COVID-19 ... how we cope :)

[Erik Malmsten]

I believe there is something more than our physical bodies, unmeasureable by science. My closet friend woke up in the night at the time his grandmother in England died; He felt it or her saying goodbye. I had a girlfriend whom i felt like calling but she would answer before it rang. I have known psychics would can make connections with living people (not predict the future).

But we do live by the rules of the physical universe. It's dangerous to act otherwise. I had a coworker who read Eckhart Tolle and said the world is an illusion. If so, i told him to choose an illusion where he's a millionaire. He chose to jump off a bridge.

[Sid Belzberg]

The fact that you would call Alexander my hero despite nothing like that having been written here says all I need to know about you. You are trolling and I won't have any further discussion with you beyond what I write in this post. He isn't a hero at all, he's someone who because of his position in life and his knowledge of the human brain was chosen by a higher power to have an incredibly rare experience and to tell the world about it. The message is that we all can have and in fact WILL have consciousness and rational thought without the human brain.

The important point about his E. Coli meningitis is that Alexander reached a point at which he had 97% chance of mortality, and even if he was to make the 3% who survive, at least 50% of those live their lives in a vegetable state. He came out of it in an instant, alert and with no mental damage, far beyond any medical explanation, and there is still no explanation of how he even got the disease.

For a disease that afflicts 1 in 10 million per year, for it to suddenly and unexpectedly hit of all people a world-famous brain neurosurgeon is a miracle in and of itself. And then he becomes by some other miracle one of less than 3% who get the disease and reach his status of seizures and mental incapacity to survive. Together those mathematical odds are astounding, and if you don't agree, you don't know statistics.

You have every right to your opinion, which is obviously that his story is somehow bogus. I am assuming you are likely an atheist. But your attempts to discredit Alexander and make him out to be some sort of con artist are pathetic. I won't give you any more discussion.

Hey Paragat, I think you are reading way too much into Dr. Panjanwani's comments. I don't think he really meant anything by it regarding the "hero" comment. Dilip is correct about many people contracting meningitis by many different pathogens besides ecoli and that most people indeed recover from it. Here is some information put out by the CDC regarding bacterial meningitis that seems to support what Dilip has to say about it.
https://www.cdc.gov/meningitis/bacterial.html
Despite these facts, I must say I personally find the story remarkable insofar as his recovery from what appears to be a very late stage of the disease is concerned. I am not sure if his case provides "Proof of Heaven". I have always been a fan of the concept of Quantum Consciousness as researched by Dr. Roger Penrose and Hameroff
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/s...20210906122208
Along the lines of the original theme of this thread "Covid19...how we cope" when Alica and I in March of 2020 were locked down and I brushed off my former career in Molecular genetics and virology to research what COVID19 was about I was overwhelmed with the amount of information and research on SarsCov2.
I had done research in AI in my old company that had developed nonhuman intervention automated trading platforms for banks and large financial institutions.
I was fascinated by Alphazero "teaching" itself to play chess and GO via identifying patterns on a neural network instead of the traditional tree search move by move methodology.
I wondered if the same methodology could be applied to natural language processing where a program could train itself to summarize articles and papers along the same lines ALPHA zero did of looking at patterns on a neural network. I found some really interesting projects on Github where Google had just released something called the "BERT" protocol that had done work on what I was looking for.
To make a long story short I coded the original prototype of this summarization program that later on a colleague of mine improved and used something called the flask API to take it from the terminal interface version I had created to a web browser and use an abstraction methodology of summarizing rather than extractive that I had originally programmed. The result is this https://otomidemo.xyz I have not had the time to commercially release this micro AI service as I got busy with a blockchain project I have been working on for several years.
Feel free to try it out, it helped me summarize many research papers and then do a meta summary and get very quick aggregate views on any topic. I think that it is only a matter of time before non-DNA consciousness becomes a reality via AI that supports the whole notion of quantum consciousness.

Cheers
Sid

[Dilip Panjwani]

He came out of it in an instant, alert and with no mental damage, far beyond any medical explanation, and there is still no explanation of how he even got the disease.

When his artificially induced coma was reversed....
There are several well established risk factors (more than what's in Sid's link), which lead to this illness, and I would not be surprised if he had one or more of them.

