Love is biological bribery?
nautil.us
nautil.us
Love comes in many shapes. Love for one's family, one's nation, one's profession, even God. It's at best uninformative, at worst nonsensical to try to reduce all of this to interaction found in sexual interaction / reproduction. It's a common thing with these evo-psych explanations. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The more scientific sounding version of thinking every skyscraper represents a phallus.
I doubt this even makes sense across cultural boundaries. For example the fact that oxytocin is apparently indicative of how long a relationsihp lasts. In a Western culture where people nowadays are prone to form relationships spontaneously, sure. In a culture where parents organize relationships based on class, caste or faith? Probably not.
Do the biochemical aspects of love matter that much? When it is no longer functional, sure.
Besides, all pleasurable feelings/sensations are "bribes".
Really funny how we make separations about male vs female dating strategy, and they are right to a great degree, but both men and women share a lot of DNA, I don't know if there are many male specific genes.
Sure, all animals are the same and just a few different hormones make a huge difference (male vs female gorilla?) but not to that extent in humans.
Men can be manipulated too when they fall inlove, I wish the article talked about that.
Hormones, neurotransmitters, all make a big difference, sure.
But humans do not show such a pronounced dimorphism and human minds are extremely complex things, surely the brains/minds of male/female share a lot more than they differ on average.
There are outliers -- like a man pumped with testosterone, a leader's brain flooded with dopamine, an adrenaline junkie, a nymphomaniac and so on, but these are outliers.
My problem is people who take the "men produce billions and billions of sperm and women ovulate once a month, therefore men and women are completely different" -- that's a tendency sure, and there are differences and different drives, but not to the extent people interpret them to be.
Do you have any meaningful data that backs those claims up? I mean, first of all - "not to the extent people interpret them to be" - which people, more precisely, and what's that extent? And secondly, how do you know that it's not to that extent?
Don't want to be pedantic here, but we could be rambling on about how "people say this, but it's actually like that" all day long - show me the numbers, how they were obtained, and your interpretation of them and we can discuss, something like [1], hopefully.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
You can get very large differences in computer systems just by flipping one single bit.
Anecdata is not the opposite of anecdata.
But this is all conjecture, if we seek to understand reality instead of just what we imagine, then we need to empirically measure reality.
> It's a common thing with these evo-psych explanations. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If everything in reality is made from nails, then it makes sense to look for the hammer that hammered it in. Everything in human psychology was in fact molded through evolution, so of course it makes sense to look to evolution for potential answers.
> For example the fact that oxytocin is apparently indicative of how long a relationsihp lasts.
If a culture artificially forces relationships to last by, say, heavily stigmatizing divorce, then of course that's going to override the "natural" course of events. That hardly means there isn't useful information to be gleaned from our biological nature in situations where such artificial forces are not in force. (Or you could argue, where different artificial forces are in force.)
What is the question and what are the possible answers? What difference would it make in our morals?
That sounds like the reverse of the good old "Well, if God does not exist, why don't you just kill random people, then?"
Anger and violence and rape and murder, are all bilogical and evolutionary based. So what?
> "If a culture artificially forces relationships to last by, say, heavily stigmatizing divorce, then of course that's going to override the "natural" course of events.
See the above argument, it changes nothing. And by the way, divorce is more normalized than ever and divorce rates are falling in the developed world.
On the countrary, if lustful love is just a chemical process that eventually wears off, you're better off not divorcing. If love was this astral magestic thing, then sure, divorce and pursue it.
People have this idea "yeah, but back then, there was no marriage and both men and women could just fuck arround".
Sure, some people did just like today, but back then, we lived in small groups, a coule hundred individuals, the opportunities to fuck around were not as great as today and there was no anonymity as today.
I've been 20 pumped with testosterone. Was it not for my religious education and moral sense, I would probably have slept with a lot more women. Between age 20-35 I think I only cried 3 times, when my grandparents died.
As my testosterone levels are declining, my emotions are coming back.
I'm still the same biological organism, evolution did not intend one course or the other. I just find a lot of satisfaction now from family life.
There is no contradiction or dilema for me. I do not feel oppressed by society or morals or biology.
I think people are dealing with the issue on the other end, by just not getting married in the first place.
Who said anything about morals here? The questions are, why do we feel the way we do, and why do our feelings make us act the way we do? Evo-psych gives some ways of possibly answering that. How we got here is largely independent of where we want to go from here.
> There is no contradiction or dilema for me. I do not feel oppressed by society or morals or biology.
I honestly don't know what the rest of your comment has anything to do with any of what the article is talking about. When did the article bring up any contradictions?
