How to Love the Truth

• Seek It 
• Be curious 
• Indulge your curiosity 
• Be around curious people 
• Google your questions 
• Read 
• Go the library 
• Ask experts/friends 
• Trust 
• Senses - They are good enough to drive with. 
• Mind - It is good enough to get man to the moon. 
• Experts - They're scared enough of losing their job that they relatively have their shtuff together. 
• Doubt 
• Authority - Beware of hegemony, self promotion and parasitic self replicating memes. 
• Tradition - Question the status quo.  Those that don't learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.
• Self - There are many, many, many things that you are wrong about. Don't add to that list by being wrong about being wrong 
• Defend It 
• Argue with people--civilly. Truth is discovered communally. A community of people exchanging ideas like a super network of neurons firing back and forth to each other. The world community is one big brain (and the internet is the synapses:)). We're smarter together. 
• Proclaim It 
• Start conversations: Bring up important subjects. Go beyond small talk. Talk big. 
• Preserve truth in writing: Make it so you and others can come back to that thought after it's faded or been forgotten.  Why aren't you blogging?  Srsly.

Irrational Things Atheists Believe

We all believe irrational things--things that are subjective and not empirically testable.  

Is this such a bad thing? Is it even possible to live without the scaffolding of these ideas and many, many others? What would life be like without these kind of ideas? Can noticing these ideas give us humility and more level playing field when dealing with/thinking about/talking to people that believe things that seem utterly foreign and ridiculous to us?

• Epistemological Beliefs
• Reality is Coherent--As Einstein famously put it, "God does not play dice."
• How we live like reality is coherent: 
• Science invests billions of dollars into research.  Many of our expectations about what life will be like on a given day are met.
• Reality Is Not an Illusion--Is what you see what you get?
• How we live like reality is not an illusion: 
• We find love and life meaningful.  
• Continuity of Reality-- "We have no logical reason to assume that anything we've learned from science will be true tomorrow." --Cameron Green
• How we live like reality has continuity: 
• We act according to our experience.
• Causal Relationships--One thing leads to another--cause and effect. How do we know that when one cue ball hits another that the two events are actually connected? The philosopher David Hume wrote much on this conundrum.  
• How we live like causal relationships are determinable:
• We administer medical treatments.  We write and read history books.
• Memory Is Accurate--How do we know our most trust and dearly held memories are accurate?  How do we know our brain didn't just make them up and they seem real?
• How we live like memory is accurate:
• We go up to and kiss our loved ones when we see them again.  We cherish fond childhood memories.  We recall and use information like directions to get to work.
• Senses Are Reasonable Facsimiles of Reality--How do we know that we can trust our senses?  How do we know they correspond to reality at all?
• How we live like our senses are accurate:
• We follow traffic signs and lights.
• You’re Not Completely Crazy--Is it so crazy to think we're not crazy?
• How we live like we aren't completely crazy:
• We make decisions and live by them.
• Solipsism Is False--How do we know others are thinking, feeling, volitional beings?
• How we live like solipsism is false:
• We care for the needs of others.

• Existential Beliefs 
• Life Has Value--Funerals suck.  War sucks.  Abuse sucks.  Why?  Because life is precious.
• Life Has Meaning--What we do with our lives has some value otherwise we wouldn't keep doing it.
• Identity/Consciousness/Mind--We believe in ourselves and others as a whole, independent being rather than a talking set of individual neurons and atoms.  Attributing a volitional personality to a human is the same thing on a different scale to giving the random occurrences of 'life' and 'the universe' to 'God'.  
• Contiguity--Many have said (controversially) that every atom in your body is replaced every ten (or seven) years. Assuming something close to that is true, how can it be said that we're the same person? Yet we still believe it every time we see an old friend! 
• Free Will--Our choices are our own and not a mechanistic predetermined byproduct of things outside of our control. 
• Love--It's more than a hormone. It's more than a pre-programmed mechanism to create and rear young. We believe and behave like love is real.

• Justice Beliefs
• Virtue/Vice and Good/Evil--Every time we resist evil and do good we show that we believe in moral obligation/virtue/vice/good/evil.

Brenner Emmanuel Michel's "Hercules Between Virtue and Vice"

My point:


Of course all of the above has rightly been questioned and doubted by philosophical luminaries, but I bring it up to point out that both you and I have sacred ideas and that we all hold things true without proof everyday. That, by in large, is a very, very good thing. You may well cognitively doubt every idea above, but you still believe them functionally if you use them. Just as many believers deal with doubts about their religion's teachings so can an atheist doubt the list above, but still be counted as a believer on the basis of how they live--actions speak louder than words.


