion process is greatly assisted by bacteria that are in the soil but this process doesn't happen like it use to because of the way western farming work. All the pesticides sprayed on our plants kill the bacteria and really hurt this process. But even if that were not the case it wouldn't matter because the minerals that are in the soil are not spread out evenly across the surface of the earth. Take a look at this image below: As you can see minerals are all over the place in their distribution. Because of this when a farmer grows his plants if he doesn't account for this in some way his plants wont grow. So western farmers use something called NPK (nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous). This is a combination of minerals that will give the farmer the biggest bang for his buck regardless of what the soil is like on his land. Tieing it all together: So what this means is the carrots and the squash and all the other "healthy" foods out there actually dont give you much. The nutritional needs of a plant and the nutritional needs of a human are not only vastly different in amount but are very different in variety as well. Plants have a peculiar ability to absorb nutrients that they dont need but we do. The reason why certain plants are seen as good for certain things is because different species of plants are better at absorbing certain nutrients than others. So if plant A is better at absorbing nutrient 1 then plant B is at absorbing nutrient 1 then you are going to get a statistically significant result that shows that plant A is statistically better at improving lets say your vision. It doesn't mean that you will get better vision from eating that plant it only means that you have a better chance of improving your vision when eating that plant. How to get around this: Well the answer is pretty simple. You HAVE TO SUPPLEMENT. It's really not an option. Since the distribution of minerals is going to be so widely variable you have to supplement. Supplementing with vitamins is not the big issue here. Remember plants make vitamins. You need to supplement with all minerals and trace minerals. When selecting a nutrtional supplement you need to be careful of which kind you pick. Many because minerals need to be absorbed through the plant to be effective you need to know the difference between chelated and collodial minerals. Chelated minerals are minerals that have not gone through the conversion process. Collodial minerals are minerals that have and are much smaller to partical size which is the property that gives the mineral its absorbability. Many products out there well the chelated version of a mineral because it is much cheaper. Calcium carbonate is a popular one that is nothing but a huge scam. You need to take a very large bottle of calcium carbonate in order to get the real daily volume of calcium you need. Once you are properly nutrified you will feel a big difference in how hungry you are throughout the day. For me it was a very strange feeling. I can feel my stomach is empty but im not hungry at the same time. It takes some getting use to (at least for me). I recommend a company called youngevity. Try not to be scared away by the fact that they are one of these multi level marketing companies. I've been using them for years and I love their products. Never really been interested in selling their stuff though. If you do a google search for the healthy start pak you'll find a bunch of website with people selling their stuff. Healthy start pak is where I recommend starting if you are interested since you seem to like to do experiments lol. If you read my post about cholesterol it should be pretty evident that we do need cholesterol. I only mentioned two of the reasons we need cholesterol as well. There are lot of reasons we need cholesterol. Our bodies do indeed create cholesterol on its own through the liver and you can life without cholesterol just like you can live without calcium or iron or any other nutrient. The question is how long will you live. The argument that you have lived without cholesterol for two years therefore you are some kind of proof that you dont need cholesterol is like making the I know a tall Chinese guy argument. The way I see it if you want to make an argument about something you really should understand the argument at some level instead of just stating that you know for sure you dont need cholesterol. I'm not a doctor but I have been reading about this stuff for a while now which is why I can articulate my position as well as I can. All you did was make a statement and post a video and links. From my perspective it doesn't seem like you understand your position at all.

You dont actually have choice here. You go to the military you go to jail or you die. We all know what happens if you resist your so called "choices". It's like saying I choose to pay taxes or I choose to go to jail. So no matter what you do you certainly aren't making an immoral choice you are just making a value judgment based on what you value more. You life your freedom or your conscience. If your life is in danger of being taken morality surely goes out the window.