1) people jump between partners too often when free, it's easier but maybe less deep
2) family stability is important, and noble (it's a hard compromise but others complicated things are important and noble)
3) in the past social, family and intimate stability were probably a lot more important than today, so we inherited that perspective, even though today we may care less
ps: saying this I understand perfectly how human relationship, marriage are complex, volatile and how no one wants to rot in a bad relationship. :)
Many past societies did not have atomic families like we do today.
In fact, even couple-marriage is not _that_ old (several thousands of years)? I remember reading about this stuff in "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", which, while somewhat dated (125 years ago or so?) is quite interesting. Matrilineal societies, group marriage (i.e. being 'married' to all people in a certain category so that if you travel to another village you have people in your 'family' or 'marriage group' there even if you've never met them) and other arrangements.
Cities and written language and written laws and such are not that old either...
What was the case in some earlier societies shouldn't be a yardstick...
Also some people say that a lot of animals have similar emotional/biological needs. It's not just a matter of homo-* history it seems.
I would assume you were brought up in a modern cultural environment. That means your view of the world, your values, your expectations, your fantasies - are shaped by that upbringing.
So, your feelings are not good evidence that this is "programmed deep down inside of us".
That seems a … bizarre opinion. Until industrialization, human relationships were directly tied to survival.
And, in fact you're making the point even more strongly, in that you seem to identify lifelong, formal, monogamous pairing with the potential for human companionship.
By Fredrick Engles, known most popularly when associated with his co-author Karl Marx. Who among their many philisophical ideas advocated things such as
- "All history is class warfare"
- Dialectical materialism that proved to be so wrong no one even knows about it anymore.
- Or my personal favorite that the communist revolution would come first to the most capitalist countries, when in fact the only countries that fell to communism were backward feudal societies or those that had communism forced on them by the Soviet Union.
My point if your source of information is Engles then I'd suggest checking out some resources from people haven't been quite so thoroughly eviscerated by actual reality when their ideas were put to any sort of test.
There's a difference between "no one wants to rot in a bad relationship" and "no one wants to put the effort and time to make a relationship work", though.
And while a number of divorces are because of the first, another number is because of the latter.
Now, a question would be "So? Why shouldn't people just jump ship, even if they're just frivolous/bored/have short relationship attention spans/etc?"
And an answer would be, "Well, look at our modern relationship landscape. Does these trends work out well for us? Is yes, then fine..."
This is a very timely question. There are a few topics about how easy our lives should be, how much effort is considered normal. And beyond efforts, the skills to know when, what and how to apply them to avoid just struggling 24/7.
And shockingly, depression and anxiety is on the rise, we have a "loneliness epidemic", etc because people can't seem to fill that void.
I'm nobody but it seems that survival made most mammals social, but we don't owe our survival to the group now, but to a blurry and large system. So why bother with people when I can swipe for all my needs /s
But the thing is, as an ex introvert I can understand, dealing with people is not easy. Just like dealing with love, intimacy, marriage, existence is not easy. But we used to try to find solutions of better quality. Not just "i'm out".
I am not sure, if I understand you right, but you seem to romantize the old version of marriage relationships.
Well, as far as I know, they had only very rarely something to do with love, but rather with violence and domination and "making the relationship work" meant beating the wife to submission. And one of the written duties of a wife were sex, whether they wanted, or not, so basically rape.
And the thought of leaving an abusive partner was considered sin, with real punishment (sometimes torture to death) for making those thoughts real.
It has not been even so long ago, that these laws were abolished in the west. And to my knowledge, they still exist de facto (or even de jure) in many parts of the world.
The only reason I can think of, of "making a relationship work", is when there are already kids, who need stability. Then both adults should get their act together and work it out like responsible, mature people. But in the cases I have witnessed, the children usually were acting more mature, than their parents.
All relationships require upkeep. If you never make any time for a friend, the friendship deteriorates. You need to make time for each other and show each other that you care.
The fact that you see this as abusive is perhaps revealing why marriage and lasting relationships are at an all time low.
I disagree with the sense that evolution has answers to begin with, or that everything in human psychology can be assumed to be touched by evolution. Sometimes weird shit happens and it doesn't prevent you from fucking so it sticks and there's no greater purpose to it.
I feel this understanding of evolution ascribes too much anthropomorphism to the phenomenon.
That's how you end up with random maladaptive mutations. But they aren't distributed across a species.
You don't end up with near universal traits in a species without them being molded by evolutionary pressures.
Those are cases of institutions hijacking the mechanism of love.
Love is not a nearly universal human experience. Love is a whole lot of concepts and emotions and experiences that are highly dependent on the cultural context.
That's one of the points of the article.
And is that wrong? Of course we're reducible down to biological impulses in the end. Part of understanding higher level cultural phenomena is understanding our biological interactions, how they were historically shaped by our evolutionary past, and how those adaptations affect us in a drastically different modern context.
