Why do ppl like Stephen Hawking so much

And a couple of people on SciForums insist that she doesn't understand Buddha and Buddhism at all. For example one of them (sorry I'm not in the habit of taking names so I don't know who) insisted that one must absolutely believe in a supernatural universe in order to qualify as a Buddhist. Like perhaps the majority of American Buddhists, she absolutely does not. She insists that while Buddha welcomes supernaturalists since there are many paths to enlightenment, he also welcomes atheists because their path is just as valid. It's widely asserted that Buddhism embraces science because its only goal is to discover the truth. (This cannot necessarily be attributed to Buddha himself since science as we know it did not yet exist.)

Of course they cannot be glossed over, but technology certainly helps us deal with them. For example, it was just in the past few months that brain scan analysis became so detailed that scientists discovered (to their shock) that some of the people who are assumed to be in comas are actually conscious and can hear everything going on around them. They trained them to craft thoughts that activate waves in widely separated sections of their brains, which the scanner can distinguish and thereby interpret as "yes" and "no" answers. So not only can they hear, they can now "talk" after a fashion.

How many people have languished in this condition for months (or in exceptional circumstances even years), going slowly insane with frustration and grief? I'm waiting for one of these scientists to ask one of these patients whether he would like to continue living this way, or please pull the plug? I know what my answer would be.

Actually before the 20th century life expectancies are generally calculated for adults who have already survived childhood, because infant mortality was so high that the records were kept only by individual families and not compiled on a national or worldwide basis. We can estimate with reasonable accuracy, from the records that exist, that the death rate for prepubescent humans was around 80% clear up into the 19th century.

So when we say life expectancy was in the high 30s in 1900, that's only for people who had already lived to be, say, 15, or whatever the cultural definition of adulthood was in a given era. If you count statistical average life expectancy going all the way back to birth, it was more like eight years (my own estimate). Many, many babies died before their first birthday. Life was very hard and very sad. In some cultures it was customary not to even give a child a name until he was a year old.

Speaking from a later point in life than you, I can assure you that there is a long period when those in fact will occupy more of your attention, time, money and other resources than any of the other problems of aging. I am in no imminent danger of dying, except from the same causes we all face such as road accidents, crazy people with guns, and a somewhat higher probability of a heart attack than you face despite my good nutrition and aerobic conditioning (which widens and replicates the blood vessels making them more difficult to block). Yet I've had two orthopedic surgeries in the past three years (one shoulder, one knee), both of which are slow to recover and require regular sessions of sitting with an icepack. I have to take omeprazole to stave off GERD as my body chemistry loses its precision, and the omeprazole is weakening my bones. The older I get, the more aches and pains become routine, and I can't take NSAIDs because they exacerbate the GERD.

I have to get a colonoscopy every few years because the risk of colon cancer is much higher over fifty.

Oh yeah, and one of my molars actually rotted out and I had to get an implant. That took a year so we could spread the cost over two insurance years and minimize the co-pay.

All of these things take a considerable amount of my time, money and attention away from my job, my band, my contributions to this forum, and in general my ability to contribute to the advance of civilization. Oh yeah, and my own leisure time which is supposed to be the guilty reward (and the not-so-guilty battery recharge) for being a good citizen.

Uhhhhh...... Sure there's a correlation but it's weak. Lots of good, productive, honorable, beloved people die slow, lingering, painful, demeaning deaths. And lots of nasty, horrible people who on the balance have done more harm than good to their families, friends and civilization get merciful infarctions and die more quickly than the tenth of a second it takes their brain to form a thought, or even the hundredth of a second it takes a pain signal to reach the brain.

I don't think you really understand what people my age and older mean when we talk about "end of life" issues. I don't mean sitting on the sofa in my home with my dog in my lap and Garbage's latest CD on the loudspeakers, munching chocolate, mourning the friends who are already gone, and wishing I hadn't spent so much of my life spinning my wheels in the employ of the government, sucking at the public teat.

