I've driven across the Great Plains three times in my life. It's a long and sometimes boring drive. Depending on how often you stop, it takes a few days of driving to get to the Rocky Mountains. Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I live, is at about 1,000 ft. of elevation above sea level. Denver, Colorado, the "Mile High City", is at about 5,000 ft. elevation. So in the drive from Ann Arbor to Denver, you will increase your elevation about 4,000 ft. Because the 1,200 mile drive to Denver is across the plains, you don't really notice the increase in elevation. It's about 3 feet per mile. Because the drive takes time, your body gets used to the change in elevation as you go along. If you've ever flown to Denver from Detroit, you know that you have a risk of having altitude sickness when you arrive. You definitely notice the difference in altitude. When driving, you don't really notice at all.
Now suppose Denver was the next town over from Ann Arbor, but it was still at 5,000 feet. That would mean that there would be a 4,000 foot cliff at the edge of Ann Arbor looking up to Denver, somewhere in the sky. If you've ever seen photos of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, it's about 3,000 feet high. The cliff to Denver would be another 1,000 feet higher. If you lived in Ann Arbor, Denver might as well be on another planet. You would never go there, and you would never even try.
Keep that image in mind.
Imagine you are someone who weighs 300 lbs. You've been that weight for as long as you can remember. It's part of who you are. Supposed you decide you want to get to a healthy weight, and your optimum weight, based on your BMI, is 170 lbs. The idea of losing 130 lbs is like a person in Ann Arbor wanting to move to Denver and all they can see is that 4,000 ft. cliff in front of them. It's impossible. They'll never do it. "Diets" that they read about are like a jet pack you can strap on your back to give you a lift. The problem is that it will get you 50 ft. up the cliff before it runs out of fuel. Then, you're most likely going to crash back down to the ground.
The only way to lose that 130 lbs. is to realize that Denver isn't at the top of a cliff next to Ann Arbor. It's across a wide plain that can be crossed. The way to do it is to do it gradually. You don't try to drive all the way in one day. You take your time. You go one mile at a time, and you adjust to the elevation as you go along. Losing weight in a way that will be permanent is like this. You have to set small, attainable goals and work toward them. Little by little you change the way you eat, you change how you exercise, and you change how you live your life so that eventually, but definitely, you'll get to the point where you are living like a 170 lb. person. That 170 lb. person is who you are. It is now part of you. Like someone who moves to Denver, because you took the time to get there at a healthy pace, you have become a Denver person. You almost don't even remember what it was like to live in Ann Arbor. It seems foreign to you.
This is the approach that I took when I lost weight more than a decade ago, and wrote about here. I was never "on a diet". A "diet" has the connotation of something that is temporary. "I'm going to go on a diet and lose 50 lbs!". And then what? Go back to the way you ate before? If so, you'll just gain that weight back again, like the jet pack crashing back to earth. The only way to stay at a healthy weight is to change how you eat. Permanently. And the only way to do that without driving yourself crazy is to do it gradually. Change small things, little by little. Drive one more mile down the road toward your destination. Be persistent. It's worth the trip.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Saturday, January 23, 2016
The Fire of Life
Where does the flame go when you blow out a candle?
In a fire, heat causes a chemical reaction between a fuel and oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, water, and energy in the form of light and more heat. That heat feeds other chemical reactions between fuel and oxygen. This chain of reactions continues as long as we have fuel and oxygen and the burning fuel stays hot enough to support the reaction.
In a candle flame, the heat of the flame melts the wax. The melted wax moves up the wick where the heat boils it into a gas. The wax gas mixes with the air, and the oxygen in the air chemically reacts with the wax. This reaction gives off light and heat. The shape of the flame that we see is just the areas of the gas which are involved in the chemical reaction. If you look close to the wick, you'll see a clear area that isn't reacting yet. This is the pure wax gas that is in the process of mixing with the air.
Once you understand the chemistry and physics of combustion, the answer becomes clear. When you blow out a candle, the flame doesn't go anywhere. A flame isn't a thing. A flame is what we call that continuous chemical reaction that gives off light that we can see. When we blow out the flame, we cool down the wax gas to a temperature where the chemical reaction stops. When we stop the chemical reaction, it stops giving off light, and we no longer see the flame.
In the same way, the property that we call "life" is also just a set of complex chemical reactions. Seeing something that is alive is like seeing a flame. We're seeing the effects of the chemical reactions that are taking place in the cells. Those chemical reactions are what cause the cells to behave as they do. Groups of cells act together as, for example, muscle tissue and digestive organs in a concerted effort to obtain fuel and oxygen to keep the chemical reaction going.
