From here:
Following a Mediterranean diet can extend a person's lifespan and reduce the risk of mortality in elderly people, according to a new study.
Italian researchers from the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention of the IRCCS Neuromed, in Molise, Italy, analysing the relationship between a traditional Mediterranean diet and mortality found the life-prolonging link when studying participants over the age of 65 who adhered to the diet.
According to the findings, the diet, comprised of a mix of fruit, vegetables, fish, olive oil, and moderate wine consumption, is associated with a 25 per cent reduction of “all-cause mortality” and the effect remains when considering “cardiovascular or cerebrovascular mortality” as well.
Well, at least I eat plenty of fish and olive oil and nuts. But very little in terms of vegetables and fruit (unless potatoes count), and no wine (although I drink lots of lager).
Similar to those who claim that studies reveal consuming 5 to 10 portions of fruit and vegetables a day will help prevent heart disease, diabetes and some cancers, and hence extends one's life, I would like to know how they know it's the consumption of these foods that are of primary importance rather than the avoidance of ultra-processed/junk foods? That is to say, perhaps it's not so much what you eat, but what you don't eat? I do not believe that studies distinguish between these 2 possibilities since eating through humongous amounts of vegetables and fruit every day will leave very little appetite for any junk foods.
I've been thinking. It just simply won't be possible to create fully autonomous cars (i.e level 5 cars) that share the same roads as human drivers. Google etc are wasting a lot of their money attempting to do this.
There needs to be a rethink. Autonomous cars need their own lanes. Stop wasting money Google, Musk etc and give it to me instead.Also see my original blog post on these cars here, and another post here.
Some people dwell -- unduly in my opinion -- about their own deaths and the meaning of it all. Yes we are all going to die -- just as ~ 100 billion people did before us (this is a rough estimate of the total number of human being who have ever died).
We either survive, or we don't. If we don't then it will be exactly the same as the time before our lives. It will be akin to deep sleep. If we survive? Then it's an adventure which will happen at some unspecified time in our futures. Meanwhile let's just lose ourselves in our lives. Enjoy ourselves.
Life is interesting. Existence is fascinating. Let's not lose sight of that.
According to modern western wisdom we are mere meat robots, with no free will, living out our purposeless lives in a purposeless Universe, marching to our inevitable annihilation. An annihilation that can occur at any time. All our actions, all our thoughts, all our emotions, all our hopes, all our fears, everything we ever say, everything we ever do, is ultimately to no avail. In a million years time, each and every one of us will have long been forgotten, as if we had never existed. And, perhaps, the human race itself will have long since disappeared and will have been forgotten, as if it too had never existed.
Moreover, the Universe itself is dying. Eventually, all conscious creatures will die everywhere in the entire Universe. And eventually, nothing will ever happen ever again . . not anywhere and not ever.
Let the sheer meaninglessness of our existence and the Universe suffuse through you!
But wait! Richard Dawkins has some words of consolation:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here...
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?" (Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder p6)
Now doesn't that make people burst with happiness? Let us spring forth from bed with alacrity and enthusiasm for the forthcoming day! To savour the sweetness of existence. To know that you're one of the infinitesimally small proportion of potential people who have been granted the miracle of being alive! To be bestowed this gift of a momentary window of existence before entering into eternal nothingness. Oh, how fortunate we all are!
That's one way of looking at it I suppose! Ha Ha!
Why do guys act so sycophantically around good looking women? Get sick of hearing stuff like:
You have intelligence, courage and a keen sense of self and your place in the universe. You're a very feisty lady that can handle pretty well any challenge that is thrown at you, dare I say you have inspired me with how you live your life? Your awesomeness emanates from your very being, it is almost a tangible thing! OK . OK . .I made that last sentence up.
Most people seem to take it for granted that the brain produces consciousness and they surmise this because when the brain is damaged, the person’s mind is also damaged. Such damage not only can result in the diminishing of one’s mental capacities, it often seemingly changes the actual personality. The obvious conclusion is that the brain produces consciousness, otherwise why should the mind be affected?
