Skeptical Thinking Presented by Carl Sagan

[SteveS]

brainshmain - Exactly.  He had an unmatched lucidity on topics like this.  I sure miss him.

Scrybe, a few follow-ups for you.

I'm not saying we need to constantly reevaluate gravity

Eh, I think we better in this case.  Gravity still doesn't jive with quantum mechanics  :?

But again, I see an unnecessary dualism in your point of view. You divide science from experience, and choose to examine a phenomenon from one lens or the other based on which category you feel it should fall into. I am claiming that a thing like love (as we humans experience it) does not exist apart from the physical processes and the existential processes. One without the other renders it as something fundamentally different. We need both lenses to understand it. And we need to know that when we see it through only one, it is an imbalanced image we are seeing.

Let me addressed the "duality".  I don't want to be confused with a dualist, that would blow my rep as an atheist  :wink:  .  I see this more as levels of abstraction.  I'm a software engineer by trade.  I know that when I write code in Java, it is interpreted by a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and runs as machine code local to my platform.  But, when discussing how my programs work, I use a high-level abstraction in terms of software objects, methods, and interfaces.  It's really machine code underneath it all, but depending on how I want to discuss this topic I use a different abstraction level.  That's all I meant.

Summary: The science explains how my experience functions, the poetry conveys my experience to others.  I hope this makes some sense.