When something dies, then, what does that mean? It simply means that the conditions have changed to a degree that the chemical reactions can no longer take place, like blowing out the candle. When the chemical reactions in the cells stop, the cells can no longer perform their functions. This means that tissues and organs stop working. Since other cells depend on those tissues and organs to get their fuel and oxygen, those cells die too. As a result, the organism dies.
When this happens, where does that organism's "life" go? Well, just like the flame, it doesn't go anywhere. Life isn't a thing. There isn't a "life force" any more than there is a "fire force" that can leave the organism and go somewhere else. When an organism dies, the chemical reactions simply stop.
If, when I explain this, I say that the organism is a worm, then most people with a little knowledge of chemistry and biology will completely agree without having any issues with this. If, however, I say that the organism is a person, you or me, then a lot of people will have a problem with this. We are conscious beings. We have a feeling of being alive. We have a sense of ourselves as being something more than just a bunch of physical structures whose sole purpose is to sustain an ongoing (albeit complex) set of chemical reactions. We have a mind.
Our bodies are biological machines. As such, our brains are also just biological machines. There's nothing about our mind, our consciousness, or our sense of self that is anything more than just the patterns of connections in our brain's nerve cells and the chemical and electrical communications between them.
Once we realize this, we can do away with the idea of mind-body dualism. Our mind is not separate from our body. What we call our mind is just our body being aware of itself. Our brains evolved as an organ to control our bodies and to use information from our senses to find meaning in our various sensations to help us move through a complex world, protect ourselves, find food, and reproduce. As evolution shaped our brains to be better and better at this task, we developed a sense of consciousness - a sense of mind. One consequence of developing this sense of mind is that we feel that the mind is separate from the body. Since the mind feels separate from our bodies, ancient people came up with the idea that it must be an actual, separate entity - a soul. As we can see, that's really just an illusion.
This brings us to the big question, then. Where do we go when we die? By "we", I mean our consciousness, our minds, that thing that we perceive as being separate from our bodies. The mind is just like the flame. It's not a thing. It's just the shape of the chemical reaction of our brains that we can perceive. So where do we go when we die? The same place the flame goes.
In a fire, heat causes a chemical reaction between a fuel and oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, water, and energy in the form of light and more heat. That heat feeds other chemical reactions between fuel and oxygen. This chain of reactions continues as long as we have fuel and oxygen and the burning fuel stays hot enough to support the reaction.
In a candle flame, the heat of the flame melts the wax. The melted wax moves up the wick where the heat boils it into a gas. The wax gas mixes with the air, and the oxygen in the air chemically reacts with the wax. This reaction gives off light and heat. The shape of the flame that we see is just the areas of the gas which are involved in the chemical reaction. If you look close to the wick, you'll see a clear area that isn't reacting yet. This is the pure wax gas that is in the process of mixing with the air.
Once you understand the chemistry and physics of combustion, the answer becomes clear. When you blow out a candle, the flame doesn't go anywhere. A flame isn't a thing. A flame is what we call that continuous chemical reaction that gives off light that we can see. When we blow out the flame, we cool down the wax gas to a temperature where the chemical reaction stops. When we stop the chemical reaction, it stops giving off light, and we no longer see the flame.
In the same way, the property that we call "life" is also just a set of complex chemical reactions. Seeing something that is alive is like seeing a flame. We're seeing the effects of the chemical reactions that are taking place in the cells. Those chemical reactions are what cause the cells to behave as they do. Groups of cells act together as, for example, muscle tissue and digestive organs in a concerted effort to obtain fuel and oxygen to keep the chemical reaction going.
When something dies, then, what does that mean? It simply means that the conditions have changed to a degree that the chemical reactions can no longer take place, like blowing out the candle. When the chemical reactions in the cells stop, the cells can no longer perform their functions. This means that tissues and organs stop working. Since other cells depend on those tissues and organs to get their fuel and oxygen, those cells die too. As a result, the organism dies.
When this happens, where does that organism's "life" go? Well, just like the flame, it doesn't go anywhere. Life isn't a thing. There isn't a "life force" any more than there is a "fire force" that can leave the organism and go somewhere else. When an organism dies, the chemical reactions simply stop.
