Theory of love

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coberst

Kram3r
The math of it all definitely seems right. I'd say at least, on a basic level, I agree with the statement, probably even more so than that.

DigiMark007
Your description of love is needlessly wordy, shifts into tangents that aren't necessary (still can't see how you justify the link between Plato and evolution), and is obviously trying too hard to sound scientific. You also don't draw any sort of link between your animal observations and Plato's definition that love is a struggle for truth, despite saying that you "find verification" of it on the Discovery Channel.

Love is a by-product of evolutionary forces that influence us toward procreation.

There. One sentence, and I'm fairly sure it covers most of your topic. It's not really a new insight either.

Mindship
"Plato judged that the basis of love is centered upon the mutual struggle for truth."

Basically, everything in the OP could've been reduced to this wonderfully worded statement. And Plato was not alone. In the perennial philosophy and esoteric traditions, Truth = Oneness, and in Oneness is the greatest love.

DigiMark007
Originally posted by Mindship
"Plato judged that the basis of love is centered upon the mutual struggle for truth."

Basically, everything in the OP could've been reduced to this wonderfully worded statement. And Plato was not alone. In the perennial philosophy and esoteric traditions, Truth = Oneness, and in Oneness is the greatest love.

Sounds almost Taoist.

But yeah, he wasn't alone within esoteric tradition. Various myths from nearly any age are very unifying at their core.

leonheartmm
no1 will ever understand the deapths of love. hard as you might try, be it plato or be it god.

coberst
I suspect that the instinctive feeling caused by love is displayed in our self love that is also our survival instinct. We call it the survival instinct but it is probably the love instinct as focused upon the self.

Without the guidance of the parent the young cannot survive. As I watch these shows of animals in the wild on the Discovery Channel it seems so clear to me that this is the origin of the instinct we call love.

Truth for a lion cub is what is the correct manner to deal with a snake, or an elephant, or etc. All of which the cub learns from the mother.

Love is an instinct without which mammals would not have survived.

We have all kinds of ways to use the word love. If we remove all the contingencies we will find that in all cases the essence of love is an emotion, i.e. an instinct.

I love chocolate, I love mom, and I love April in Paris. Love is an instinct and love is an abstract idea. Remove all the contingencies and you are left with the emotion we call love. That feeling resulting from the emotion is really what we are speaking of. We attach that feeling to many things. Just as we attach fear to many things and these emotions help the species to survive.

We assign the same word to many things. I suspect that in many cases we are assigning the improper word. When I say I love cookies I suspect we are using the wrong word. However there is a feeling that results from emotion, which is an instinct, and that feeling like the feeling of fear can save or life. Without such an instinct the species could never have survived.

DigiMark007
You're trying to turn hard science into fanciful wordplay. The affection show on your Discovery Channel programs does indeed have a set reason for it, but it's based in evolution and natural selection.

We are organisms that were built by genetic instruction, and it is those genes who (unconsciously of course) are struggling to survive. The genes whose programming is best suited to the environment will do well, because their instructions will help the organism survive and it will reach the next generation, where the gene will give similar or identical instructions. In this light, it is easy to see how the "affection for children" gene (or gene cluster) survived so well in most species. If a parent shows affection to their child, usually in the form of care and protection, the child is more likely to survive. And that surviving child will carry the same genes to care for its children, and so on.

The onset of consciousness in evolution has caused us to find alternative reasons for such love. It is a beautiful phenomenon, and altruism can have myriad benefits for us as people. We need not feel obligated to be slaves to our genetic code, since we are aware of their processes and thus able to refute and counter them...and so there is opportunity to see affection as something fulfilling. But to speak of love and affection as an abstraction, rather than acknowledging their actual origins, causes, and reasoning, is a dangerous mixture of actual science with complete nonsense.

Phrases like this:
Remove all the contingencies and you are left with the emotion we call love. That feeling resulting from the emotion is really what we are speaking of. We attach that feeling to many things.
...are pseudo-scientific chicken scratch. So it's an abstract concept? An emotion? Various contingencies? It's a convenient label we apply to a large number of related-but-not-identical neural reactions that cause us to feel desire or affection toward something, most of which are traceable to evolutionary forces like those I described earlier. To try to reduce it to some all-encompassing unifying force that transcends ourselves, or even to speak of it in abstract terms rather than the facts about what it really is, muddies the truth. It may be great for Victorian England or a fiction writer, but for our purposes it is needlessly vague.

leonheartmm
^go easy on the guy. i think its just his current interest in freud and EROS vs THANATOS thingie which is guiding his thoughts. nothing really wrong with it, except for being romantic. but then again, this is LOVE your talking about, youd be hard put to bring science to explain most of it. a lot moreso than other things anyhow. thats why i think he is in the right and you mostly in the wrong to give an answer like that in a thread about "love" .

