I'm passionately interested in and driven to support human progress. In this particular discussion I'm focused on human biological progress; specifically, retarding/reversing the harmful impact of aging on human biology.
In that effort I'm NOT going to spend significant amounts of my currently limited resources/time/energy on things that, UPON INITIAL APPRAISAL, appear to offer poor chances of progress. That would be wasteful and irrational given my stated goal.
Upon initial appraisal, Qigong, Daoism and many/most other "traditional practices" show extremely poor chances of progress when compared against Western science. Your personal and subjective experiences of Qigong do little to boost my appraised value of Quigong.
For millenia, humans have displayed bias, ignorance, superstition, placebo effect, delusion and anti-progress characteristics(even to the point of forming massive multi-generational collective traditions and organizations based on said characteristics.) I have little reason to assume your views/experiences of Qigong are any different.
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I could not care less what morons believed and not for a moment did I think that they could drag me down.
Progress in the rea of antiagng likely rests upon, and almost certainly will be hastened by, vast swathes of humanity (and not just scientists) posessing the right mentality. Actions and behaviour flow from mentality. The most glaringly obvious examples of a mentality stifling progress can be seen in cases like stem cell research being held back by religious mentality(pro-life Christians.)
As Aubrey De Gray points out, much of society is in the grip of a pro-death trance. There are innumerable other subtle and very pervasive memes that infect the minds of many, and they are most definitely a threat to progress.
The current call (and mindless zombie acceptance) for "tolerance" toward varying mentalities and beliefs may have pragmatic value in curbing the destructive tribal warfare tendencies of the moronic apes, but the price for peace may be progress.
"As long as it doesn't hurt anyone!" can, in the long run, be very hurtful to humanity indeed.
Just like most people, you dismiss the evidence without bothering to examine it, simply because the description does not fit into our current scientific models.
What and where is this evidence you speak of?
I assure you that current western science does not even know how to approach the simplest of qigong phenomena
Again, how or why can science not "approach" these claimed phenmena?
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What If I told you that I have the ability to fly like superman, and I did a flying tour around the universe last night and had lunch with magical invisible elves on the dark side of the moon, and they taught me how to be immortal?
Edited by Brett Black, 08 November 2013 - 05:06 AM.