If, when I explain this, I say that the organism is a worm, then most people with a little knowledge of chemistry and biology will completely agree without having any issues with this. If, however, I say that the organism is a person, you or me, then a lot of people will have a problem with this. We are conscious beings. We have a feeling of being alive. We have a sense of ourselves as being something more than just a bunch of physical structures whose sole purpose is to sustain an ongoing (albeit complex) set of chemical reactions. We have a mind.
Our bodies are biological machines. As such, our brains are also just biological machines. There's nothing about our mind, our consciousness, or our sense of self that is anything more than just the patterns of connections in our brain's nerve cells and the chemical and electrical communications between them.
Once we realize this, we can do away with the idea of mind-body dualism. Our mind is not separate from our body. What we call our mind is just our body being aware of itself. Our brains evolved as an organ to control our bodies and to use information from our senses to find meaning in our various sensations to help us move through a complex world, protect ourselves, find food, and reproduce. As evolution shaped our brains to be better and better at this task, we developed a sense of consciousness - a sense of mind. One consequence of developing this sense of mind is that we feel that the mind is separate from the body. Since the mind feels separate from our bodies, ancient people came up with the idea that it must be an actual, separate entity - a soul. As we can see, that's really just an illusion.
This brings us to the big question, then. Where do we go when we die? By "we", I mean our consciousness, our minds, that thing that we perceive as being separate from our bodies. The mind is just like the flame. It's not a thing. It's just the shape of the chemical reaction of our brains that we can perceive. So where do we go when we die? The same place the flame goes.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Just the facts, Ma'am.
I was reading an article on the Web today and at the bottom was one of those ubiquitous click-bait articles, "9 Things Einstein Didn't Really Say" (or something like that). Being a sucker for these things, I, of course, clicked on it. In amongst the quotes was the famous "God doesn't play dice". This got me thinking about how often we hear Christians (mis)quoting Einstein in reference to God just to make the point, "See, Einstein believed in God!" They make claims about deathbed conversions or quote Stephen Hawking talking about "truly knowing the mind of God". "See! All these geniuses really believe in God!"
The thing is, it doesn't really matter if any of them believe in God (or if, in most cases, they don't). If Einstein were the top rabbi in the biggest synagogue in Jerusalem, it wouldn't change the truth about the theory of relativity. Charles Darwin could have been the Archbishop of Canterbury, but that wouldn't make evolution less true. Because the thing about Science is that it isn't who states a fact that matters, it's the fact itself.
The Ten Commandments aren't important because of what they say, they are important because God said them. The moral guidelines given by Jesus aren't good ideas simply on their own merit, they must be followed because Jesus said them.
Christianity is based on argument from authority. Statements are true because of WHO said them, not because of their content. Atheism, on the other hand, is based on an examination of the facts. It doesn't matter who first stated or discovered the facts. It doesn't matter if that person was wrong about other facts. The combined effect of all the facts that we've gathered through the process of scientific discovery point to the conclusion that no gods or other supernatural beings really exist. Bigfoot doesn't exist. UFOs haven't landed on our planet. There's no monster in Loch Ness. Homeopathic pills don't work.
We can only gain knowledge and advance as individuals and as a species if we use rational, scientific approaches to gathering and using facts. Arguments from authority are an anchor that slows our progress and keeps us from finding the truth.
... but don't take my word for it...
The thing is, it doesn't really matter if any of them believe in God (or if, in most cases, they don't). If Einstein were the top rabbi in the biggest synagogue in Jerusalem, it wouldn't change the truth about the theory of relativity. Charles Darwin could have been the Archbishop of Canterbury, but that wouldn't make evolution less true. Because the thing about Science is that it isn't who states a fact that matters, it's the fact itself.
The Ten Commandments aren't important because of what they say, they are important because God said them. The moral guidelines given by Jesus aren't good ideas simply on their own merit, they must be followed because Jesus said them.
Christianity is based on argument from authority. Statements are true because of WHO said them, not because of their content. Atheism, on the other hand, is based on an examination of the facts. It doesn't matter who first stated or discovered the facts. It doesn't matter if that person was wrong about other facts. The combined effect of all the facts that we've gathered through the process of scientific discovery point to the conclusion that no gods or other supernatural beings really exist. Bigfoot doesn't exist. UFOs haven't landed on our planet. There's no monster in Loch Ness. Homeopathic pills don't work.
We can only gain knowledge and advance as individuals and as a species if we use rational, scientific approaches to gathering and using facts. Arguments from authority are an anchor that slows our progress and keeps us from finding the truth.
... but don't take my word for it...
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