Nod
Love is BS. Thats what it is.

leonheartmm
^ totally untrue.

Nod
Originally posted by leonheartmm
^ totally untrue.

DigiMark007
Originally posted by leonheartmm
^go easy on the guy. i think its just his current interest in freud and EROS vs THANATOS thingie which is guiding his thoughts. nothing really wrong with it, except for being romantic. but then again, this is LOVE your talking about, youd be hard put to bring science to explain most of it. a lot moreso than other things anyhow. thats why i think he is in the right and you mostly in the wrong to give an answer like that in a thread about "love" .

I won't go easy when he's packaging speculation as science. He might be well-intentioned, so I don't mean it as a personal barb, but if I see something that I feel is wrong I point it out. And I fail to see how my evolutionary model doesn't adequately outline the foundation upon which we base the idea of "love."

Bardock42
Well, if you want to talk about love you first have to do so semantically and then you can see (through science) what in nature exists that is in the definition we have of love.

I don't think either of you really did it anywhere near sufficiently. That emotions can be explained through evolution is true, but how is a more important question.

DigiMark007
Originally posted by Bardock42
Well, if you want to talk about love you first have to do so semantically and then you can see (through science) what in nature exists that is in the definition we have of love.

I don't think either of you really did it anywhere near sufficiently. That emotions can be explained through evolution is true, but how is a more important question.

Fair enough. Different approaches. But his methodology was suspect, since he seemed to mix science and abstract philosophy as though they were one and the same.

Perhaps I'm not semantically defining love specifically enough. My intended point was to minimize the scope to the point where it was a coherent approach to the subject. I chose an evolutionary angle because he alluded to it a few times without ever explaining it accurately.

coberst

DigiMark007
It's becoming clear that you're as interested in posting your theories as you are in engaging in discussion. The above post may have merit (or not...I only browsed it) but it's a tangent that pretty much ignores what others have added to the discussion. Theories are good starting points, but if you want to go to the next level, you should attempt a more dialogue-approach to threads, rather than the preachy tone that comes about when you do nothing but quote others material.

leonheartmm
and thats the problem isnt it. you CANT semantically describe love. it will inevitably end up being reductionist. you will only define it from one perspective will describe a COMPONENT or a specific EXPRESSION of love perhaps, but not love in its entirety. that is the thing, you CANT describe love, to even start to explain it with an evoutionary model or otherwise.

DigiMark007
Originally posted by leonheartmm
and thats the problem isnt it. you CANT semantically describe love. it will inevitably end up being reductionist. you will only define it from one perspective will describe a COMPONENT or a specific EXPRESSION of love perhaps, but not love in its entirety. that is the thing, you CANT describe love, to even start to explain it with an evoutionary model or otherwise.

...which seems overly defeatist to me. There's no doubt a finite number of functional definitions and/or perspectives from which to view love. And therefore, a finite and reachable number of analyses.

If you're talking about each individual's interpretation of it, that's different. But like I said, then you get into the idea of subjective reality where anything becomes impossible to accurately quantify....convenient for those who wish to hide behind a "it's indescribable" banner, but not useful for our purposes.

Bardock42
Originally posted by leonheartmm
and thats the problem isnt it. you CANT semantically describe love. it will inevitably end up being reductionist. you will only define it from one perspective will describe a COMPONENT or a specific EXPRESSION of love perhaps, but not love in its entirety. that is the thing, you CANT describe love, to even start to explain it with an evoutionary model or otherwise. I don't think "love" has particularly many problems to be defined.

leonheartmm
it isnt defeatist. it just isnt a compleye picture, im not just talking about interpretive reality. ans i disagree that a finite number of definitions exist. a line has infinite points. but so goes a line segment. just because the line segment is a defined portion which is not part of the wrest of the line doesnt mean it has a finite number of points.

leonheartmm
also, each point among the infinite is so interesting and wonderful on the line segment that that alone is reason enough to keep defining it and moving onto another point, that is why i dont think it is defeatist. however, when even interpretively, you claim to define ALL there is to love from one perspective than, not only will u be leaving out other perspective but inevitably, wont even know all there is to love in that specific perspective, that is what i meant to say.