[Brad Thomson]

But we do live by the rules of the physical universe. It's dangerous to act otherwise. I had a coworker who read Eckhart Tolle and said the world is an illusion. If so, i told him to choose an illusion where he's a millionaire. He chose to jump off a bridge.

it is important to note that even if there is no material substance and all of our experiences of sense therefore exist only in our minds and do not refer to any extra-mental entities (which is my belief), it is still the case that the ideas of sense are real, they are not illusions, and they do follow rules or patterns. To me a skeptic is someone who says there IS an external material world but that we cannot know its true nature. To me the objects of sense, whiich are but ideas in our minds, ARE the true reality, therefore we know them absolutely perfectly, precisely as they are. We learn the Laws of Nature, which are nothing more than patterns, by observation, trial and error. We do not need to posit the existence of material substance to explain anything, we need only presume the existence of a mind capable of imagiining, just as we ourselves are.

[Brad Thomson]

I believe there is something more than our physical bodies, unmeasureable by science. My closet friend woke up in the night at the time his grandmother in England died; He felt it or her saying goodbye. I had a girlfriend whom i felt like calling but she would answer before it rang. I have known psychics would can make connections with living people (not predict the future).

This is a different question, but an interesting one. I have had many odd experiences such as you suggest. I was sitting with my brother about to watch a football game and I said to him that Buffalo are going to score a touchdown on the opening kickoff. He responded by pointing out that it was Buffalo who were kicking off, not receiving. It happened. Also with my brother, we were caddying in the same group and I told him that sometime over the course of the round two tee shots would come to rest touching each other. It happened on the 18th hole. More recently in life I woke up one night with a horrible feeling and sensed that something terrible had happened. I got out of bed and turned on the television, CNN, expecting to hear that a nuclear war had started in the Middle East. But there was nothing for about 30 minutes so I went back to sleep. When I woke up I again turned to the news and found out about the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Also, I had a dream that the dude who liked to swim with crocs, Steve Irwin, had been killed during one of his stunts. He had been at about the same time as the dream. Again, going back in time, I once did a watercolour painting of jazz alto-saxophone player Cannonball Adderley. My mom liked it and hung it on the wall. One day she heard on the radio that he had died, then a moment later she noticed that the painting had fallen to the floor. I suspect that everyone has these sorts of experience from time to time. I do not know what to make of them.

[Aris Marghetis]

This is a different question, but an interesting one. I have had many odd experiences such as you suggest. I was sitting with my brother about to watch a football game and I said to him that Buffalo are going to score a touchdown on the opening kickoff. He responded by pointing out that it was Buffalo who were kicking off, not receiving. It happened. Also with my brother, we were caddying in the same group and I told him that sometime over the course of the round two tee shots would come to rest touching each other. It happened on the 18th hole. More recently in life I woke up one night with a horrible feeling and sensed that something terrible had happened. I got out of bed and turned on the television, CNN, expecting to hear that a nuclear war had started in the Middle East. But there was nothing for about 30 minutes so I went back to sleep. When I woke up I again turned to the news and found out about the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Also, I had a dream that the dude who liked to swim with crocs, Steve Irwin, had been killed during one of his stunts. He had been at about the same time as the dream. Again, going back in time, I once did a watercolour painting of jazz alto-saxophone player Cannonball Adderley. My mom liked it and hung it on the wall. One day she heard on the radio that he had died, then a moment later she noticed that the painting had fallen to the floor. I suspect that everyone has these sorts of experience from time to time. I do not know what to make of them.

I admire your ending to your post: "I suspect that everyone has these sorts of experience from time to time. I do not know what to make of them."

Such things have happened to me as well (as they probably happen to most people), and I am also stumped. At the same time, isn't it wondrous?!

