r/scienceisdope

Do a quick experiment right now: Close your eyes, stretch your arm out and touch the tip of your nose with your index finger. You probably nailed it on the first try. But how did your finger know exactly where your nose was in 3D space without you looking at it?

We’ve all been taught since primary school that we have 5 senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. But modern science recognizes quite a few more and the one you just used to touch your nose is arguably the coolest one.

It’s called Proprioception.

Simply put, proprioception is your body’s built-in GPS. It’s the continuous, unconscious ability of your brain to sense the exact position, movement, and orientation of your body parts in space. Without it, you wouldn't be able to walk without actively staring at your feet, you couldn't type on a keyboard without looking at every key and you definitely couldn't scratch an itch on your back in the dark.

You don't have "proprioception organs" like eyes or ears. Instead, you have millions of microscopic sensors called proprioceptors buried deep inside your muscles, tendons, and joints.

Two of the heavy lifters are:

1. Muscle Spindles: These detect how much a muscle is stretching.
2. Golgi Tendon Organs: These detect the amount of tension in your tendons.

These sensors are constantly firing rapid-fire data up your spinal cord to your brain, essentially saying, "Hey, the right bicep is contracted at 40%, the elbow is bent at 90 degrees, and the fingers are curled." Your brain stitches all this data together in milliseconds to create a 3D map of your body.

Ever seen a police officer ask a suspected drunk driver to close their eyes and touch their nose or walk in a perfectly straight line? That’s not a balance test, that’s a proprioception test. Alcohol suppresses the nervous system and disrupts the communication between your proprioceptors and your brain, causing you to lose that 3D map. It’s also why teenagers are famously clumsy. During rapid growth spurts, their limbs literally get longer faster than their brain's internal proprioceptive map can update. Their brain thinks the arm ends here, but it actually ends two inches further away, resulting in knocked-over glasses and stubbed toes.

So next time you easily catch a ball, run up the stairs in the dark or just touch your nose, take a second to appreciate your actual 6th sense working in the background.

What goes on their minds who have a habit of trying to be the main character or portray themselves as the biggest repsentative of the whole community?

Like there are countless number of people in the instagram or facebook or youtube speaking nonsense always. And the frequent use of phrases like ; as a (name of the community),

In my opinion then some of the most nonsense take ever that directly contradicts the first line with the last line, I'm not generalizing then a complete generalized statement etc.

And the worst part these people don't take questions. If you ask them something they directly throw a label on you.

They can't follow what they preach!

What is the reason behind this behaviour?

Same as question

I've been following Acharya Prashant and looking into the philosophy of idealism after seeing a few posts and comments here. Before I get to my concerns, let me acknowledge what he does well:

What I Respect:

1. He does call out pseudoscience. He has publicly dismissed astrology, homeopathy, and mystical claims on the grounds that they aren't falsifiable or verifiable.
2. He advocates for veganism and animal rights. A lot of people have become vegan through his influence. His arguments are grounded in ethics and compassion, and he's helped many make the connection between consumption and violence.

I respect this a lot.

Where I See a Problem:

Despite articulating a rigorous standard for science, his core metaphysical claim fails his own criteria. The claim that consciousness is fundamental and the material world is appearance (maya).

Here's why idealism doesn't hold up as a claim about reality:

It's unfalsifiable. Idealism makes no testable predictions that differ from naturalism. Every possible observation is compatible with "consciousness is fundamental" and also with "the brain generates consciousness." There's no experiment that could distinguish the two. A claim that can't be wrong can't be right either.

But when idealism DOES make testable claims, it fails them. If consciousness is fundamental and the brain doesn't generate it, then:

• Brain damage shouldn't erase specific conscious functions. But it does. Damage to the fusiform gyrus destroys face recognition. Hippocampal damage wipes out the ability to form new memories. Amygdala damage eliminates fear responses.
• Anesthesia shouldn't turn consciousness off. But it does, reliably and reversibly, by targeting specific molecular receptors (GABA, NMDA).
• Progressive neurodegeneration shouldn't gradually erode personality, memory, and awareness in lockstep with tissue loss. But it does.

Proponents of idealism dismiss these as correlations, but they aren't just correlations. These are direct, causal, bidirectional manipulations of conscious experience through the brain.

If consciousness exists independently of the brain, you'd need to explain why damaging this supposed "receiver" systematically destroys specific contents of consciousness. The destruction of particular capacities, rather than just signal strength, fits exactly the predictions of the "brain as generator" model (modern neuroscience).

Idealism handles this by retreating to: "That's just the ego-mind being affected, not the fundamental consciousness." But this is adding ad hoc machinery to protect the claim from evidence. The fundamental consciousness conveniently is poorly defined, can't be measured, detected, or affected by any physical process. It's immune to disconfirmation by definition.

This is the same structure as Last Thursdayism (the universe was created last Thursday with all history planted to appear older) or Young Earth creationism (the Earth is 6,000 years old, fossils were placed to test faith). All three make claims about how reality actually is while being structured so no observation can ever count against them.

I find that the rhetoric fits the motte-and-bailey: When the claim is challenged, retreat to the motte ("Vedanta isn't science, it's philosophy/darshana, you can't attack it with empirical standards"). But when promoting the teaching, imply the bailey (that consciousness being fundamental is actually true, not just a philosophical stance).

The contradiction is: he uses falsifiability to defend against astrology but exempts his own claims from the same standard.

My Question:

Why do people find him compelling?

I am not trying to diss him here, I am actually curious.

Try to go through the rationale and arguments I have attempted to articulate and engage with them if you disagree.