Callan
Originally posted by leonheartmm
a line has infinite points. but so goes a line segment. just because the line segment is a defined portion which is not part of the wrest of the line doesnt mean it has a finite number of points.
Actually, that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of a line segment. It is defined as a portion of a line delimited by two end points, meaning it has a finite number of points in between.

leonheartmm
^ not true. it is all the points in between two points. a line, any line, finite or infinite in length is made up of an infinite number of points. all line segments have an infinite number of points in them. as does the line they are taken from.

DigiMark007
*agrees with leonheart*

*for a change*

stick out tongue

leonheartmm
^ ahh but you forget, i dont beleive in MATERILISTIC LINES! stick out tongue

Atlantis001
Maybe we should try to define love or emotions without refering to the bio-chemical processes involved with them. The bio-chemical processes have their importance for sustaining life, but maybe we should analyze the emotions as conscious experiences.

leonheartmm
^ true true, that is more important

DigiMark007
Originally posted by leonheartmm
^ true true, that is more important

Which is a value judgement, not a fact.

*back to disagreement wink *

I don't see how you can separate anything from the forces that cause it, without having an incomplete picture. Obviously we aren't conscious of the biological influences when we experience what we term "love," but the two are intrinsically tied to one another. An abstract analysis free from materialism might lead us toward a discussion of consciousness, which would be fine, but would (imo) be further from the truth of love than the admittedly un-romantic, but practical, assessment of love given to us via biology.

We're fortunate that our experience does seem separate from it, though, because we experience life as a conscious and spontaneous process, and can actively rebel against our biological encoding because of our sentience. It makes life fun to live, but doesn't negate the deterministic causes that create such lives.

leonheartmm
the knowledge of biochemical processes will not enhance your ability to love. nor will it add to it. for many people, it will actually make love less significant. and love will continue to exist with or without the knowledge of the chemistry.
if you want to, by all means go into it. but to me, the fealing of love is more significant. and if you look at just the physical part, you will also, inevitably miss out on the most significant concious part of it, which makes love, love.
also, your last statemet is contradictory, a sentience can not actively rebel against deterministic causes, be it biological or more. it is one thing we have not yet reconciled.

Atlantis001
I think we don't need to ignore the biological significance of love, but sometimes we want to understand the emotion itself, like to know why people love or want to be loved, but in a emotional context... rather than for example saying that love is needed for reproduction.

I think analyzing the physical aspect of it is not interesting if we want to understand the emotion itself, but of course it could be interesting for other reasons...

DigiMark007
Originally posted by leonheartmm
the knowledge of biochemical processes will not enhance your ability to love. nor will it add to it. for many people, it will actually make love less significant. and love will continue to exist with or without the knowledge of the chemistry.
if you want to, by all means go into it. but to me, the fealing of love is more significant. and if you look at just the physical part, you will also, inevitably miss out on the most significant concious part of it, which makes love, love.
also, your last statemet is contradictory, a sentience can not actively rebel against deterministic causes, be it biological or more. it is one thing we have not yet reconciled.

Hehe. I should've said rebel against our genetic coding, not determinism...because you're right, it is contradictory.

Anyway, I wasn't talking about knowledge of the physical processes enhancing a person's ability to love. That would be silly. I was using it to explain love, which it does exceedingly well.

And there's more to love than reproduction, even as it applies to evolutionary forces.

leonheartmm
^ true true, but the concious expirience is significant, whether it is biochemicals causing it or whether you are a sentience in a computer. you may be able to explain the chemical processes ASSOCIATED with love, but that is not love in itself. just sumthing which gives rise to love.

and srry, ur right, we can more than choose not to follow our genes at times. infact, when part of our own genes gave us the ability to develop a thinking mind, they inevitably paved the way to non response of the organism to other part of the genes.

and yea, biologically love has more functions than just reproduction, people with loving parents develop better and more functionally, generally than those without love and hence survive better. same with societies, with lotsa love, youll have strong societies with stronger gene pools.

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