The Super-Meaning of Romantic Relationships

[Faith No More]

I've studied a fair amount of evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and all the related stuff.  The more I learn about life, the less I believe that the people pushing these theories have anything of scientific value to tell us. Here are my four reasons:

1) Most of this "knowledge" comes with a heavy dose of confirmation bias, so they highlight the observations that match their theory's predictions and ignore observations that don't fit their theoretical framework.

Source?

2) Neuroscientists have failed to solve the "hard problem of consciousness" which is how a set of neurotransmitters and electrical signals translates to the subjective first-person experience of consciousness.  Talking about "neurotransmitters" gives me exactly zero useful information about what romantic love feels like, or about how to stop being attracted to women who treat me badly.

Not understanding the hard problem of consciousness =/= all information we have is useless.  You may as well say that since we haven't reconciled quantum mechanics and relativity that none of the information we have is useful.  

3) All of this knowledge about evolution and brain function has failed miserably at helping us solve the basic problems of the human condition, such as war, poverty, divorce, suffering, etc.  

So what?  You do realize that neuroscience is an extremely young science, right?  We're only just now being able to develop the technology to determine the inner-workings of the brain.  The brain is extremely complex, and expecting us to have solved such complex problems because we've just begun to pull back the first layers of the onion is extremely unrealistic.

4) The power of a scientific theory lies not it its ability to explain the past, but in its ability to predict the future.  Evolution in particular can give us detailed explanations about what's happened in the past, but can't tell us anything about what's going to happen next.   This is one of the reasons I like physics: it has the best predictive power of any scientific discipline.  

Again, so what?  You're essentially dismissing neuroscience because it's not like physics.  Of course it's not.  Modern physics has been around since the time of Newton.  You may as well just say you're not going to eat oranges because they're not apples.

I guess my real frustration with neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is that it never helped me to solve any of my personal problems, or most of the problems of the people around me.  

How could it when you're so easily dismissed it?

That really doesn't have much to do with the meaning of romantic relationships.  Unless neuroscientists are able to identify a neurotransmitter that moderates a person's sense of meaning in life.

Nonsense.  We know for a fact that the brain works on a reward based system.  When we do something that is pleasing to us, neurotransmitters are released that stimulate certain neurons.  That stimulation causes those neurons to "crave" that neurotransmitter, and that is what causes us to desire to repeat an action.  The fact that we feel the need return to romantic relationships after they're gone show that they are indeed a release of neurotransmitters.  So, the meaning behind those relationships is actually that your neurons are wanting chemicals.