Info Archive



[ Donate :    Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund    Save The Rhino ] 


<Prev Next>
Subject: Re: Further thoughts and responses ( 41 of 52 )
Posted by Si

Arbiter,

Sorry, I don't mean to pick on you, but I still don't think we understand each other.

I am talking about love for a parent or sibling or child. That's a different thing altogether, I
hope you'll agree. That's the kind of love that survives in the same unassailable way that faith
does - without proof or evidence. Just by conviction.

But, as I think I posted before, the parent/child bond is indeed the same kind of thing, just manifested differently. There will be physical changes in brain activity when processing "my child" information that modulate an organism's (human or otherwise) behaviour. 'Love' is just a label for those physiological responses.

I think your original point was that Love is analogous to God in that the presence of both is unprovable. I disagree because love is just a name for a particular collection, or set of collections, of biological "stuff", whereas God is not. What's the betting that if you connect a parent to a brain activity imaging machine (I don't know what they're called) and show them two pictures, one of their own child and one of a different child, you will get dramatically different and repeatable patterns of activity? Physical. Measurable. Demonstrable.

Perhaps what you meant was all the romantic baggage we've attached to love over the last few millenia. Maybe that's analogous to God. I don't know, it could be. Either way, it doesn't matter because you're nolonger talking about what love *is*.
<Prev Next>

[ Back to thread list ]



 


(c) 2001