AO said:
Consequently, when the pieces are related, as in my experience going to the wake, there is a high probability those related pieces were responsible for the event.
Not really. It just means that despite your increased education and status in society, you are just as susceptible to being astonished by coincidence and victim of embellishment or "flashbulb memory" as the rest of the nutters that believe in all the paranormal junk.
As to "love" and other human emotions, there's no doubt that
H. sapiens experience emotions, other animals appear to as well, which is noted by several researchers, some of whom have published books like
When Elephants Weep or
Mining the Minds of Animals. Some of the work might be reaching a bit, but I think we can all agree that animals are capable of experiencing emotions like fear or anger.
But in the realm of "measuring emotions," we certainly can. We know that certain primary emotions are controled by the hypothalmus and integrated into behavior, as demonstrated through ablation and stimulation studies (on cats as I remember) as well as other observations made in neuroscience. The limbic lobe of the brain, where the Cingulate gyrus and the Parahippocampal gyrus reside, has been observed to affect "secondary" emotions (like embarassment). Humans that experience Kluver-Bucy Syndrome, which affects this lobe, experience impairments or stimulations of certain secondary emotions, such as increased apathy. The Amygdala has been linked to the emotions that are
learned and, indeed, studies in which the Amygdala connections were severed in rats resulted in the elimination of "fear" responses.
So emotions can be measured, at least to the extent to which regions of the brain that affect specific emotions can be identified. But "Love" (in the respect that you used the term) is most likely just a trick of DNA to convince us to procreate. There is certainly nothing "paranormal" regarding love (or any other emotion). And if it were as "magical" as human poets are inclined to suggest, then wouldn't the rates of divorce, adultry, incest, cuckholding, frigidness, etc be less significant? Wouldn't the person who married more than once in his/her lifetime be a rarity? That these answers aren't favorable to "love" easily dispells any magical or paranormal explanation and is highly suggestive of a physiological/neurological one.
The "magic of love" is mostly a social construct anyway. Monogamy is valued by Western cultures (among others) and being "unfaithful" to one's partner is considered taboo. Therefore, the cultural norm is to declare one's "heart" to another -but that doesn't keep the individual from being attracted to others of the opposite or same sex.
AO said:
it’s a SCIENTIFIC FACT that science still doesn’t understand the human heart.
. Really? I was under the impression that science has a pretty good grasp on
coronary processes and physiology.
AO said:
I am a REAL scientist - Undergraduate degrees in Computer Science, Digital Electronics, Geography, and Social Science; Graduate and post-graduate degrees (on full “Fortune-500” math scholarships) in Computer Science and Engineering.
I have a ten-inch penis. Both of our claims have some similar characteristics: they are equally possible; both irrelevant to performance; neither means shit on an internet forum; and both speak more about our egos than the facts. You'd do better to post you CV somewhere else and let your words speak for themselves in a forum like this.
In the end, you appear to be an alleged six-degree holding woo-woo.
AO said:
What are your “science” credentials, Silas? Any REAL math in your background? Or are you just “acting” like a scientist, pretending you have any credibility yourself? (Imitation of TV courtroom drama applied to a dialogue? Who's REALLY using “idiot logic” here?).
And an impertinent one at that.
Contrary to what you've said:
- science can demonstrate the existance of emotions in humans as well as other animals;
- your "love" argument to support the paranormal was, indeed, a strawman;
- while this is a "thread on the unusual," it resides in the Psuedoscience sub-forum of a science board and this is where we discuss the negative aspects of pseudoscience and occasionally expose it;
- your anecdote about the funeral was just as likely to be an embellishment of memory than an accurate account;
- even if it was an accurate account, Silas' point of the sheer number of significant events (such as funerals) that occur daily implies that some will be associated with other significant events through coincidence;
- science understands the human heart to the extent that it can be replaced with an artificial duplicate.
Coincidence, however, is what creates the illusion of something
paranormal. For poeple who have "six degrees," yada yada..., the question then becomes: why would someone with that education continue to believe in the paranormal, etc?
The answer: people in that category now find themselves skilled at defending beliefs they've held since when they were ignorant.