(January 17, 2014 at 10:47 pm)rasetsu Wrote:
I think the question of what is love shows the failing of traditional metaphysics of mind. It's likely that love is simply a name we give to a group of only weakly related cognitive processes or states that share one or more of the affective or emotional qualities which are associated with prototypical examples of it, falling in love, being in love, loving one's children. There are similar feelings associated with each, and conventional folk psychology suggests that if the feelings are similar, the underlying cause must be one and the same. But there's no reason to suppose this, aside from some loose principle of similars. When we feel pain from losing a loved one, or from bone cancer, or from getting hit by someone, we recognize that while these experiences can provoke similar experiences and affects, because we clearly see that the origin of each is different, we don't consider them to have one, same, unique underlying cause. Not so with love, because many of the causes are below our conscious perception of them, in hormones or psychological drives which we only become aware of, abstractly, by studying the science of the processes involved. The arc of a love affair from first sight to old age is governed at different stages by different complexes of hormones in the blood, and different changes occurring in the brain. But the person experiencing these changes only sees one subtly and sometimes confusingly shifting set of constellary emotions. He or she wants to attribute this melange of seemingly related feelings as reflecting a similar underlying cause and call it love. The same with the process of having children. It's known, for example, that chemicals released by the head of a newborn, when they come into contact with a male holding the infant, result in cognitive changes that incline the man to being more favorable to having children. Is the male so affected aware of the origins of his newly found baby lust? No, of course not, so he attributes it to emotional constructs called "a desire" [to have children]. He may even develop an elaborate narrative to explain his feelings. Have none of it. It was just chemicals acting on the brain. And so it goes. Nature through evolution has woven a patchwork quilt of emotional states and drives which we identify as one thing, this blanket concept we call love. It's a good illusion, that it's one, underlying, noble thing inside you, but it's really just a huge set of minor adaptations, all working together so that your actions are more likely to result in sex, reproduction, and successful parenting. The patchwork is the reality. The idea of a unified emotion or drive is not.
Interesting. Definitely puts a lot of things into perspective for me.