I think why people have so much trouble with this problem is because they are making assumption about the implications of the answer. People get hung up because they think if you answer one way you are somehow immoral or more or less moral. Well no matter what you answer you cant be immoral because without choice morality doesn't apply and morality is binary. You are either immoral not not immoral there is no in between. So whatever choice you make it will call under the category of not immoral. In essence I think people dismiss the question because the question is designed to figure out the more moral choice when that is an impossibility. So how do you answer an impossible question you dont.

Right there are two categories of morality. Immoral and not immoral. There is no such thing as positive morality.

The answer to your question is no. Lying to someone isn't immoral. When you ask someone for a price of a bracelet you never enter into a verbal contract in which either party agrees to be honest. You only agree to the sale at the price given. Lying makes you a jerk but not immoral.

Love is completely conditional. All you have to do is think of would your feeling change if the other person suddenly change to be a completely different axe murdering psycho path. That obviously is an extreme example but anywhere along that continuum you can easily fall out of love. You can really love a person but every person is an amalgamation of certain characteristics. The characteristics that makes one fall in love are the characteristics that are most able to change.

I"ll take a swing at this cholestoral thing here. Let me know if this makes sense to you. Cholesterol is absolutly essential to the human body. It's so essential your body makes cholesterol on it's own. Think of cholesterol as a starting point for every hormone your body needs Testosterone progesterone and many many other hormones are all broken down versions of cholesterol. Your body takes cholesterol and breaks it down to make all your hormones. The reason cholesterol is given such a bad name is because it is found in the arteries clogging up things which causes people to die. These is a very simple reason for this which I'll explain below: The science behind cholesterol: Take a look at the image below As you can see everything starts from cholestoral and is broken down from there. This is not a comprehensive picture by any means there are many more hormones in the body. How does cholesterol clog your arteries?: First of all you need to understand something called fluid dynamics. Basically it's the science behind the movement of fluids. As blood flows through your arteries it is going to twist and turn as it flows through you. Here is a picture of a river: As you can imagine whenever the river hits a corner there is much more pressure hitting the walls of the river at the turn. When the river is going in a straight line there is little pressure on the walls of the river. Our bodies work the same way. Only difference is when you are dealing with a closed system like our arteries the pressure is greater. In a river the pressure can just overflow onto the ground. In a tube there is no overflow. So now that you get there is greater pressure at the bends then when going in a straight line the rest should makes sense (hopefully). Free Radicals: When we eat processed foods, burnt meat, fried foods, oxygenated oils (which includes all oils that aren't treated to prevent this) or meats with nitrates and nitrites in them we bring into our bodies these things called free radicals. Here is a picture of a free radical and an antioxidant: Every atom has three parts a neutrons protons and electrons. A stable atom has an equal amount of protons and electrons. An unstable atom (free radical) has extra electron(s) and an antioxidant has a missing electron(s). Since free radicals have an extra electron the atom is free to react to react to other atoms and attempt to bond with them. When this happens there is a chemical reaction on a molecular level because an unstable atom came in contact with a stable atom. What an anti oxidant does is come in contact with the free radical and neutralizes the free radical because it requires more electrons and the free radical has extra electron(s). There is no reaction between these two because of the perfect pairing. What does this have to do with cholesterol?: When the free radicals explode they cause damage to your arteries (and everything else in the body). This is where inflammation comes from. Now imagine your arteries have tiny wholes in them throughout your circulatory system. If those wholes are not repaired in some way you are going to die very fast. What happens is because there is more pressure on the bends of the arteries the wholes grow in size there. So what your body does is use what is has in abundance which is cholesterol. Cholesterol is a temporary fix your body uses to keep you from dying immediately. Unfortunately our body has no clue how to think long term. Good vs bad cholesterol: This is simply a myth and there isn't much to say about this. The only reason bad cholesterol exist is because free radicals damage your HDL and convert them to LDL. The consumption of LDL type fats is not the problem at all. Conclusion: Cholesterol is not the enemy and never has been. As soon as doctors started telling people to stop eating cholesterol Alzheimer's (which never existed before) appeared. Your brain is made up largely of cholesterol. without cholesterol you cant make testosterone. Which means you cant get an erection. This cholesterol free dieting is a complete doctor created disaster. We evolved eating a very high fat diet full of cholesterol. The danger with cholesterol comes from free radicals. Free radicals are ubiquitous but the largest source of free radicals by far come from food. If you want to protect yourself you need to consume a product that has a high ORAC value. ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity. Since you cant avoid free radical entirely the more ORAC you get the healthier you will be. I hope that clears up the cholesterol myth for you guys.

