Cloudscape

""Before' implies time""


No, no.
"Time" implies "before."
Time is basically movement. There's no way you can separate the two concepts whatsoever.
If you remove movement, there's no more time, et vice versa.
So if you'd say there was no time before the Big Bang, how did it come into being?
Obviously such line of reasoning as what there was "before there was time" is bound to lead into sophistication, and therefore I will continue to assume in the nature of an infinite and eternal universe.
I just don't believe in a beginning of existence because of Occam's razor; an existence which had no beginning is simple simper, requiring less tortuous logic.
The only reason why one would favor a universe with beginning is because it's intuitive: everything in our world, after all, has a beginning. But if beginning itself would have a beginning, then that as well would have to be part of the beginning. In other words, there is no reasonable way in which one can "exclude" something from existence and assign it the cause of existence. Anything that would have caused existence would already have been part of it.

Some people fear that if we would improve ourselves through genetic manipulation, we would all become equal. However, it must be observed that genetic similarity is not necessarily correlated with psychological similarity. Humans are more alike than any other mammalian species, and yet we are also the most psychologically diverse. Furthermore, people with higher IQs also have more varying personalities than people of average IQ. The complexity of a person's personality is proportional to his or her intelligence; it would therefore be simplistic to state that eugenics would necessarily reduce the diversity of our species; indeed, the more advanced a species is, the more diverse.

When in times of hardship you are numbed with pain and feel that you have lost all feelings, remember that they are still nonetheless still htere, even if they are hidden in your unconscious mind. All you need to do is to find them again. Acknowledge that they are still there, even if you cannot feel them, and they will bit by bit return. Just saying to yourself how you think you would feel in a moment as is present, and describing how the feeling would be like, can help a great deal to become aware of your emotions again. Just imagine how an emotion would feel like, imagine it as vividly as possible, and it will become real.

In schizophrenia, severe chronic stress resulted in the failure of the individual's coping mechanisms; she or he loses courage to face his difficulties and therefore to care for her- or himself. In other words, the ego dissolves. Practical thought becomes reduced because the individual has lost the will to concern her- or himself with it. Not finding safety in reality, the individual is then forced to flee into unreality, leading to psychosis.
What remains is simple experience, be it of a sensory nature (i.e. sensations) or abstract (i.e. imagination). No longer having the will to filter perceptions of practical value from those without, perceptions that are normally filtered at once become more prominent. This is referred to as decreased latent inhibition. Perceptions that are normally unconscious encroach upon the conscious, while normally conscious (practical) perceptions become unconscious.
Because the individual's awareness is partly transferred from the practical thought which usually accounts for a large part of our mental processes to experience, this may lead to a state of expanded consciousness. While this may be experienced as pleasant at times, as the illness progresses it becomes so inescapable that it becomes horrifying.

In a world of lies, honesty is the greatest sin. Being one’s true self is self-pity. And aside from the prescribed clichés, anything we might say is either selfish or meddlesome. When we’re sharing our daily mantras, we might as well bark as dogs do. The level of meaningfulness would be about the same, were it not that at least dogs still put some emotion in their barking. When we’re talking at all instead of chanting, all we are exchanging is but dead and deadening information. The only thing in which people are still somewhat together, then, is in the things they do — sadly, there is a very great deal we no longer dare to do. The few that still resist this compulsive inhibition are seen as irresponsible or even insane.
In our dishonesty, when someone else is honest and we cannot deal with their honesty, we are ourselves too dishonest to let them know this, but rather neglect them. Since it is seen as rude to be honest, we take it for granted that others should be just as dishonest as ourselves — those who are not dishonest are ignored.
Rather, should we not express ourselves just as much in our feelings of our own as in our feelings about others' feelings? Would it not make more sense to tell others just how close they can get to us rather than to never get closer to each other than two strangers?
Why do even friends remain at a distance that is dictated to them by society? How can people live in such detachment from one another? How could we let it come so far that we keep our hearts shut just because it is the only way we can still know that they will not get hurt or hurt others? If we would just tell others how much they can share their emotions with us, then there is no need for them to hide them altogether. If others' feelings hurt us when they share, we as well should share this. There is no way one can know in advance when one's feelings will hurt someone; some are used to others' feelings, others are not. But can we just shut up altogether because all things we say have a chance of making others feel uncomfortable?
We can but tell each other inhowfar we can deal with listening to their secrets, or else remain in our ice-cold panzers.