What is religion at its most very basic? Ideas. Ideas about life, morality, metaphysics, origins...etc. Just in the same way that believing life has value has existential and social utility so can other religious ideas--even if we deeply doubt their veracity. Ideas are tools--tools that can help improve our lives by being the scaffolding on which to build a life. What I'd like to show with the above list of things is that there is common ground between atheists and theists to discuss ideas, values and meanings. We all are subjective. We all are biased. We all operate with ideas that are unfounded. We all have memes.  It's a level playing field between atheists and theists in this regard. We all make assumption leaps and some of these ideas are vital to living a fulfilling life.

Pictures from here, here and here.

Infrared "Vision" in Snakes

Seeing in the dark is (and is not) pittsville for snakes.  It's been so great that it's evolved more than once in pit vipers and in pythons.


Here's the organ:

Facts of note about the pit organ:


"Essentially, it allows these animals to “see” radiant heat at wavelengths between 5 and 30 μm to a degree of accuracy such that a blind rattlesnake can target vulnerable body parts of the prey at which it strikes"


"The facial pit actually visualizes thermal radiation using the same optical principals as a pinhole camera, wherein the location of a source of thermal radiation is determined by the location of the radiation on the membrane of the heat pit. However, studies that have visualized the thermal images seen by the facial pit using computer analysis have suggested that the resolution is actually extremely poor. The size of the opening of the pit results in poor resolution of small, warm objects, and coupled with the pit's small size and subsequent poor heat conduction, the image produced is of extremely low resolution and contrast. It is known that some focusing and sharpening of the image occurs in the lateral descending trigeminal tract, and it is possible that the visual and infrared integration that occurs in the tectum may also be used to help sharpen in the image. In addition, snakes may deliberately choose ambush sites with low thermal background radiation (colder areas) to maximize the contrast of their warm prey in order to achieve such a high degree of accuracy from their thermal “vision”."


"he organ is used extensively by them to detect and target warm-blooded prey such as rodents and birds, and it was previously assumed that the organ evolved specifically for that purpose. However, recent evidence shows that the pit organ may also be used for thermoregulation. In an experiment that tested snakes' abilities to locate a cool thermal refuge in an uncomfortably hot maze, all pitvipers were able to locate the refuge quickly and easily, while true viperswere unable to do so. This suggests that the pitvipers were using their pit organs to aid in thermoregulatory decisions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes#cite_note-KM-0


"Take a whiff of mustard or wasabi and you’ll be hit with a familiar burning sensation. That’s the result of chemicals in these pungent foods hitting a protein called TRPA1, a molecular alarm that warns us about irritating substances. The same protein does a similar job in other animals, but rattlesnakes and vipers have put their version of TRPA1 to a more impressive and murderous purpose. They use it to sense the body heat of their prey.

Pit vipers are famed for their ability to detect the infrared radiation given off by warm-blooded prey, and none more so than the western diamondback rattlesnake. Its skills are so accurate that it can detect its prey at distances of up to a metre, and strike at objects just 0.2C warmer than the surrounding temperature. Against such abilities, darkness is no defence.

Like all pit vipers, the rattlesnake’s sixth sense depends on two innocuous pits located between their eyes and their nostrils. With two pits on either side of its head, the snake can even ’see’ heat in stereo. Each pit is a hollow chamber with a thin membrane stretched across it, which acts as an “infrared antenna”. It is loaded with blood vessels, energy-harvesting mitochondria and dense clusters of nerves. The nerves connect with the visual parts of the snake’s brain, allowing it to match up images of both heat and light."

"A single gene that encodes the TRPA1 protein was 400 times more active in the pit nerves than the spinal ones.

In humans, TRPA1 is activated by allyl isothiocyanate, the chemical that gives wasabi and mustard their kick."

"Two other groups of snakes, the pythons and boas, can detect infrared radiation, although their technology is 5-10 times less sensitive than the sophisticated viper hardware. They also have pits but theirs are spread across their snouts, are simpler in structure and have fewer nerve connections. But Gracheva and Ingolia found that they have independently co-opted the same molecule in their pursuit of hot sensory action, even though their ancestors diverged from those of vipers 30 million years ago."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/03/14/wasabi-protein-responsible-for-the-heat-seeking-sixth-sense-of-rattlesnakes/#more-853


"The membrane is only 15 micrometers thick and hangs freely suspended in the pit organ so that it is isolated by the air. Heat sensitive cells from the membrane react to differences in temperature of only a few millikelvins."


It's also interesting to note that some scientists think that the snake's brain might clean up the blurry images similarly to our brain scrubs out our blind spot, flips our eye's lens image reversal and how our mind accentuates borders.  

http://www.bccn-munich.de/news-views/bccn-research-news/catching-prey-in-darkness

Bifurcated Senses - The Power of Two

Two is better than one.  Why?  Because you can compare and contrast the two side's concentrations and hone in on the location of the smell.  That's why we have two nostrils (at least, that used to be the reason), that's why snakes have forked tongues, and why we have two ears (two eyes is for greater range of vision and for 3-D imaging, which is a similar contrast of concentrations).