Steph answers your question in the video even though he says he wont at the beginning lol. He says where there is no choice morality doesn't apply. So there is your answer. There shouldn't be anything left to discuss.

If you are saying UPB has missed something that needs to be included you are saying UPB is incorrect because animals are not included. If you believe UPB is correct then saying it needs to include animals rights is a contradiction. You are indeed saying UPB is incorrect when you attempt to extend the definition. I hate to keep going to a race thing but it's like when we expanded the definition of black people to be considered equal people. The previous definition was incorrect and now we have the correct definition. As I said in my last post the reason we include sleeping people and babies is because they will become able to act as moral agents at some point. The state of inability to act as a moral agent is temporary. You cant have it both ways here. You cant say you think that you cant be an aggressor towards animals because it would be immoral and then say you disagree with with the statement If it is evil to kill fish, then UPB says that anyone or anything that kills the fish is evil. Can you help me understand how this is not a contradiction?

Did you read the rest of that section in his book? You only posted about the section that mildly favors your point. Steph is simply pointing out how if you cant avoid something it logically can not be considered evil. But he clearly states later on that you can not disprove a theory by pointing out that it doesn't apply to something else. You may think you are just trying to extend the definition of UPB but you are actually attempting to disprove UPB. You are essentially saying UPB is wrong because it does not include animals. Once we include animals UPB is correct. Also let me address the babies point once again. Babies are protected by UPB in the exact same way an unconscious person is. If the person is in a state where they currently are unable to be a moral agent but will at some point or have been able to in the past or would be able to given normal circumstances they are protected by UPB. It would be like saying as soon as I fall asleep I have no rights because I cant act as a moral agent. Comparing animals to babies is not really fair. The other thing that bothers me about your argument is that it seems completely arbitrary when you decide that animals should be protected by UPB because they can suffer and feel pain. To me this sounds like the argument that babies have rights when their heart forms or when their brain forms. You are picking out a characteristic and saying this is why animals should be protected with no appeal to any moral framework. Think of it this way. UPB stands for Universally Preferable Behavior. If you want to include animals in that universe you must have animal follow all the moral rules just like everyone else in that universe. Animals cant be part of this universe for obvious reasons. So therefor they are not protected by universal moral rules.

Yes but you have no test for what is or isn't moral. You seem to be throwing the word moral around without any kind of test for what is moral or isn't. That is why I asked for you to distinguish between rocks animals humans and plants. Why is it that animals and humans pass the test but plants and rocks. What is your test? How do you determine that one action is moral and another isn't? We cant just say humans should act morally towards animals and not define what morality is.

