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Originally Posted by regal

I guess you're an expert in Humanity, what you do read a couple books?

This is known as the ad hominem fallacy: attacking the one presenting the message instead of addressing the actual argument I presented. It's a sign that you're unable to logically refute what I wrote (either because you've stubbornly taken an indefensible stance on the issue and your ego is not allowing you to admit defeat, or, that as well as an intellectual weakness preventing you from coming up with a plausible counterargument), so you have to resort to attacking my credentials--a clear sign you have lost the argument. You claimed to be an engineer, and I'm disappointed you would resort to hand-waiving, fallacious reasoning.

Give this poster the Nobel prize, he thinks we're inferior to bacteria, brilliant.

I have presented a view that most biologists would agree with, and again, you have failed to give any counter-argument.

Consciousness, yes the brain is the final frontier of modern science and philosophy.

That's total BS. I have studied cognitive psychology and neuroscience in university, and I can tell you that we are well on the way of elucidating the neural correlates of consciousness. The specific regions involved in making consciousness, and the general mechanisms have already been pretty well nailed down by the research of A. Damasio et al.

Since I initially joined this forum in 2003, I've seen a significant increase in the low quality posts typified by these examples by regal. I wonder if this happens to all forums--as popularity increases, the SNR drops since many of the latecomers are just people jumping on the bandwagon rather than joining not due to peer influences. The discussion I was involved in on the first page of this thread was largely free from the spurious noise people like regal are injecting into recent pages.