Love

[Dicecaster]

Gee, even reading "Theory and Practice in Experimental Bacteriology" was more romantic than this topic.

 

If I recall, the point was not to make this about science. Were science, logic, and reason the basis of love, love would not have it's unbelievable effects. Mental signals mean nothing, they can be totally ignored. Pain, heat, cold, pressure, drug addiction, emotion... these are all among the most powerful influences there can be on the mind. Yet each and every one can be completely blocked out. I know from experience four of those can.

 

Love, however, regardless of effort, does not seem resistible. The most powerful chemicals and influence of the brain can be ignored even if they flood you. Yet love is nearly impossible to ignore. Every one of the previous things I've mentioned has been completely overcome with relative easy by many. How, then, could love be almost impossible to ignore?

I never said that love was impossible to ignore, I don't know where you pulled that from (unless you're talking to one of marharth's posts, which I missed). Now, everything in all existence has a cause. This keyboard doesn't type unless some force acts upon it, my fingers in this case. Love is not exempt from this classification. If something has a cause, it can be explained by science, because that's part of what science is. In fact, short sidetrack: science isn't test tubes and electron microscopes, it's figuring out how the world works by observation. If a kid climbs on top of his house and throws a chair off it, and concludes that chairs fall, that's science (not necessarily GOOD science, but science nonetheless). So, there is some way to explain love by science. I don't have a clue what that might be, but it is or will someday be possible. And, finally, there's no reason why love cannot have its unbelievable effects without science, logic, and reason. That is, put rather bluntly, a senseless idea.

[Kuraikiba]

I was referring to no single person. Just all the people who made love a chemical soup.

[marharth]

I never said that love was impossible to ignore, I don't know where you pulled that from (unless you're talking to one of marharth's posts, which I missed). Now, everything in all existence has a cause. This keyboard doesn't type unless some force acts upon it, my fingers in this case. Love is not exempt from this classification. If something has a cause, it can be explained by science, because that's part of what science is. In fact, short sidetrack: science isn't test tubes and electron microscopes, it's figuring out how the world works by observation. If a kid climbs on top of his house and throws a chair off it, and concludes that chairs fall, that's science (not necessarily GOOD science, but science nonetheless). So, there is some way to explain love by science. I don't have a clue what that might be, but it is or will someday be possible. And, finally, there's no reason why love cannot have its unbelievable effects without science, logic, and reason. That is, put rather bluntly, a senseless idea.

I never said love was impossible to ignore either, my argument from the start is that it is scientific.

 

We can explain how flowers form, and how lightning flashes, does that make it any less beautiful?

[Sync182]

I never said love was impossible to ignore either, my argument from the start is that it is scientific.

 

We can explain how flowers form, and how lightning flashes, does that make it any less beautiful?

 

marharth:

 

Today I went to a funeral in support of a close friend, one I've known for about 20 years.

 

The person he buried? His daughter. A little girl who died during childbirth. A girl who never had the chance to live. The casket she was buried in, that I watched him lower into the ground, was not much longer than the average human male is wide. I want you to understand this when I ask the following question:

 

When my friend and his wife were at the gravesite, crying for a child they loved but never got to hold and see grow up, would you be the one to comfort them with scientific formulae and chemical analyses? Or will you accept that sometimes, just sometimes, love is more than a simple concoction of chemicals?

 

We all of us are more than the sum of our parts. That is what makes us human, sentient, conscious...aware.

[marharth]

I never said love was impossible to ignore either, my argument from the start is that it is scientific.

 

We can explain how flowers form, and how lightning flashes, does that make it any less beautiful?

 

marharth:

 

Today I went to a funeral in support of a close friend, one I've known for about 20 years.

 

The person he buried? His daughter. A little girl who died during childbirth. A girl who never had the chance to live. The casket she was buried in, that I watched him lower into the ground, was not much longer than the average human male is wide. I want you to understand this when I ask the following question:

 

When my friend and his wife were at the gravesite, crying for a child they loved but never got to hold and see grow up, would you be the one to comfort them with scientific formulae and chemical analyses? Or will you accept that sometimes, just sometimes, love is more than a simple concoction of chemicals?

 

We all of us are more than the sum of our parts. That is what makes us human, sentient, conscious...aware.

Sorry to hear about that.

 

The thing is we agree on the effects of love, we don't agree on the cause.

 

Maybe I am just being cynical, but I still don't have much reason to believe it won't be explained by science. You explained the effects of love, not the cause. It has a lot of effects, but I still don't think the cause is different from science.

[LadyMilla]

We all of us are more than the sum of our parts. That is what makes us human, sentient, conscious...aware.