First off I apologize for taking so long to reply to your post. Second UPB cant apply to animals because what you are advocating is that animals be protected by UPB but have no moral responsibility. UPB only applies to humans because we can act both morally and morally. Because of this we are also responsible for our actions. This cant apply to animals because they cant act as moral agents. Also you never explained the difference between a rock a plant an animal and a human. Why are all four of these treated differently to you given your moral framework? Im going to have to disagree with you on the point about contemporary cattle. The thing is none of that really matters. Not to sound condescending but you might want to read my post again. We dont need meat and if we do eat meat we only need the amino acids and saturated fat from the meat. That isnt effected by the way the cow is raised. The only thing that matters in your diet is how much nutrition you get. That's it. It is impossible to get all your nutrition from your food. If you eat meat from a cow grown in a lab as long as that cow is giving you all your nutrients nothing else really matters (assuming the cow isn't so toxic you die from the first bit). One of the fundemental misconceptions people have about the human body is when it breaks you are screwed. The human body has an amazing copacity to heal itself from all chronic disease. The only reason it doesn't do so in most cases is because the body doesn't have all its' tools available to fix the problem. (I feel a rant coming on) People go to their doctor assuming their doctor will help them but have no idea that most doctors in the US are MD doctors. The term MD is misleading and almost no one realizes what MD really means. MD should be renamed to AD for alopathic doctor. These types of doctors specialize in trauma surgery and a few infectious diseases. Most of the time people go to the doctor they dont have any of these issues. So what's the best way to work with surgery and trauma? DRUGS!! This is why every solution an MD will give you will be drugs or surgery. When they go to medical school that is what they learn. But what everyone else believes and MD is is a medical doctor who goes to school for years and years and learns something about everything. Then if he doesn't know he sends you to another doctor who is a "specialist". The term specialist only means he is an expert in the aplopathic treatment of a disease. That doesn't mean he is an all around expert on everything to do with that disease. Of course alopathic medicine is far far more profitable than the other schools of medicine so of course while they are the dominant force in medicine. People believe that MD's are a better bet for health because they are everywhere. Natural medicines are seen as risky largely because of the reasons I mentioned in my first post. When a person's body breaks down and they try using vitamins to fix the problem they may only get slightly better if at all. The body needs a comprehensive set of nutrition and then all chronic disease goes away because chronic disease can ONLY exist in the face of a lack of nutrition. If you suffer from a chronic disease and aren't getting better from the nutritional approach you A aren't taking enough according to body weight or B you aren't taking the correct stuff. Now that doesn't mean that MD's are all bad doctors. All it means is people need to get the idea out of their head that MDs went to school for year and years and learned all about chronic disease. If they know anything about chronic disease then it came from their own personal study of the subject. MD doctors read papers on alopathic treatment of chronic disease and that is what they bring to the table. Not a comprehensive understanding of what's going on. Almost all known chronic diseases were already cured in animals but there is this myth that animal medicine and human medicine is somehow vastly different. One last thing the vitamin companies are out their to make money also. If you cant read chemical names (which most people cant) then you can be easily fooled into thinking you are getting a good product but are getting almost nothing. An example of this is calcium carbonate. This supplement is very popular but because of the way calcium carbonate is bonded you need to take usually a very large bottle of this stuff every day to get the daily value your body really needs. OK END OF RANT XD. Im very passionate about this stuff as you can probably tell and most people have no idea how medicine really works behind the scenes.

It is never morally correct to initiate violence against others but we must distinguished between humans animals and non living things. It would be rediculous for anyone to say it is morally wrong to initiate violence against a punching bag but why would we say that? There has to be some kind of test that distinguishes a punching bag from a human. UPB says that distinction comes from the ability to comprehend morality or under normal circumstances would eventually become capable of understand morality in the future. That covers children and those born with little to no ability to comprehend such things. Animals can not comprehend morality so they cant act as moral agents. Animals cant be moral or immoral so morality does not apply to them. If you which to apply the UPB ( a moral framework) to animals then you are at the same time saying that animals should act morally. But since animals cant act morally UPB doesn't apply.