[Dilip Panjwani]

it helped me summarize many research papers and then do a meta summary and get very quick aggregate views on any topic

Hi Sid,
One of the directors at the Stevens Institute of Technology has also done a good job of summarizing the current state of our knowledge on some of the 'mysteries' of humanity:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ave-in-common/

[Pargat Perrer]

Hey Paragat, I think you are reading way too much into Dr. Panjanwani's comments. I don't think he really meant anything by it regarding the "hero" comment. Dilip is correct about many people contracting meningitis by many different pathogens besides ecoli and that most people indeed recover from it. Here is some information put out by the CDC regarding bacterial meningitis that seems to support what Dilip has to say about it.
https://www.cdc.gov/meningitis/bacterial.html
Despite these facts, I must say I personally find the story remarkable insofar as his recovery from what appears to be a very late stage of the disease is concerned. I am not sure if his case provides "Proof of Heaven". I have always been a fan of the concept of Quantum Consciousness as researched by Dr. Roger Penrose and Hameroff
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/s...20210906122208

Sid, I know you are trying to be helpful, but both you and Dilip need to know that in your attempts to be armchair quarterbacks, you are missing some key points and having some misinformation.

Firstly, both of you are trying to play doctor and say that Dr. Alexander possibly had some other form of bacterial meningitis. NO. HE HAD E COLI MENINGITIS. There wasn't some other bacteria involved, they identified it specifically as E. Coli. So let's begin with that.

In the CDC link you provided, it says this about bacterial meningitis in the How It Spreads section:

• Group B Streptococcus and E. coli: Mothers can pass these bacteria to their babies during birth.

Yes, no problems there. Then it says:

• E. coli: People can get these bacteria by eating food prepared by people who did not wash their hands well after using the toilet.

People usually get sick from E. coli and L. monocytogenes by eating contaminated food.

Again, yes.... BUT!!!! This is totally misleading. Yes, people get E. Coli from contaminated food, But that E. Coli doesn't go to the brain and cause meningitis!!! It enters the stomach and can cause sickness like diarrhea, but cannot cause meningitis! It has no pathway to the person's brain!!!

Notice is says "people get sick", not "people get meningitis". This is misleading and is misinformation. If you have any contacts at the CDC, I recommend you reach out to them and have them correct this information.

PEOPLE DON'T GET E COLI MENINGITIS FROM CONTAMINATED FOOD.

Now here's a link to a site that has the correct information:

https://www.meningitis.org/meningiti...oli-meningitis

And here is the correct information:

E. coli meningitis is caused by bacteria which grow in the bodies of healthy people.

Usually these bacteria do no harm, but some uncommon strains can cause serious disease.

The vast majority of cases of E. coli meningitis are caused by a disease-causing strain known as E. coli K1.

Most cases of E. coli meningitis occur in newborn babies or babies under 3 months of age.

In the UK and Ireland adults and older children almost never get E coli meningitis unless they have health problems that suppress their immune system, or have had head injuries or surgery to the head so that bacteria can enter via the head wound. It may also occur in people who have a CSF shunt (a device for draining excess fluid from around the brain to relieve pressure). Infection in babies may occur during delivery, or from bacteria acquired in hospital, or in the home. Premature and low-birth-weight babies are at higher risk of contracting meningitis.

Notice that for adults and older children, there is no mention of getting E Coli meningitis from contaminated food!!!!!

Dr. Alexander did not have any problems with his immune system. He had not had any head surgery and he didn't have a CSF shunt. Therefore, HE SHOULD NOT HAVE CONTRACTED E COLI MENINGITIS AT ALL!!!!!

So Dilip can stop playing doctor now. I don't know why the two of you are trying to outdo the medical professionals who treated Dr. Alexander, but you do yourselves a great disservice. Especially Dilip for whom I have totally lost respect. Even with his latest reply to me, Dilip is STILL trying to say Alexander had some other form of bacterial meningitis. "It would not surprise me" he says. He should read the book. He should recognize that Alexander specifically had E. Coli meningitis. He should recognize that there is no plausible explanation for how Alexander got E Coli meningitis. Period.

Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I think Dilip has his explanations but has never been punched in the face, and he goes around thinking he's some kind of expert. Eventually he'll get punched in the face, even if it doesn't happen until his moment of passing on.