Certainly sounds a lot more scientific than, say, dismissing all the research as "biological reductionism."
The article would be fine if it recognized that it was speaking in trends and generalities. But the information is presented as universal and individually applicable. For example:
> But a lot of women, in particular, find it hard to accept that they are still looking for a protector and a provider.
No doubt women find it hard to accept someone lecturing them on their preferences without allowing them any individuality.
The idea that searching for a protector is adaptive seems reasonable enough. The fallacy is thinking it must therefore apply unconditionally to every individual person and culture. Individual behavior does not always adhere to what is adaptive and there is no reason to think there aren't other adaptations that may interact with, override or invert this "provider seeking" behavior on an individual basis.
The diverse spectrum of human sexuality and romantic disposition is completely at odds with the simplistic view presented in the article. The system is too complex to understand in a few generalities.
> Part of understanding higher level cultural phenomena is understanding our biological interactions
I think It's more often part of an anti-understanding of higher level cultural phenomenon. My observation is that people who strongly believe in reducing love to chemicals or atoms are intellectualizing an area of their life where they do not feel capable, confident or in control. These beliefs then inhibit personal growth and an understanding of others. In the last couple of decades I have seen dozens of men and a handful of women grow out of reductionist beliefs.
I agree. I assume that's just the journalist doing a bad job of getting the nuance across.
> No doubt women find it hard to accept someone lecturing them on their preferences without allowing them any individuality.
At the same time, we humans are notorious for rationalizing nice sounding, preferable reasons for why we engage in certain actions. I don't have the context on these personal discussions, of course, but perhaps those women were indeed acting in ways that were more congruent than not with the evo-psych explanation espoused here.
> The diverse spectrum of human sexuality and romantic disposition is completely at odds with the simplistic view presented in the article. The system is too complex to understand in a few generalities.
I agree with the complexity. Again, I assume that much of it is just the usual pop-science article being a pop-science article. Perhaps I assume wrongly.
I do think however that overall, this is a research direction worth pursuing. There's a diverse spectrum of human sexuality and romantic dispositions, but what are some of the common driving forces in the background across time and culture? Why are some romantic experiences (e.g. an unreasonable crush on a specific person that fades over time) so common in the general population, and why do these experiences happen and play out in these common ways?
> I think It's more often part of an anti-understanding of higher level cultural phenomenon.
Quite possible, but IMO we shouldn't let popular misunderstandings of science detract from the actual scientific inquiry taking place. A lot of woo spiritualists have repurposed popular misconceptions of quantum mechanics for their own ends, but that doesn't detract from the legitimacy of actual quantum physicists.
The idea that articles like this are science is a popular misunderstanding of science. The article is not a scientific work. It's a pop science piece where an individual scientist promotes her personal philosophies on love to a public audience. Her beliefs may integrate individual scientific facts but that does not make them scientific in themselves.
> Why are some romantic experiences (e.g. an unreasonable crush on a specific person that fades over time) so common in the general population, and why do these experiences happen and play out in these common ways?
Let's say you're feeling anxious before an important exam. Someone notices your anxiety and asks you why you're feeling that way. So you provide a detailed explanation of the neurochemical signalling cascade involved in an acute anxiety response and say that is why you are feeling anxious. Does this answer the question? In a very literal way it does. But it's a useless and incomplete answer. "I'm feeling anxious because I have an important exam coming up" is in many senses more useful and accurate.
Our biology is shaped and acted on by our environment which includes many psychosocial factors. Culture and individual experience are biopsychosocial. Biology is to human behavior what electromagnetism is to computing. You can't build an understanding by considering only the lowest level details.
I never said it was. I said it was pop science — in other words, a highly mangled portrayal of scientific work, made fit for public consumption.
> It's a pop science piece where an individual scientist promotes her personal philosophies on love to a public audience. Her beliefs may integrate individual scientific facts but that does not make them scientific in themselves.
She’s promoting the theory that she believes best fits the data. Assuming she’s not one of those scientists who fakes her data, that is very much a part of regular scientific discourse. Her theory may very well be wrong, but that doesn’t mean she’s not being scientific.
Again, I am assuming that the claims she’s making are backed by actual data that she’s reviewed. Have you reviewed her work and found that this is not in fact the case? If so, I’ll cede that to you.
> You can't build an understanding by considering only the lowest level details.
No, but abstractions are leaky. You can’t build a full understanding without ignoring the lower level details either, which is what she certainly seems to be doing.
As an example,
> "I'm feeling anxious because I have an important exam coming up" is in many senses more useful and accurate.
If someone notices that you’re always anxious, this is likely just your brain rationalizing the exam being the main or most important cause of your anxiety. On its own, it’s a perfectly plausible explanation. But in reality, how good of a predictor is the presence of an exam for your mental state?
