[quote]Rico Suave wrote:
my dad can beat up all you dads. [/quote]
I have relayed this message to my dads. They’re pissed.
[quote] legendaryblaze wrote: The part I said was horseshit was when you basically said we don’t know much.
[/quote]
Except it’s not horseshit at all:
"The theory of the four humours was a mainstay of medicine until the advent of the age of reason. It was completely disproved as late as 1858 by Rudolf Virchow. Before that, they were widely regarded as scientific facts. "
So it was back to the drawing board as soon as they were disproven. Medicine has been playing catch-up for a ‘mere’ 152 years, so in the great scheme of things, we don’t know much at all.
If you don’t know what the four humors were or how central they were to medicine up until that point, well then you have no business arguing how much we know or don’t know in the first place.
we might not know much, but i dare say the ability to perform heart+lung transplants gives us certain… credibility.
so, by crom, stop this madness! this is a scam, or a fake.
Didn’t make it past the 1st page, but…
LOL at everyone calling bullshit.
[quote]novocaine wrote:
we might not know much, but i dare say the ability to perform heart+lung transplants gives us certain… credibility.
so, by crom, stop this madness! this is a scam, or a fake.[/quote]
This is the problem : it’s only “madness” because people are too quick to assume that anybody considering the possibility of a human surviving a ten day period without water automatically believe Jani’s claims as well.
Professor X and I have both acknowledged that the Jani study may well be a fake, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t consider the possibility of subsisting without water for 10 days independently of Jani’s claims.
Hoax or not, we keep revisiting ground already covered because people refuse to make any distinction between the two: if one is bullshit, so must be the other.
As for heart/lung transplants giving “credibility” - well it’s certainly a significant achievement, but if we knew as much about the human body as most seem to believe, then we wouldn’t need immunosuppressant drugs to stop the body from rejecting transplanted organs, for one thing. In reality, we haven’t even scratched the surface. I know this, and I’ve got zero medical training - not even a first aid certificate.
My question would be why would they only test him for 10 days, the guy claimed to be on 72 years without a lick, throw him in the room with cameras for a month and I bet they get to the bottom of it.
Am I the only non doctor that doesn’t think 10 days is that unbelieveable??? I mean if he was in a desert for 10 days without water I’d find that a bit questionable, but he was in an airconditioned hospital.
Although it’s very possible that it’s a hoax (due to the lack of detail in all the articles posted about him), I still think it’s plausible.
I’ve read of a few people who can go without food for extreme amounts of time (for more than a couple months) by practicing sun-gazing. One guy in particular was studied thoroughly and the details were pretty well documented if I remember correctly.
I’m not sure how it would work, but if plants can photosynthesize, why is it so crazy to think we can do something similar with the light energy from the sun? This guy, however, did drink water and had tea every now and then.
As for not going without any water… that’s pretty incredible and surprised me when I first read it. But now that I think of it, there could be some very natural explanations for it. You don’t have to literally ingest water to consume it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure water can be absorbed through the lungs and skin.
It’s not so crazy to think that a Yogi, who has devoted his life to practicing (and improving) his breathing, can eventually learn to harness the moisture from the air much more efficiently than the average dude who just breathes so he doesn’t die. Also, India is a very humid place, and this Yogi even mentions walking through the jungle for days. Maybe that’s not a coincidence.
Interesting article and thread.
Personally i am someone who lives in a world where nothing is certain, some phenomena are more common than others, but there isn’t 100% that the next time things will go down exactly as they have all the times prior.
If that was the case, evolution, medicine, engineering, and almost everything else that comprises of the human made world that we live in would not exist. There are many variables is the universe and to claim we have knowledge/control over all of them, well even the most closed minded person i hope would not claim that.
So if it is, well the right word here wouldnt be certain, cause that we could not be sure of either, probable that we do not have control over all the variables in the universe, then how can anyone say with such emphaticness(sp) that something is not possible. The most we can do is run more tests and record more data to see if our theory on a particular subject holds up or not, and can be used for the improvement of our civilization.
[quote]sbr wrote:
So if it is, well the right word here wouldnt be certain, cause that we could not be sure of either, probable that we do not have control over all the variables in the universe, then how can anyone say with such emphaticness(sp) that something is not possible. The most we can do is run more tests and record more data to see if our theory on a particular subject holds up or not, and can be used for the improvement of our civilization.[/quote]
I know that I can’t predict the roll of a standard die, but I can be certain that I won’t get a 7, for example.
The fact is that the burden of proof here is with the people making the incredible claim, and since they’ve not managed to come close to demonstrating it, we can assume that it is false until they do.
Some guy called Albert something-or-other once said:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
No major scientific breakthrough has ever been made without a leap of faith or some measure of risk.
[quote]Rational Gaze wrote:
[quote]sbr wrote:
So if it is, well the right word here wouldnt be certain, cause that we could not be sure of either, probable that we do not have control over all the variables in the universe, then how can anyone say with such emphaticness(sp) that something is not possible.
The most we can do is run more tests and record more data to see if our theory on a particular subject holds up or not, and can be used for the improvement of our civilization.[/quote]
I know that I can’t predict the roll of a standard die, but I can be certain that I won’t get a 7, for example.
The fact is that the burden of proof here is with the people making the incredible claim, and since they’ve not managed to come close to demonstrating it, we can assume that it is false until they do.[/quote]
Definitely, i’m not saying that the dude actually did stay 72 years without food or water.
The die example makes sense, when it comes to die.
I do not have a degree and have only done school till grade 11 so unfortunately i would not be able to successfully debate this topic, but isn’t some protein in the body recycled? As is water?
Hypothetically is it outside the realm of possibility to master ones biological processes so that one becomes exceptionally adept at said recycling thus allowing a prolonged period of time with less sustanance or maybe even no sustanance?