Along the lines of the original theme of this thread "Covid19...how we cope" when Alica and I in March of 2020 were locked down and I brushed off my former career in Molecular genetics and virology to research what COVID19 was about I was overwhelmed with the amount of information and research on SarsCov2.
I had done research in AI in my old company that had developed nonhuman intervention automated trading platforms for banks and large financial institutions.
I was fascinated by Alphazero "teaching" itself to play chess and GO via identifying patterns on a neural network instead of the traditional tree search move by move methodology.
I wondered if the same methodology could be applied to natural language processing where a program could train itself to summarize articles and papers along the same lines ALPHA zero did of looking at patterns on a neural network. I found some really interesting projects on Github where Google had just released something called the "BERT" protocol that had done work on what I was looking for.
To make a long story short I coded the original prototype of this summarization program that later on a colleague of mine improved and used something called the flask API to take it from the terminal interface version I had created to a web browser and use an abstraction methodology of summarizing rather than extractive that I had originally programmed. The result is this https://otomidemo.xyz I have not had the time to commercially release this micro AI service as I got busy with a blockchain project I have been working on for several years.
Feel free to try it out, it helped me summarize many research papers and then do a meta summary and get very quick aggregate views on any topic. I think that it is only a matter of time before non-DNA consciousness becomes a reality via AI that supports the whole notion of quantum consciousness.

Cheers
Sid

I'll check it out, but I'm not sure if I'll know what to do with it. I'll also research this notion of quantum consciousness.

[Dilip Panjwani]

Firstly, both of you are trying to play doctor and say that Dr. Alexander possibly had some other form of bacterial meningitis.

Dilip is STILL trying to say Alexander had some other form of bacterial meningitis.

Neither Sid nor me said that! Wow, like your hero or prophet or whatever you consider that neurosurgeon to be, you too have started resorting to lies!! He did it to mint his millions...I wonder why you are doing it!

[Pargat Perrer]

I believe there is something more than our physical bodies, unmeasureable by science. My closet friend woke up in the night at the time his grandmother in England died; He felt it or her saying goodbye. I had a girlfriend whom i felt like calling but she would answer before it rang. I have known psychics would can make connections with living people (not predict the future).

But we do live by the rules of the physical universe. It's dangerous to act otherwise. I had a coworker who read Eckhart Tolle and said the world is an illusion. If so, i told him to choose an illusion where he's a millionaire. He chose to jump off a bridge.

Many people don't accept that there can be miracles, because they don't see any evidence. Yet everyone alive on this planet is a living miracle, because NO ONE KNOWS what takes place when a male human sperm meets an unfertilized female human egg. Suddenly a whole new life is formed, and no one knows how it happens. I read somewhere that some researchers had managed to take a photograph (obviously through some kind of microscope) of the moment when a sperm met an unfertilized egg, and there was a "blue spark" that happened between them. I wish I had recorded that information, but it was many years ago.

We humans have no inkling where an individual human life really comes from. It just appears out of nothing. It becomes a separate, conscious, rational and thinking being with it's own sense of identity and individuality. We are as totally clueless about it now as we were when we were communicating in nothing more than grunts. And I think I can safely predict that we will never know, in this physical universe, what happens when a sperm meets an egg and life begins.

Most Christians believe that Jesus was created without this process, without a male sperm contacting Mary's egg. They believe this by faith alone, because in all of recorded history, such a thing has never been recorded outside of the Bible. All human life we know of came about by meeting of male sperm and female unfertilized egg. And with over 7 billion, probably closer now to 8 billion, people on Earth currently, you'd think if there was going to be an exception, it would be happening in this time.

[Brad Thomson]

Insofar as there can be no explanation for existence (because if there were there would need to be an explanation for the explanation ad infinitum), existence itself is miraculous. There is nothing that is not a miracle.

[Neil Frarey]

Insofar as there can be no explanation for existence (because if there were there would need to be an explanation for the explanation ad infinitum), existence itself is miraculous. There is nothing that is not a miracle.

Which of course includes COVID-19 scientifically engineered in a lab in China.

[Sid Belzberg]

Which of course includes COVID-19 scientifically engineered in a lab in China.

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/...t-chinese-lab/

[Brad Thomson]

Which of course includes COVID-19 scientifically engineered in a lab in China.

We do not know the truth. COVID may be man made, it may be natural. It may have been deliberately leaked or accidentally leaked. If deliberately leaked it could have been a lone nut or a conspiracy. It also could have been planted near the lab to make it look like the lab was responsible. Again, we do not know, and I shall not guess.

[Pargat Perrer]

Insofar as there can be no explanation for existence (because if there were there would need to be an explanation for the explanation ad infinitum), existence itself is miraculous. There is nothing that is not a miracle.

But if everything is a miracle .... then nothing is a miracle.

(that can be interpreted in 2 equally valid ways)