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I am reminded of a question posed in The Imitation Game, which is the story of Alan Turing and his colleagues at Blechley Park during WW II. They cracked the Enigma code. But in a side conversation, someone asked Alan about an article he had written (from which the movie's title was derived)...

Learned behavior when you were a child and were losing your deciduous teeth.

We use this knowledge by recognizing that education is meant to change us. We have to be receptive to change. Learning is not a passive thing - it is an active, participatory thing. It requires an attitude of willingness to learn something else than we learned before. I.e. don't walk into a...

Anxiety and depression go hand in hand in this specific way: Both are self-feeding mental attitudes. (They differ in many other ways.) The key to either of them includes identifying the triggering condition or behavior and learning WHY it triggers your attack. Then learn to handle the...

The entire set of threads about religion are exactly about that subject, though not in a legal sense.

In the USA, the Political Correctness movement is a way to stifle debate by attempting to claim high moral ground. This is an extreme case, but when a thug gets shot and killed while attempting to rob a store, his parents/friends say "he didn't do anything wrong." (I'm avoiding the opportunity...

I have plenty of willpower when it comes to food. What I don't have is won't power.

You are welcome. I will check in from time to time but my time to answer is getting a bit constrained due to a combination of wife's recovery from surgery requiring a lot of my time, and my mother-in-law is reaching a critical stage in the progression of her cancer. Wifey is fine other than...

It is possible to prove that a specific god does not exist if the descriptions of that god are self-inconsistent. The existence of gods in general cannot be disproved. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph in the Holy Bible can be disproved by extension because the Bible (that is the defining...

Maybe, but don't say that near my wife!

In New Orleans, our cuisine is widely varied because of our "eight flags" heritage. We have had immigrants from Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, England, and there are also the Native Americans (Choctaw nation) in our area. There is also a touch of African cooking from the slaves and...

Non-existence. No spiritual form. BUT no consciousness, either, so you don't KNOW you are dead. (In fact, you don't know anything at that point since the medium of your memory is decaying.)

Jon, logic does not allow a Universal Negative to be proved. If you have studied formal logic, you already know that. The way to prove that a God exists is to produce Him. There IS no way to prove that a God does not exist other than through strict logic. At most, we might be able to...

No apology necessary, and your question was reasonably worded. Think nothing of it. There was no insult. As a hypothetical comment, I temporarily entertained the idea that God exists. As the lawyers say, pro argumentum. If the God of the Bible exists, and all of this "The beneficent God...

Alan Turing's test stands as the best answer to that question. If you are told that you are testing a new type of distant communication involving a teletype or computer keyboard, and you can have a free and open conversation with who-/whatever is on the other end of the line, but you CANNOT SEE...

Ah, yes. That is a difference. In USA English, the "School of Hard Knocks" is the schooling afforded by difficult life experiences that provide adversity as something to be overcome.

Moderation in everything is usually best.

There is a school of thought that relates the map to the territory. If you take the idea that having a more nuanced vocabulary lets you put more details on your word-map, at what point does the map become the territory? And at what point does the finely nuanced map become a picture? If words...

Ghosts? No. Can the power of the mind move an object? Sure. When my mind tells my body it is hungry but my body is being lazy, I will eventually move by the power of my mind (with only a little help from my muscles). Oh, you meant moving an object not otherwise in contact with my body...

Depends on what you mean by "I" in this context. If "I" refers to the personality inside your head, then that statement is somewhat of a tautology. However, if I recall correctly, many zoologists consider the "mirror" test to be definitive. If a creature coming up to a mirror wants to attack...