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Originally Posted by ngdawg
Taking a quote from a doctor I had, 'as much as we know, there is so much more we don't.'
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But that's faulty logic. That's like saying "we only know what 10% of the brain is used for, therefore 90% must be used for x." It's just not true. It's possible, but that we don't know doesn't make it true or even probable.
Consider :
You get ill one afternoon. Maybe you had some bad sushi for lunch, who knows. These things happen. That same afternoon your friend receives bad news. Later, upon talking to your friend and finding out that she received bad news on that afternoon, you remember 'hey, that's right around when I got sick!' Later, in future consideration of the event, you begin to think that maybe it wasn't just in the same afternoon, maybe it was around the same time. Or maybe it was exactly the same time. Then, with even more consideration, the maybe starts to blur. Eventually it disappears and you end up with 'I got sick at the same time that my friend received bad news, so one must follow the other (which is another logical fallacy; two things happening in succession aren't necessarily cause and effect).
Same goes for your daughter. You were 3 miles away in a department store. She choked on a bracelet. While at the department store, you choked. It happens to everyone. Saliva runs down the airway on occasion, or maybe there was something in the air that caused it, who knows. When you get home you find out about the events with your daughter and that they coincide within a few hours and your thought processes follow the same path, until again you're thinking of it as cause and effect.
Looked at another way, what about all the times your daughter choked or scraped her knee or got a bruise or whatever else and you had no idea about it? We're pretty frail creatures, mishaps like that occur on almost a daily basis. There are probably thousands of times that something happened to your daughter that you don't even know about because she or anyone else didn't even think to tell you about it. So whay makes that one event special? Why is it different? Do you see, it is coincidence, but it's also a numbers game. Eventually events are going to coincide. Eventually you're going to decide that you want to talk to a friend at approximately the same time that friend receives bad news. That doesn't mean it's cause and effect.
Judging by pictures I've seen of you, I'm going to guess that you're in your mid to late thirties. So lets put an arbitrary number of thirty years on it. In thirty years (that's over 10 000 days) , you have three specific instances that you remember things coinciding. But unless you're a shut in with no family, odds are that something bad is going to happen to a friend or family member of yours on nearly a daily basis. I know it's not pleasant to think about and it's not necessarily big things, but these things do happen. So looked at from that perspective, if you've got 10 000 instances where nothing registered and 3 where you had a 'connection', how can you look at it as anything but coincidence?
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with coming to that conclusion or faulting those who do. It's human nature, everyone does it and I'm not excluded from that. But at the same time, when you look at it rationally it just doesn't seem likely. I've talked to a lot of people about these sorts of things, including a lot of people who claimed to be empaths. I have yet to meet someone who can give me more than five specific instances within their lifetime of experiencing such empathic situations and when taken in the context of someone's entire life, that isn't really that much.
I mentioned the lie detector thing, because I am a studied empath. I can read people and generally have a good idea of who they are and what they're about, along with whether they're telling the truth or not at any given point. I do it consciously, by looking for the signs I know and using information given to me to draw further conclusions (this technique is called cold reading by the way, in case you're interested).
And again, I'm not totally dismissing the concept because the fact is that nobody knows for certain whether it's possible for a person to have these abilities or not. I'm merely pointing out that there are much more plausible explanations out there and that personally, I'm going to side with those until some evidence comes up that forces me to re-evaluate that position.