 

True. This is one of the wonders we encounter every day. For instance, the computer that I am now using to type this message is also so much more than the sum of its elementary constituents. What is it made of? Circuits that operate on the simple principle that a certain voltage level represents a logical true or the binary value of 1, while the lack of voltage (or a lower voltage level) represents a Boolean false value or a binary 0. And still, the way they are organized permits people to create virtual worlds like Tamriel that you can see and experience, virtual beings you can interact with, or recall your old memories of either the real or those virtual worlds in the form of photos stored as a series of bits. The constituents rise to a higher level and become more than their sum. The musical notes are also unremarkable alone. If you arrange them into a certain sequence you get something wonderful called music. This is the mystery of this existence - how simple things become so much more when they are present in large numbers, and start to interact with each other and with the world outside, either according to their own laws, or according to the rules imposed on them by sentient beings like humans.

 

 

 

[Nintii]

Love is a biological emotion and nothing more.

 

There is no proof that love is anything else.

 

Well well well, my dear Marharth, it would seemeth that thou art single, rise up and walk.....

 

 

Love is not like looking through a single lensed telescope, distant and singular, it's multi-faceted like a diamond and can

be expressed and received in many different ways.

It's dazzeling, bright and colorful and when it is experienced it can cause you to lose sight of that which is dark, deathly and depraved and cause you to live again.

 

To some it is just noticing them and greeting them, to others it is expressed in gifts or a hug and so on and on.

Love is a feeling and an expression when doing something for others.

Love is also expressed in sacrificing one's rights, one's self, one's time and money.

Love is also expressed in the removal of harsh legalism, rules and regulations.

Love is choosing to walk in the opposite spirit to that which breaks, hurts, kills and destroys.

Love is choosing to trust another person with your heart, emotions and very life and build a relationship with them.

Love chooses to be generous and overlook the faults of others.

Love is the desire to benefit others at your own expense because love desires to give.

Love is giving yourself over to the passion of intimacy and physical sensuality with the one you trust.

Love is never empty.

 

Like I said love is a lot of different things to a lot of people.

[Saraane]

Exactly.

 

I think the Greeks had it right - there is brotherly love, romantic love, and unconditional love. Some people are also able to live in love - to care so much about others that they would sacrifice their own safety/health/convenience for them. I don't think love will ever be explained by science. Animals protect and nurture their young but never would they go OUT OF THEIR WAY to help another being.

 

The cases of a dog nursing a cat were simply that the dog was in "nurture mode" and had enough milk to provide for the kitten.

 

I think Humans have more. There are those of us that will secretly go and do some charity - never wanting credit for what they did, not even wanting anyone to know they did it - out of the love in their hearts. In some cases, those acts of Charity saved or changed lives.

 

On 9/11, the firemen that went into the burning Twin Towers knew that if they went in, they wouldn't come out. But they went in and many lost their lives... out of love - to save a perfect stranger at the cost of your own life is love in perfection.

Science will never explain that.

[draconix]

Sorry guys, Marharth's totally right. It seems a lot of people are up in arms about what he's said, and those people probably don't have a firm understanding of what science actually is. It's not a pretentious man in a white lab coat jaded with the world trying to belittle humanity by fitting it into a preconceived notion. That's the opposite of science. Science is observing the results, and trying to discern causes by modifying variables.

 

If love can be observed and tested, then Science can find patterns and better understand it. That's all Science is, an attempt to understand the world around us. It has no preconceived notions. Scientists don't claim to have all the answers to everything, and it's not about knowing everything, it's about knowing what we can.

 

 

Love can be physically explained already to an extent as a series of chemical reactions in the brain in reaction to a series electrical stimuli. After all, your brain is composed entirely of parts, cells and molecules and so on. Of course that doesn't explain much at all, but it's not wrong either, to the best of our knowledge. It's like stating that a computer is explained by an electrical charge running through a series of semiconductors that react differently under certain conditions. It doesn't explain everything, but that does not mean that it cannot be explained. Just because you don't know how the brain (and therefore, love) works, doesn't mean that nobody can learn.

[Nintii]

@ Draconix

 

One dark, dreary and overcast morning in the soulless land of Draconia, a cold and biting wind blows through the pale gray streets, nameless, faceless, coughing,

hacking shriveled up forms that once looked human, shuffle and creep through the thick black shadows.

Stepping as lightly as they can, they carefully avoid the tiny streams of toxic and human waste that flows through nearly all the streets of the evil kingdom.

Then just as suddenly as it appears the sun disappears behind the thick chemical clouds that roll and thunder and now burst open like the putrid rotting guts of

a swollen dead corpse.

And spew their filthy rain of death across the bleak and lifeless landscape.

 

The alarm sounds, warning the wretched denizens to take shelter, for those who are too slow and that means most of them, the rain drops like bullets, burn

and sear their way through their rags, flesh and bone.

The screams of the dying and wounded fill the air as this new strain of deathly rain beats down upon the land.

"If it's not the Thought Police or the experiment tanks, then it's this, I cannot carry on" cries an old man just before he throws himself from his window.

 

Yes indeed, ol' mad king Draconix and his weirdling chief scientist Marharth have indeed been up to no good.

In their crazed scientific search for the heart and soul of mankind their desperate grasp for the intangible has both left them and their people ruined and stunted.

Life as we know it, has no root in this evil kingdom ...

 

Ahem, just some fun ... :biggrin: in the loveless land of Draconia.