First off you should listen to the podcast I pointed out in my last post. Im not saying what you are advocating is like slavery im saying you are taking an argument that is the same argument that was put forth when people said we shouldn't have slaves. The rebuttal was we needed have slavery because without slaves XYZ will happen. What im trying to say is you are telling me that morality is determined by consequences. If morality is determined by consequences then we should still have slaves because it was completely impossible to tell what benefits we would get from not having slavery. This relates to your argument in this way. You are saying if we way it is moral to allow people to do cruel things to animals then the consequences of that action will be XYZ. Even if the consequences of allowing such action were good that would have zero baring on whether the action is moral or not. When it came to slavery it just so happen that by freeing the slaves gave us a great benefit. But we didn't free the slaves because we thought the benefit would be so great. We free the slaves because we believed that to be the moral thing to do. If you want to extend UPB to animals or anything aliens rocks whatever you need o explain first what is the logical inconsistency in UPB. Also you shouldnt be teaching children "good behavior". You should be teaching them how to think. If you start teaching them this is good and this is bad they will look to you for answers and not be able to think for themselves. The question should be what do you think about this. Raising children with conclusions about what is good and what is bad is what religion does. Now children will naturally latch onto the beliefs their parents have but teaching them that what you think is right is not the best way to go about parenting in my opinion. Also a child raised with empathy will have no desire to do anything cruel to animals. You dont need to teach children murder is bad stealing is wrong ect. These things come naturally when the child has empathy. When the child has empathy they can place themselves in the shoes of others and imagine how an action would make them feel. Steph has said his daughter is very very kind to animals and I guarantee you he never taught her to be kind and animals. Promote peaceful parenting by being a peaceful parent. Teach other parents how to be peaceful. Dont tell parents or children conclusions only how to think.

Im not sure if you saw my first post on this thread but you should read my thoughts on diets. In there I explain why both diets work and neither is correct. You do not need meat you need amino acids which you get from protein. You can get amino acids outside of meat. You also need saturated fat which you can get from milk. Eating protein is just a more efficient way of getting amino acids rather than getting amino acids through other means Again you are using the argument from effect. I cant say slavery is great because the consequences of not having slavery will be disaster. That is exactly what you are saying. You are saying if we dont change the universal theory to include animals the consequences could be disaster. Arguement from effect podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/1645/the-religion-of-the-argument-from-effect You cant claim that everyone not doing horrible things to animals is UPB because the child is preforming that action. Therefore it cant be universal. I also find it hard to believe that in a world where there is a child doing such horrible things there is only one child in existence that is doing such things. This just adds to my argument about how the action of stopping the child cant be UPB. Also sanity has nothing to do with UPB. UPB applies to sane people and insane people equally. No we dont all accept the UPB extends to animals. If you wish to dispute UPB you must find the logical inconsistency in the argument. You must say UPB is wrong because it doesn't apply to animals and here is why it should apply to animals. So far all you have said is doing horrible things to animals will lead to negative consequences in the future. I really want you to understand why that argument is the exact same thing as saying who will pick the cotton if we dont have slaves. It doesn't matter how bad things would be without slaves it's still immoral. If UPB is false please explain why it is false. Murder is immoral. Murdering someone slowly is immoral as well. The amount of suffering doesn't matter. If murdering someone brings great joy to others that doesn't make murder moral (Killing in self defense is different). But as you can see if you replace animal suffering with murder you can see that you dont judge the morality of an action based on how much suffering is involved, how much you get out of the action or what everyone else things about the action. At one point everyone thought slavery was good except that tiny group called the slaves. You cant just exclude them and slap the label on them of insanity (Not that you are calling slaves insane I know you aren't). But you basically said only sane people would do such a thing. As if someone's sanity determines an arguments validity. You would be considered insane for trying to come up with a system of agriculture that didn't involve slaves. OK END OF RANT!! XD

You can tell by your language you dont get what im saying. Would I be "OK" doesnt matter I do not decide morality so what I prefer doesn't matter. If I saw a child doing that I would probably stop them. In this case I would be violating the NAP but that is my choice to violate it. I dont change a universal theory by my decision. You need to prove why the NAP does apply to animals and not tell us how you feel that it will lead to bad things or makes you feel uncomfortable. If you cant do that then this is not an argument at all just you stating you preferences and not at all stating why the NAP does apply to animals.