I'm talking about being trundled off to a hospital and hooked up to a machine, because my brain isn't working quite right and there's no one left to argue about it with the hospital staff, even though my physical senses and emotions are working and I feel absolutely horrible. This is what people of my generation mean when we say "end of life."

That's fine for you. But please allow the rest of us to not only come to our own conclusions, but to have the right to deal with this condition in the way we choose. Especially in a way that will benefit civilization by not diverting scarce resources to maintaining a warehouse full of partially functioning bodies whose inhabitants would rather be dead.

Yeah, I've made that point on the Moderator's Super Secret Subforum many times. The consensus is that;

• In aggregate we simply don't have enough time and energy to maintain those standards and
• If we did, we'd lose the majority of our members because they are immature emotionally, chronologically, or both.

Of course. But that's not what they're doing. They're praying because they sincerely believe that a supernatural creature hears the prayer and is being influenced by it to use his supernatural powers for kindness and mercy. And that releases endorphins which reduce pain, something that 99.99% of the population don't even know about.

This is yet another reason why I don't go around hectoring people in the general population for their supernatural beliefs. Why take away something that makes them feel better, as long as they're not doing any harm to the rest of us in the process?

I don't understand why you think that matters. What's wrong with helping people anonymously? That's what we do when we contribute to the Red Cross Pakistan Earthquake Relief Fund, or whatever. That's what Rob Thomas does every time he cuts a new CD. That's what (good) presidents and congressmen do every day when they go to work.

This is the difference between our species's current herd-social organization and our ancestors' pack-social organization. They looked in the eyes of everyone they cared about and depended on. We have learned to deal with those people as abstractions, yet to still be able to care about them and depend on them. From that perspective, this could be said to be the essence of civilization. The definition of the word "civilization" is "the building of cities," and one decent definition of the word "city" is "a community so large that its members are not all personally acquainted, yet due to its organization they are still able to live and work in harmony and cooperation."

That was not meant to be humor. Many of the go masters I've met from the old countries evince many of the qualities that my wife identifies as being on the track to Buddha-hood. There was a lady from China at our local go club a few weeks a go who makes a living teaching the game to children. She seemed very Buddha-like to me in many ways. I question the validity of saying that these people can never be admitted to that august circle simply because they are able to have fun playing games. This is one of the most fundamental characteristics of our species, one we share with only a few others such as dogs, dolphins and some of the other primates.

Hey, we all lose our cool when we get old and decrepit.

A friend of mine had to have all his teeth pulled fifty years ago when he was 19. He had to get by with choppers for two or three decades until implant technology was perfected. Of course after enduring the process of getting one implant, I can't imagine what it was like getting an entire mouthful. They don't actually install 28 individual ceramic teeth, but I think they come in blocks of two or three.

Then perhaps his peers will realize that they need to improve their communication skills so they can take their argument to the public. There's a movement afoot to actually teach scientists to communicate better. Climate-Gate and the "creation science" faux-controversy finally forced them to realize that nobody understands them.

Sure, but what works even better is the fact that they can understand him.

Not so many. As I say, I'm convinced that his popularity is largely due to the fact that he is one of a handful of scientists who can speak understandably to laymen. If he spoke utter nonsense he'd just be a typical "ivory tower" geek who happens to be severely disabled.

 

I have some fillings, all from my youth (apparently the designer made my teeth from an obsolescent blueprint). Having said that I just went a stretch of 15+ years between visits to the dentist and have no cavities to show for it.

 

I am unsurprised by this revelation.

It's funny you say that, because in the research that I have done into Buddhism, I had gotten exactly that impression, indeed there are some statements I have come across that sound decidedly like something a scientist might say - err, if you catch my drift.

Hasn't there been annecdotal evidence of this for a number of years - for example, reports of (some) people who have been in comas (as opposed to the "I woke up three weeks later" kind).

I had to have something like half a dozen teeth pulled simultaneously when I was ten or eleven because although my adult teeth were coming through, my juvenile teeth were not falling out. This was fairly normal for me. So not only were my teeth poorly designed, but the replacement process failed to work as advertised.