Is “love” significant?

[Esquilax]

No Offense taken. I don’t really think it’s a matter of ‘knowing where it happens in the brain,’ so much as it is ‘whether the feeling itself is more meaningful than what produces it.’

I didn’t intend to denigrate your view, actually I find it the most unusual. Being controlled by the chemistry in our brains sounds almost alien; as though it were ‘predetermined’ in a sense?

Well, consciousness and the things that govern it aren't super well understood, and I tend to think of it as an emergent property of chemical processes that's more complex than that description might indicate. But there's a certain type of theist who'll point the finger right at you if you say you don't believe in a soul and say that the only other alternative is "molecules and motion," that if you don't believe in a soul you must therefore believe you're just a collection of atoms, couched in the most dry, simplistic terms possible. It's a false dichotomy, but the demand made of the atheist is that they can't believe in free will and that everything is determined by brain chemicals.

It's not accurate, but that's the canard. Personally, I like the compatibilist view: it may well be that I don't have free will, and my eventual choices are governed by neurochemistry, but in my first person experience it feels like I'm making my own choices, so why should I care?