Im sorry but I have to call you out on that. You said you dont see how the NAP doesn't apply to animals. Which means you are trying to make a moral argument for the non suffering of animals. The NAP is the non initiation of force it is not the non initiation of force unless that force doesn't include suffering. The NAP is a moral framework and unless you are willing to make a moral argument then you are just stating your preferences. Your argument seems to be akin to the well who will pick the cotton without the slaves. You are saying if people do this then they may end up like that. That is an argument from practicality and not a moral argument. Even if the killing of animals int eh most brutal way lead to the most evil of people the consequence of the killing of the animal has no baring on the morality of the question at hand. You have to decide if you are making a moral argument or are you just stating what you prefer. If the latter if true then that is your answer to your question as to why the NAP does not apply to animals or animal suffering. The NAP is a universal and preferences have no place there. You will have to prove why the NAP applies to animal without using the argument from effect. Ah sorry I didn't read everything. I kinda just came in towards the end.

I agree with that but I dont think you have to go that far. Vegetarians eat plants. Why is it morally acceptable to eat a plant that is a living creature but not an animal. I mean what's the point of debating anything else if you cant answer that question? The only reason I pointed out how it's the non initiation of force is because of how often the you guys were saying the word aggression towards animals. Just wanted to be clear on that.

I think the issue here is using the word aggression. Although it's called the NAP it's actually just the non initiation of force. Aggression isn't morally evil. You can be agressive towards and attacker or anyone else that threatens you so if we think about it in that sense I dont see anything wrong with initiating force to consume living animals. We do it to living plants all the time. I really wanna know what the difference is.

Couldn't by that logic you say we should apply the NAP to things like plants and trees. If we did that then we couldn't use wood or is there something im missing?