The possible psychological dangers of violent videogames is proportional to the realism of the simulated emotions of the opponents; and except in the most labile individuals, this will also be the only important factor causing desensitization.
Even though all but some psychotics will rationally know that the characters aren’t real, anyone will empathize with their emotions. This occurs in any form of fiction and even in daydreams: but there is a huge difference between imagining feelings from a neutral viewpoint and imagining causing them.
At first, causing simulated pain will automatically go along with feelings of guilt. To cope with these empathic feelings, it is possible that regular players become desensitized.
They overcome the empathic feelings because they know that their actions have no consequences; they still know that in real life their actions do have consequences, and only psychotics would be inclined to think otherwise. However, it has been proven through brain scans that human sense of ethics is not based on reason, but on emotion. In a moral decision, reason follows emotion rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, our emotions make not make much distinction between reality and virtuality: it makes such distinction only to the extent that the two differ in realism.
Many people will argue that, since it is only a game, only people who cannot tell the difference between a game and reality will undergo significant desensitization. Empathizing with characters from videogames would occur only in people to whom imagination has become almost as important than reality, if not more so, such as many schizophrenics or autistics. But consider that many videogames have become extremely realistic, and that it’s only a matter of time before they become indistinguishable from reality except through memory.
Suppose that you killed people in a game and it was so lifelike that the only reason you know it to be a game is that you remember you entered into it: you hear your opponents’ screams, their pleadings, their moans, you see their expression, their wounds, their blood, their internal organs — all this as realistic as reality itself. The potential dangers of immersive virtual reality in violent computer games are quite apparent — upheaval, traumas, desensitization, psychopathy, dissociation, even psychosis.
In conclusion, for the psychological health safety of the players, it would be safer if either simulated emotion from the opponents should be forbidden in first person shooters, or games that include them would by law require regular psychological screening.

Recently, methane has been observed in the atmosphere of Mars. This appears to indicate that Mars is either biologically or geologically active. Although it is possible that this methane is being emitted by microbes, there is no reason why this possibility should be greater than the possibility that it is caused by volcanic or plutonic (subterranean volcanic) activity, well on the contrary. Though it seems very attractive to see this as possible evidence of life on Mars, however, everything seems to point in the opposite direction. Looking at a map of the methane distribution in the atmosphere (an example of which can be found here), anyone with some knowledge of the Martian geology (or "areology" as it is called) will see that the vast majority of the methane is located above the Tharsis bulge. The Tharsis bulge is about the largest volcanic plateau in the solar system, also containing some of the largest volcanoes in the solar system.
One study stated that volcanic activity is unlikely to be a major source of methane based on studies of Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano on Earth; they found that Mauna Loa emitted 9 metric tons of methane per year, whereas on Mars, 300 metric tons of methane are emitted per year. Mars has no active plate tectonics, and no volcanoes on Mars are known to be active. Since Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth, they therefore assumed that its volcanic emissions, if not surpassing those on Mars, would compare to a large percentage of its emissions. However, this argument is based on the supposition that there is no major volcanic activity on Mars, which obviously makes it cyclical: there are no major volcanic emissions on Mars because there are no major volcanic emissions. Furthermore, there is another flaw with the conclusions of this study: the final results were published in 2006 after thirteen years of research. However, Mauna Loa has been dormant since 1984, and no significant seismic activity was observed since then until 2002.
I believe that, despite the fact that no volcanic activity has been observed on Mars, we should do well not to underestimate it. For one thing, most, if not all, volcanoes on Mars are shield volcanoes, whose eruptions are far less dramatic than those of stratovolcanoes. Their lava has a high liquidity, so that it flows out easily and steadily, rather than being locked up in the magma chamber for a long time until it suddenly explodes. Because of this, eruptions are far more frequent but less prominent. Because of the low viscosity of the magma, it also flows out without bringing too much scoria with it. This, in combination with the low pressure with which the highly liquid lava flows out, causes the eruptions to produce very little smoke in comparison to their more aggressive brothers the stratovolcanoes, which often cause smoke trails which can be seen from space. The most dramatic eruptions of shield volcanoes are caused by water entering a vent, due to the pressure of the expanding vapor — since there is very little water on Mars, this never or almost never happens.
Furthermore, we can draw from the results of the Mauna Loa study that even when shield volcanoes are dormant, they still emit some methane. Considering we're talking about a planet covered for a large part with volcanoes, we might very well assume that ten times as much methane is produced on the entire planet than by a single dormant volcano on Earth.