[quote]on edge wrote:
Didn’t make it past the 1st page, but…
LOL at everyone calling bullshit.[/quote]
So I guess both sides of this are just laughing their asses off at each other then.
I guess he who laughs last will be the one one who stopped drinking water and started drinking The Force.
now in Obi-Wannablueberry
While we are on the subject of invisible and unknowable forces, consider this: the Ancient Greeks would look at someone having an epileptic fit and consider that person to have been afflicted by the Gods as punishment for some transgression.
Should they be called idiots because they did not know what epilepsy was, and for at least attempting to rationalize the cause of the fit as best they could within their (relatively) limited frame of experience? The condition is no less real, but we can still look back and point and laugh because we have the benefit of experience. We know better…or so we think.
Vegita mentioned in another thread that the supposedly esoteric concept of karma had parallels with the very scientific law of “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. The basic principle goes beyond science and religion - and these are supposedly irreconcilable disciplines.
Often when we think we are uncovering something for the first time, we are actually rediscovering it , while looking down our noses at the people who hit upon the same ideas centuries, even millennia before us.
So we shouldn’t get too hung up on the mumbo-jumbo aspect of Jani’s claims: obviously we can dismiss his claim he will live to be over a thousand years old, and we can also discard his claim that he lasted 72 years without food and water.
On the other hand, if we strip away the spiritual dressing, what we are left with is very similar to modern autohypnosis techniques- the claim that he survives on Prana in the form of nectar secreted from his palette could be nothing more than a sensory cue, a hypnotic hook that puts him in trance.
Now if we assume that Indian yogis have used what we call ‘hypnosis’ for thousand of years, is it so hard to believe that they have learned to control their bodies in ways we couldn’t easily fathom - especially when we can already slow heartbeats using our limited knowledge of hypnosis. Is that really so far-fetched?
Ancient cultures are not as kooky as they seem to be.
[quote]roybot wrote:
Vegita mentioned in another thread that the supposedly esoteric concept of karma had parallels with the very scientific law of “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. The basic principle goes beyond science and religion - and these are supposedly irreconcilable disciplines.
Often when we think we are uncovering something for the first time, we are actually rediscovering it , while looking down our noses at the people who hit upon the same ideas centuries, even millennia before us.
[/quote]
I think you’re stretching it a bit with the comparison of karma with Newton’s laws. But you do have a point, Archimedes discovered calculus a thousand years before Newton and Leibniz. The problem is that the ancients lacked the right formalisms to describe more advanced concepts. For example, the geometric reasoning of the Greeks is very hard to follow when not presented in a modern way, and does not lend itself to more abstract ideas.
We certainly don’t know everything about the human body, X couldn’t be any more correct about that, but I think we know enough to say that the body can’t survive 72 years without food or water… 10 days, yes. 72 years, not so much.
I don’t care how much meditating you do, or what religion you are…
[quote]Rational Gaze wrote:
I think you’re stretching it a bit with the comparison of karma with Newton’s laws. [/quote]
Not “laws”, just that one. Clearly the applications are different, but they are fundamentally the same idea. I’m not saying that Newton somehow ripped off Buddhism /Hinduism - not saying that at all - but isn’t karma essentially just ‘cause and effect’?
[quote]
But you do have a point, Archimedes discovered calculus a thousand years before Newton and Leibniz. The problem is that the ancients lacked the right formalisms to describe more advanced concepts. For example, the geometric reasoning of the Greeks is very hard to follow when not presented in a modern way, and does not lend itself to more abstract ideas.[/quote]
Right, but in spite of that inability to properly articulate and expand on those ideas, they still managed to find them…and many of those ideas are still relevant today. Not bad for a society that appointed a god for entering and leaving a house. The “lack of formalisms” is probably responsible for all the mythologies and religions on the planet - they’re just another way of making sense of the world around us, and an attempt to describe advanced concepts when we lacked the development to do so by “rational” means…
Indian culture has also made its fair share of discoveries, but because they are so closely linked with religion and spirituality, they’re immediately dismissed as hokum. Could be garbage, but there could just as easily be truth in there somewhere…
Srinivasa Ramanujan:
"Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions… Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family Goddess, Namagiri of Namakkal, and looked to her for inspiration in his work. He often said, “An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.”
I’m familiar with the life of Ramanujan; I’m a mathematician, by the way. You’re taking that stuff far too literally. Yes, Ramanujan had little formal training in mathematics; although Hardy and Littlewood tried to educate him in topics like complex analysis, he had picked up lots of bad habits from his isolated studies.
He wasn’t coming up with theorems using automatic writing, or channeling some divine source of mathematical knowledge. His notebooks show how much his work was derived from an intimate understanding and study of numbers.
He stated false results occasionally. There are so many fantastic ideas of his though, that you may think there was something magical about him, and there was. But it was that he was a great genius, not some kind of mystic.
Religion and spiritually are pretty bankrupt as far as scientific knowledge is concerned. I mean, your example of karma is some vague notion of people being rewarded or punished for their actions (as far as I’m aware there is no proposed mechanism for this). What does that have to do with Newton’s laws? Precisely nothing.
[quote]Really? No one is question the 72 year claim so why would it make more sense to you if he didn’t lose weight?
I do believe most in this thread are discussing THE TEN DAYS THAT HE WAS WATCHED IN A HOSPITAL.[/quote]
The fuck are you talking about? Plenty of people seem to think that the 72 years is plausible simply because well…we don’t know everything about everything so there’s a chance it’s possible, gee golly!
Extrapolating a little weight loss from ten days to 72 years seems to matter a whole lot, so in this context, NOT losing weight makes more sense than losing it. CAPITAL LETTERS!!!
FOR EMPHASIS!!!