Posts by BenWilson
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I was always boggled that his father didn't learn to swim properly until he was an adult but now I can see exactly how that can happen without any neglect at all.
Yup, rather like how some kids are bum-shufflers, and don't ever really master crawling. Eventually, they can do it, but it's not a movement they find natural at all, and can't do it fast. With a lot of practice they would no doubt improve, but once they can walk, there's no real incentive. This can be an impediment to a whole raft of related activities, as the nature of many activities unfold from the "expected growth path", which is not always the one taken. Crawling leads to climbing, for instance.
I can well believe swimming might have similar features, since it requires coordination of the entire body, isolating limbs doesn't really work. If even one of the limbs is out of synch, you lose most of the efficiency.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I'd prefer to end up as ashes and carbon emissions. They'll all come out at some point in the composting process anyway, and I find the idea of using small plots of land containing boxes containing rotting meat rather distasteful. But really, that's a choice to be made by the people dealing with the cadaver. Maybe it would be an actual positive boon if science had its way with it. Not sure, is there really any shortage of cadavers for med-students?
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Me neither - in between lessons at Mt Albert and Henderson, and plenty of mucking around in the ocean, I managed to get to the point where I can do okay in moderate surf but I think proper elegant technique and lap records are going to remain out of my grasp.
I expect it's about the hours, by which I mean miles. Most people are a little bit shocked by how fast I swim, but I played waterpolo for about 16 years. By that sport's standards, I'm pretty slow - at my best I cracked 28 seconds for 50m, but died off to 68 secs for 100m, and at 400m I'd probably cruise in half-dead at 6 minutes. My swim training was limited almost exclusively to waterpolo training because I was the goalkeeper, and not required to swim long distances, whereas field players were expected to do at least an hour of pure swim training for every hour of waterpolo training. But just training with them lifted me enormously beyond what I had been capable of before I began the sport. My technique is not good either, a goalie just doesn't have time to get up to an efficient stroke, and is mostly about pure power. And treading water, and jumping, both of which are strength moves.
The relationship between hours spent and basic speed is not linear, of course, because there are diminishing returns. But the early part of that curve is pretty straight. Muscles lengthen, learn the movement, learn how to make the movement efficient, then learn how to apply real power into the movement. During this the incidentals of how to breathe as required, how to stay on course, how to move from upright position to swimming position, how to switch strokes mid-stroke, how long one can hold their breath, how to go into energy-saving swim-mode, how to dive down, how to stay down, how to come back up, how to get the water out of your eyes, how to keep it out of your nose....all these things coordinate together gradually, and are only very loosely summed up as "becoming a stronger swimmer".
A lot of it comes quite naturally after reaching a certain level of proficiency, so long as you put the hours in. Ongoing swimming lessons will train you into becoming a really fast swimmer, how to do butterfly stroke, tumble turns, dive starts etc. By then you're turning into an amphibian, rather than "someone who won't instantly drown in deep water".
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Cat poaching would be extremely easy. All you have to do is offer them food and they'll usually come straight to you. If they're on your land, surely that makes them fair game? Or you could make it sporting and shoot at them with something, but only if they're running.
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Hard News: Floating the idea, in reply to recordari,
Man, I wish I knew you were going there, we were probably on the same beach on the same day, could have met up. And no, it's not smug to be happy about and proud of teaching advanced water skills to your children. I was similarly stoked to have been able to lure my eldest into surf at Onetangi, for him to experience his first wave knockdown, and not to have run away crying and vowing never to return*. He didn't go so deep again, but he did linger around in the shallows, leaping about excitedly whenever he caught sight of me bodysurfing, and playing chase with the waves.
*I wish I could say the same of my wife. I made the mistake of introducing her to NZ surf at Raglan, not realizing that she had never been in anything like it before. A "small" wave, about chest height, knocked her head over heels because she tried to run from it, and she bruised her coccyx, was furious with me, and has never ventured into surf since. My excuse is that she claimed she had been in surf before, but I'm pretty sure now she simply had a totally different idea to me of what that actually meant.
She's a good example of someone who can technically swim, but is not really safe in the ocean. That's why basic swimming lessons are not sufficient for real water safety, you really need a lot more exposure than she's had, the musculature and confidence build up quite slowly. I actually think if you don't get it young, you'll probably never get it at all.
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But finding "IT" in a living person has proved absolutely fruitless, so if "IT" is not there in a living person, "IT" most certainly wont be there in a corpse.
Please define "IT"We were talking about something pretty vague, hard to ring fence with definitions, but IT was "their soul". Which can't be found physically, alive or dead, according to most kind of dualisms, because it is not in itself physical. But it can be experienced by the person to whom it belongs. Or more precisely, it's the thing doing the experiencing using the body as a proxy.
I don't really buy the theory, never have, but I can't deny that my own experience of consciousness can easily feel like my "soul" is an actual thing, more than just my brain, which has changed throughout my life. Despite this constant change, I've always been in this particular body, my experience of consciousness is continuous. Yes, there are unconscious gaps, but when I'm conscious, I don't feel that ME is constantly becoming a different person, even though the physical me is doing so.
So I have to come up with explanations for that to stick to monism. I've done this, but I don't think they're 100% bulletproof. It's quite hard to deny one's own continuous identity, our entire language is built around words that assume it. Possibly it's something we're hard wired to act as though we believe. Or socially conditioned in very subtle ways.
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My earliest memory of Piha is being torn from my feet by a receding wave, and the adult who was looking after me swinging me up in the air away from it. I felt totally powerless, and astonished that water only up to my waist could do that. I learned surf swimming at much safer beaches before I was allowed (or willing) to venture into Piha again.
But when I did, I loved it, it was extreme. You have to be able not just to swim, but to cope with being tumbled in the water, and occasionally being held under. These are very advanced swimming skills.
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I think establishing lack of any kind of consiousness in human corpses is a very easy matter
Sure, but establishing that it's not in the corpse is not the same as establishing that it's ceased to exist. If it's gone to an afterlife, the corpse could be irrelevant.
I don't think so, though. I just still feel very nervous about making sweeping claims about something as poorly understood as consciousness. The "utter death" that I believe in is still a hypothesis, and it's not scientific, because it is logically immune to objective disproof.
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I always loved Piha. Getting a pounding there always left me with an exhilarated afterglow. But I won't be taking the kids there any time soon.
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Is this any different to the “is there a God?” issue?
Not much.
Most people don’t believes in the tooth fairy, Leprechauns or the Norse gods just because they can’t prove they don’t exist/have never existed.
Sure, but those are particular instantiations, random and arbitrary, as Gio says. That's not the same as believing that there could be unspecified things that we could come to know only subjectively, and that some of those things could happen after death. Indeed, to claim to know is to fall into the same random and arbitrary trap - to claim to know that it's as I tend to believe, an end to consciousness, is claiming more than evidence can show.
Perhaps a good example of an unprovable and yet quite plausible belief might be the existence of aliens. Currently we have no evidence of aliens. Is that sufficient proof that there are no aliens? In absence of any evidence, then thinking that aliens take a particular form is random and arbitrary, probably false. But believing that there could be some somewhere in our universe is not especially crazy.
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