I'd love to chime in on this. one of these days I planned on calling in the show and asking Steph about his view and what I have come to believe. For starters I dont believe it's morally wrong to eat meat if you cant afford it. And I dont think it's morally wrong to eat meat at all. Those who have trouble eating meat because the thought makes you cringe makes me wonder how much empathy im lacking in :/. The problem with all diets Have you ever wondered why there are so many diets out there and there seems to be such a varying degree of results? Well the simple answer is because all diets require will power and that is the varying factor in all diets. What if you could take will power out of the equation (mostly). If you only eat veggies and no meat you will inevitably get very hungry at some point throughout the day but will have reached your calorie limit. The question is why are you getting hungry. The answer is because there are only two reason why anyone ever gets hungry. The single that goes to your brain that tells you you should eat happens when: 1. You require more calories: This occurs when you have exercised or worked out a ton and you have burned a bunch of calories. Calories are your energy source and are needed for you to even blink. Pushing your body by excercising will use up that energy and send that signal. 2. You require nutrition: This is the one that is so obvious but no one realizes it. Our bodies do not know where nutrients come from exactly. Our bodies only know that the way you get nutrients is through food. At least or me when I think of the term malnourished I think of some starving child in Africa with no food. But in reality many many many Americans are malnourished. When you live in a rich country where food is readily available around every corner and you are not getting nutrients you get a situation where all your food has nothing in it but calories are everywhere. IMPORTANT!! So this is probably the least known fact about health and losing weight that everyone misses. Everyone is told from being a child onward that you need to eat your veggies to be healthy. Everyone believes eating your veggies is the best thing in the world you can do to be healthy. Well that's not really true and here is why. Every millimeter of soil is different on the planet. The difference in soil composition is something that happened when the planet was originally formed. So what you end up with is one farmland with one soil composition and another with a completely different soil composition. Now what farmers use to do was just farm their lands and it was no big deal but now we are much more efficient with our technology and have basically taken all the minerals out of the soil. Our soils are depleted in the US at least. So what western farmers did was figure out how to get the best bang for their buck. We came up with something called the NPK fertilizer(nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorus). Basically this is the bare minimum that plants need to grow that will give the farmers the best yield. Plants have a strange property in them where they can absorb more and different types of nutrients then what they require to grow. Because of this the plants our grandparents use to eat were much more healthy then the plants we eat today. Farmers are not about to start giving their plants one penny more of nutrition for the sake of the customer. They will only give the plant what it needs to grow because their money comes from meeting the market standard for quality and selling as many of those quality plants as possible. Right now the market has no idea they are getting almost nothing out of their veggies and so nothing will change for now. Little known fact of how it use to be: The invention of electricity was both an amazing thing but had some serious draw backs on our health that most people dont realize. Before electricity and basically as far back as before written history humans would take wood ashes and use them as fertilizer. So we would burn our wood for heat and fuel and then we would take those ashes and place them in the ground with our plants and the plants would absorb all the nutrients from the burnt wood and we would consume the plants and receive the nutrients this way. I would say this was part of our culture but like I said humans have been doing this since prehistory. No one knows why. Once we invented electricity we dont need wood for fuel and there goes the the recycling of nutrients in our diet. The myth about vitamins: Well it's not really a myth more just people misunderstanding why vitamins are not the big picture. Plants can create vitamins amino acids and essential fatty acids. All three of those categories of nutrients are essential and if not taken will eventually lead to health problems. The forth category of nutrients are minerals. Minerals are rocks. Rocks can not be created by plants. When people talk about alternative health usually they jump to thinking vitamins. Vitamins are one peace of the pie and you can get these by eating veggies. But you can not get the minerals this way. As I stated earlier the soils are depleted. And I meant they are depleted of minerals. NPK only provides three minerals which is all a plant needs to survive and grow. We are humans need much more than that. Conclusion: The reason diets are so hard and get such different results is because the very thing that makes us hungry and want to eat is not being address. If you address the two reasons why we get hungry you can lose a ton of weight in no time. Getting enough calories to move around is easy but you MUST SUPPLEMENTS WITH MINERALS!!! If you dont supplement with minerals you will get hungry when you shouldnt be because your body thinks you are nutritionally starving yourself. Last thing and I'll shut up. Farmers are 100% able to control the weight of their farm animals because they understand how this works. Every animal on the farm is given a pellet that corresponds to that species nutritional requirement. So a pig is given this pellet everyday because if the pig doesn't get this pellet it is possible the pig will get sick due to a lack of a nutrient that is require for a certain function of the pig (this is why you never hear of huge plagues of farm animals with debilities or cancer). So what the farmer does is take that pellet away before it is about to be sold and that fattens the pig up because the pig suddenly gets hungry all the time and gains a ton of weight very quickly. This process works the same for humans. OK END OF RANT! PS I am not a doctor just someone who enjoys reading about this stuff.

Henrik got it. That's a pretty crazy story. But I think there is a way to make it so that your phone only vibrates or is muted when you get a private call. It depends on which type of phone you have but I think you can do that.

What im saying it just because science could be going about this the wrong way now doesn't mean it will remain that way forever. So it really doesn't matter how much or little we understand it now. All we know for sure is we dont understand it fully. The only reason anyone can claim it will not come down to 1s and 0s and zeros is because we dont really know how it works so it's really inconceivable to try and program something like this. And again this isn't specifically about consciousness. This is more about how our brains solve problems. If we can figure out how our brains come up with new solutions it didn't have until our brain "thought" about the question we can reproduce this process in 1s and 0s. Consciousness has little to do with it. We dont need consciousness to program a calculator but we do need to understand mathematical theory in order to program the calculator. We need to know how 1 + 1 = 2 and likewise we need to understand what is it that allows our brains to solve problems.

You are thinking too broadly. What allows humans to be creative in the abstract may be something humans need but that doesn't explain how exactly on a molecular level it works. When we create these machines they will not "need" anything. I think you are making the mistake of thinking that a machine will absolutely require a need in order to be creative. We will simply program the computers to be creative and this will be a compulsory command. The machines will not require self awareness no more than a toaster require self awareness to make your toast. It will preform the command it is given within the parameters of it's programming.