Proponents of an afterlife almost invariably ignore this argument. Instead they counter with the evidence for an afterlife such as NDE’s, mediumship, recollections of alleged previous lives, and so on. It seems to me that implicitly, therefore, they are conceding to the skeptic that this mind-brain correlations argument is a very powerful one indeed and to be avoided. However, it is my contention that there is no need for the proponent to avoid addressing this argument head-on since, as I shall argue, it appears to be considerably less powerful than it is often thought.
Let’s consider the following related argument:
It surely must be obvious to everyone that spectacles (i.e. eyeglasses) actually create vision. Changing the lenses affects the vision in certain characteristic ways. One can make one's vision worse, or better. One can make one be able to see in the distance, but not close up; or conversely, to see close up, but not at a distance. We can invert peoples' vision. We can make people see everything in blue, or red, or green, you name it. Or all blurry. By painting the lenses black we can even eliminate one's vision completely! And all these effects are consistent across different people.
Of course, we know that spectacles don’t create vision. Indeed, we know in principle that spectacles could not create vision all by themselves since there is no appropriate mechanism, or conceivable causal chain, whereby vision could be created. Extra ingredients are required; namely eyes and the part of the brain dealing with vision.
Other examples apart from spectacles can be considered. Thus, consider a prism. The mixture of coloured lights obtained is not wholly produced by the prism all by itself. Something extra is involved, in this case, the white light that enters the prism. Or consider a TV set. The internal components all by themselves do not produce the programmes. Similar to the prism something else is involved, in this case, TV signals.
So it cannot be that the mind-brain correlations all by themselves establish that the brain creates consciousness, for how are we in a position to rule out that the relationship of consciousness to the brain is not of a similar nature to the forgoing examples where there is an extra ingredient involved; namely what we would call a self or soul? In fact, I would go further and maintain that the brain- consciousness relationship is indeed of a similar nature to these examples. That is to say, similarly to the complete implausibility of expecting vision to be created from spectacles all by themselves, likewise it is similarly implausible to expect consciousness to be created from brains and the processes within them all by themselves.
Consciousness is supposed to come into being as the end consequence of physical chains of causes and effects. Such causes and effects are cashed out in the form of processes that we can measure; namely particles with physical properties such as charge, momentum, spin and so on, and their interactions. But at the end of such causal chains we get a sudden abrupt change from these measurable processes to subjective experiences such as, for example, the greenness of grass, the warmth of love, the smell of roses and so on. It seems we have an unbridgeable yawning ontological chasm between the termination of such physical causal chains, and such raw experiences. There is no appropriate mechanism, or conceivable causal chain, whereby such qualitative experiences could be created. The sensible conclusion then is to surely suppose that consciousness was there all along, and the processes within the brain merely affect its manifestation. Compare to the spectacles example. Spectacles affect vision, they can even block our vision completely if we paint the lenses black, nevertheless the unaided vision exists all along. The spectacles do not, and could not, create vision.
An Objection
It is often argued that we lack any enduring nature since we change so much over time. Hence our moods, demeanour, interests, intelligence, change throughout our lives. Compared to when we were children we now have a much increased intelligence, we have differing interests, we have differing memories, our emotional reactions are very different. Even during the course of one day our moods can change significantly. And just consider how much people change after a few alcohol drinks.
But all this just means that if we should find ourselves surviving the death of our bodies, then it is the underlying self that survives. What constitutes my self is that sense of me-ness that has endured since I was a child, to when I'm drunk, to what I am now. The fact that our interests, intelligence, demeanour change etc, is ultimately no more significant than, for example, the fact a table acquires scratches as it ages. Or to use the spectacles analogy, it is the unaided vision that is comparable to the self and survives.
None of the foregoing entails that there is an afterlife. But I do think that the mind-brain correlations argument against an afterlife is significantly less compelling than people think it is.
