Hardcore scientists whether religious or not, beleive they can reduce everything, mental and emotional, into physical means.
XMarksthespot and Regret are big examples of this....while Xmarksthespot will reduce the state of mind we know as "love" to a chemical reaction in the brain caused by physical/visual stimuli, and Regret will reduce dreams, thinking, reasoning, and emotions into simple nueron activity, while also regarding behavior as valid, and thought as invalid....
We know there is much more to it than that.
Everything is not that simple...Regret even went as far as to argue that desire does not really exist..... (?!?!??) He explained desire as a simple pattern of actions caused by a pattern of thought(s), even though we all know the desire can exist without the actions caused by the desire itself.
I am not taking a stab at you guys, I like you both very much. But I feel that many people like yourselves, who have education in scientific studies of biology, physics, and psychology will feel you know all there is to know and that's that...even though your explanations leave much to be questioned.
Also, science was once used to determine that Anglo saxon and other white races were far superior to African and Hispanic races due to comparisons in the sizes of the skull and brains.
Science was also used as a way to discriminate against Homosexuals, by arguing that Homosexuality is a mental disorder (Homosexuality and Bisexuality have been removed from the Psychological Evaluation's list of mental disorders, but the point is at one time it was scientific fact that homosexuals were "sick"😉
Science is not math....science is not an absolute. It is simply our discovery of the nature of things, of our universe and environments, and is constantly changing.
Science textbooks are retconned every single year. Findings are re examined and re explained all the time.
Hypothesis and Theories are either supported further, or proven false. Facts change.
THERE ARE SOME THINGS SCIENCE CANNOT EXPLAIN TO US RIGHT NOW...PERHAPS IN THE FUTURE WE WILL UNDERSTAND EMOTIONS AND OTHER ANOMALIES MORE CLEARLY, BUT AS OF NOW...WE ARE ALL IN THE DARK, AND NONE OF US CAN TRULY CLAIM WE KNOW THE TRUTH
Without delving into nonempirical aspects of emotion, I find it easiest (for the moment) to interpret "the place of emotion" as I might interpret anything else: what is its survival value? There may've once been organisms which, because they did not experience Fear (as an example), did not run away, got eaten and so had less chance to pass on their genes. Or there may've been creatures which did not know Love, thus less communal bonding occurred, translating into a lower survival rate for offspring (again, just an example).
Returning to the nonempirical aspects of emotion...
I see this discussion involving what might be called "subjective (inner) experience" vs "objective" (outer) experience, and I always liked to emphasize the reality differences this way: your mother's actual face as opposed to what you see when you envision your mother's face. Both are real experiences, yet clearly, one can be empirically assessed while the other can not (though one can empirically assess the neurochemical activity of the envisioning process).
Is the subjective experience of your mom's visage "less real" than her actual face? It certainly is a "different kind" of reality, but one can respond just as readily to the subjective experience as the objective one.
(As an aside, Behaviorism doesn't really deny the existence of subjective experience. Its stance is simply that, consideration of subjective experience for understanding behavior is unnecessary, distracting and detrimental to the empirical assessment of behavior).