Is love real?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Of course love is real. It may be equal parts physical attraction, infatuation, obsession, and so on, but the agglomeration of all these things is love.

Heinlein once defined love as the state of emotion that exists when another person’s happiness is essential to your own (the inversion of this statement is pretty strong evidence that it’s true). I’m in this state.

Boru

Well that's just it.  Is it nothing more than an agglomeration of things?

Philosophers and psychologists talk about "folk psychology," which is a sort of informal theory about how the mind works, and that "model" of how the mind works is populated by things like beliefs, and drives, and emotions, which themselves don't point to actual things in the mind so much as they provide convenient handles for explaining why we have the mental experiences that we do.  In a similar way to how Vulcan's video explored whether chairs as objects exist, or whether it might be more objective and real to say that chairs are just independent particles "arranged chair-wise," isn't it also possible that the idea of love is more a hook for explaining what we feel and do and experience than an actual thing?  That love is more realistically viewed as unrelated emotions, behaviors, and experiences arranged "love-wise?"

There are times I think the Jane's Addiction song, "Jane Says" must be about me.  Jane says, "I ain't never been in love.  I don't know what it is.  I only know if someone wants me.  I only know they want me."  Infatuation and the loss we feel when someone is not around get roped into being a part of love, but if you unbundle the things, and remove everything that is simply "roped into being love," then what exactly is left?





(I'm also reminded of the song "Round Here" for reasons which have momentarily eluded me.  Perhaps it's the lines, "Then she looks up at the building  / Says she's thinking of jumping / She says she's tired of life / She must be tired of something" -- in the same way that being tired of life is just a hook for being tired about some specific thing in life, perhaps love plays an analogous role, a hook for groups of things, feelings, experiences, that we simply want to seek or shun, "as a group."

So what if it’s an agglomeration of things? Chocolate cake is an agglomeration of things, that doesn’t make it any less real.

Boru