Brett Black

Who says the meaning/purpose in my(and your?) life is "merely" "subjective" "arbitrary" "preference"? My meaning, all meaning, is part of the very fabric and essence of existence. And, I am, after all, existence itself. Claiming any of this is arbitrary, assumes that there could be some alternative way things could be - but this is nonsense. What is, is what is - end of story. No imaginary God could claim any greater. It's kind of pathetic to see how self-denying...self-negating...most everyone is. Like a bunch of sick ascetics or something. Are you all gonna start whipping yourselves soon too? I suppose it's an outgrowth of social control. Now God's gone, society has had to fashion a new method to maintain control: the postmodern "that's only your opinion!" to keep people in line works nicely. The ultimate in low self-esteem is hammered into you - you can't even trust your own meaning, purpose, LIFE. Ha! No thanks - I retain my godhood. Furthermore: egoism combined with empathy can combine to form something like Peter Singer's "Point of View of the Universe" - there need be no contradiction there. I feel your pain, and because I don't like being in pain I don't want you to be in pain. Simple. Empathy aligns with the apparent reality of other beings' capacity to feel pain/pleasure, making empathy an accurate, instinctual-level, representation/reflection of reality. Then, right = pleasure and wrong = pain. "Right" and "wrong" being more complex manifestations/representations of pleasure/pain.

The lack of mortality benefit seen in the EPIC-Oxford vegetarians/vegans might be due to bias from the "healthy volunteer" effect among the non-vegetarians/vegans. It looks like the vegetarians/vegans still managed around half the expected death rate of the general population[1]: --- Dean, do you know about www.veganhealth.org? It's got to be one of the best science-based websites relating to veganism. Here's a veganhealth.org page that collected mortality data of vegans from several studies: http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/dxrates

Slightly off topic, but I know you have expressed concerns about BPA leaching into food from packaging in the past, and I know you also drink(or at least drank) wine, so I thought this might interest you too: A discussion about the study findings and some comments from posters claiming to have in-depth technical knowledge of industrial-scale wine production methods and where and how phthalates might be getting into the wine: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2d5pwd/phthalates_a_class_of_environmental_contaminant/

You made some other comments about the possible significance and meaning of various aesthetic qualities of walnuts over here too: https://www.crsociety.org/topic/11315-great-source-for-walnuts/ What I'm wondering (and part of the driving reason for my previous post) is: what are you basing this information/interpretation on? And, how confident are you and should we be that this information/interpretation is accurate and/or useful? Even though it was quoting an entire post it was still a short quote and gave quick and easy context (rather than having to read through the thread, or scroll back up and search etc).

For what reason(s) do you think the walnut on the left is the less desirable of the two?

If part or all of the benefits of CR seen in rodents are explained by an underlying evolutionary adaption to surviving famine, then a preferential retention of body fat could be an obvious sign that a particular rodent/strain strongly expresses this adaption. Preferential retention of body fat could be suggestive of the organism attempting to store away energy supplies for the future, with the "plan" of sitting out the famine period in a pro-survival("anti-aging") state whilst living off the stored "rations." There is of course evidence to suggest however, in humans, that too much body fat, particularly visceral fat, may be detrimental, possibly because it is pro-inflammatory. Taken together, I wonder if in humans the much popularly maligned "skinny-fat" body morphology could actually reflect something akin to the successful CR'ed rodents. The skinny-fat combination might ideally reflect a state of lowered caloric intake (skinny) which implies famine, coupled with the pro-survival/anti-aging adaption (fat), along with keeping absolute body fat amounts low enough to avoid the health problems observed in the conventionally overweight/obese. It also makes me wonder if womens' tendency toward proportionally higher body fat, as well as live longer, reflects a similar pro-survival evolutionary strategy. Due to the higher and longer-lasting investment requirements for reproduction in females, evolution may have given females similar pro-famine-survival adaptions like preferential fat accumulation and retention.