An Approach to Life

Shawn Achor from Harvard University speaks on “Positive Pscyhology: The Science of Happiness and Potential.” Shawn Achor describes the approach of positive psychology, the research behind how people can change, and the dramatic effects of positive psychology upon productivity, health, relationships, creativity, and success rates. He is the CEO of Aspirant, LLC, a positive psychology consulting firm in Cambridge, MA (www.shawnachor.com). This event was the first annual UP Experience in Texas February 2008 http://www.theupexperience.com/speakers.html.

Duration : 0:8:7

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By Todd Allen Gates, author of “Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer”
http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1601450893/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

How True-Believing theists cope when science contradicts Scripture: the literalist approach vs. the allegorical approach. (This is a re-make of a video I had made back in Nov 2007, which I had then called “Science, religion, and ‘truth’ vs. ‘Truth’.”)

This video is based of the following material from “Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer”:

* Science and “Truth” (endnote 2)
* Christianity vs. Copernicus and Galileo (endnote 9)
* Faith Alone” vs. “Faith & Facts” (endnote 38)
* excerpts of dialogue between the book’s two characters: Chris Proselman, the proselytizer; and “Scott Crates,” the skeptic

My four YouTube channels:

- http://youtube.com/user/ToddGates – my musician channel

- http://youtube.com/user/ToddAllenGates – where I discuss the ideas in my book “Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer” (a dialogue between a Christian proselytizer and a Socratic skeptic)

- http://youtube.com/user/ToddAllenGates2 – where I discuss the ideas in my book “Hunting, Gathering, & Videogames” (such as “Why do we have to work?” and “Why do we have to use money?” and “How should we define ’success’?”)

- http://youtube.com/user/BlasphemyPiano – where I play the background piano accompaniment for songs in Nick Gisburne’s book of lyrics “Blasphemy! Anthems for Atheists.”

Duration : 0:8:35

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http://www.dedroidify.com
http://www.dedroidify.com/vids

the full talk:
http://mckenna.psychedelic-library.org/Terence%20Mckenna%20-%20Angels%20Aliens%20%26%20Archetypes%20rc.mp3

related quotes:
“There’s science and then there’s reason and science has at times used reason although at times its conclusions have been fairly unreasonable. Reason is a universal method for dealing with information, whereas science is an extremely culturally conventionalized method. I think there’s a role for reason and the razors of logic but this is a branch of formal philosophy, not a branch of science; science appropriates everything to itself and then we tend to genuflect before it but what we really need is a relativistic approach to the true scope of science which is considerably less than it has claimed for itself. In the 20th century, it’s claimed to be the arbiter of truth in all domains when in fact it’s simply the study of those phenomena so crude that the restoration of their initial condition causes the same thing to repeat itself, and that’s a very small part of the sum total of the phenomenal universe.”
Terence Mckenna

“People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.”
Terence McKenna

“I loathe science and am always keane to attack it in most situations (…) but I love reason and I’m perfectly aware of the difference.”
Terence Mckenna

thanks to loversandmystics
http://www.youtube.com/loversandmystics

http://www.dedroidify.com
http://www.dedroidify.com/vids

Duration : 0:4:19

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This is Part One of a talk Dr. Doug McGuff gave on the book he co-authored with John Little, “Body By Science,” in which he touches on certain fallacies in exercise and the need for a science based approach.

Duration : 0:9:54

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At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we’re moving the boundaries of science through our interdisciplinary approach to solving challenges in energy and the environment, national security and fundamental sciences. Its these advancements today that will bring about big changes for tomorrow—in our nation and in the world.

A complete transcript of this video is available at http://www.pnl.gov/labvideotranscript.pdf

Learn more about Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at http://www.pnl.gov/.

Duration : 0:5:8

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Old paradigm umed the physical world was “out there” and that the brain represented it in some internal neural language.

New paradigm sees that the nervous system is autopoietic (self-making) and therefore organizationally closed. What we know about the world has to do with how our own internal structures organize themselves (ie, the brain is self-organizing!), not with how a pre-existing world is represented.

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/articles/1.1.mcgee.pdf

“…the enactive approach consists of two points:
(1) perception consists in perceptually guided
action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from
the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable
action to be perceptually guided. The overall con-
cern …is not to determine how some perceiver-
independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather,
to determine the common principles or lawful
linkages between sensory and motor systems
that explain how action can be perceptually
guided in a perceiver-dependent world.”
– Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991, p. 173

Duration : 0:5:57

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The three strands of deep science—injunction, apprehension, confirmation—give us a reliable methodology for learning about both the world without and the world within. Want to know what the moons of Jupiter look like? Look through a telescope. Want to know what satori is? Sit down and count your breaths. While you’re at it, have a couple friends do the same thing, and then compare notes. After all, if your experience of satori involves becoming one with a jelly donut, you, um, might want to see if that happened to anyone else….

Duration : 0:8:1

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Shawn Achor from Harvard University speaks on “Positive Pscyhology: The Science of Happiness and Potential.” Shawn Achor describes the approach of positive psychology, the research behind how people can change, and the dramatic effects of positive psychology upon productivity, health, relationships, creativity, and success rates. He is the CEO of Aspirant, LLC, a positive psychology consulting firm in Cambridge, MA (www.shawnachor.com). This event was the first annual UP Experience in Texas February 2008 http://www.theupexperience.com/speakers.html.

Duration : 0:9:12

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When studying for the uniform acceleration presentation, I was reminded of a wierd effect in the intersection between general relativity and quantum field theory, called the Unruh effect. It may blow your mind or simply make you shrug. I thought it prudent to present it anyhow, as it certainly blew my mind.

I did not put as much work into this as I would like. But the real justification for this effect is a bit beyond my scope, so you will have to make do with a popular science version akin to how the Hawking’s radiation (radiation from black holes) is presented in popular science.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect
and
http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Cambridge-Monographs-Mathematical-Physics/dp/0521278589

Errata: I marveled that my simple popular science approach yielded the correct formula and not only a proportionality, but that was a bit premature. As you may recall, there was a ‘pi’ in my earlier expression of the temperature as a function of acceleration, which did not appear in the semi-classical dimensionality argument. So it wasn’t that big of a fluke, after all. Good thing, really.

Duration : 0:8:52

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