How good of a predictor for mating preferences is this evo-psych theory? I’m sure the women the author mentioned here have a unique reason for every man they passed on, but were those men by and large bad protectors and low earners? If so, those unique reasons for rejection sound more like post-hoc rationalizations than “real” reasons, and the cause of such biases deserve to be looked into further to ascertain the magnitude of biological or cultural influences.
Unfortunately, as we both note, it’s a pop sci article that doesn’t contain that much information about the methodology or the results. I’m just saying, just as I can’t draw strong conclusions that it’s true based on this article itself, I don’t believe you can draw strong conclusions that it’s bunk and “not science,” either.
Understanding doesn't have to lead to disenchantment. Getting yourself into the frame of mind where you feel the wonder of things is worthwhile for topics like this, science and religion.
Disenchantment is a choice and it comes from saying "X is `just' Y." We don't have to minimize things when people point out their aspects.
Airplanes are relatively straightforward machines. Computers just do trivial math and logic very fast. Listening to Bach in a cathedral is just hearing metal tubes vibrating air in an artificial cave.
But if you've never stopped and wondered that you're "partaking in the miracle of human flight"[1] or that the block of metal and sand in your desk lets you see loved ones across time and space, or that countless people worked for ages so you could experience the music and art in that building, well you're missing out.
Humans are lucky that we experience both understanding and awe.
[1] https://youtu.be/b3dYS7PcAG4 (CW:LCK)
And whenever somebody talks about something useful they discovered using word love, arguments like yours crop up.
And indeed, they are right. Love is biological bribery. Science has proven that love is a mix of chemistry and emotions. (Or emotions caused by chemistry) that waxes and wanes and goes away over time. And the main reason for it is the perpetuation of the species by a mechanism that is outside of our consciousness and reason.
When love is gone, what is generally left is (sometimes hopefully) a caring, appreciation, and high regard for the object of "love".
And this is exactly why modern divorce rates are so high.
Because marriages were always meant to be a coming together for reasons of survival, children, sharing of responsibilities and a series of common missions.
Instead we have ruined the institution by making the main reason for it to be "love".
So when the love inevitably wanes -- as it naturally does, if the couple has nothing else left (children, shared goals, common missions), why stay together?
And yes, some people might say they have been in love for decades. Which is great! But it rarely happens. Generally love waxes and wanes. Rises and falls. Comes and goes. And those same couples that have been in love for decades will tell you all of the downswings and upswings over the years.
I wish more people knew and understood this. A lot of heartache could be saved. Then again, the world would not be so interesting. Sigh.
Seems to me it’s necessity has just waned over time, being single has become a lot more viable in our societies and the system is pretty much working as it’s supposed to.
You aren't reading what GP has written so maybe you'll read it if I quote it without the context. GP wrote: "Instead we have ruined the institution by making the main reason for it to be 'love'.".
So the answer to your question would be, it isn't. The institution of marriage isn't ruined, in GPs view, by the act of divorce when love is gone and there are no other reasons to say together but when entering in to marriage when no other reason besides love exists.
Marrying and divorcing based on love alone, with nothing else at stake doesn’t look to me like a bad thing. If it wasn’t for that, half of the people wouldn’t be marrying I think, and as an institution it would be in a way worse shape.
Perhaps GP isn’t embracing divorcing as a sane rational decision, and that would be the “ruined” part, on which we would diverge.
This is just the difference of opinion OP is making; they see marriage as having the functional purpose of dedicating one's life to the other person, sharing responsibilities and goals with them (and taxes), ie. the development of platonic love; this is required if the couple doesn't want to divorce when/if that eros / romantic love dies out.
In reality, nobody likes going through a divorce, so if they do marry without being ready to commit to shared goals like this, they're hoping that eros love never dies out, which I bet doesn't happen often.
You only need to look at the way some old people act around their spouse to see that there is nothing inevitable about that.
> Science has proven that love is a mix of chemistry and emotions. (Or emotions caused by chemistry) that waxes and wanes and goes away over time.
> And yes, some people might say they have been in love for decades. Which is great! But it rarely happens. Generally love waxes and wanes. Rises and falls. Comes and goes. And those same couples that have been in love for decades will tell you all of the downswings and upswings over the years.
I understand what someone means when they say something wanes. They means it wanes; it fades over time. If they meant to say it both waxes and wanes they'd have said that instead.
> what is generally left is (sometimes hopefully) a caring, appreciation, and high regard for the object of "love".
You still value the shared responsibility you have for your partner high enough that you have developed platonic love to a certain degree, ie. you can't imagine finding someone else to build up the same amount of caring/appreciation/shared life experiences with, even if the romantic love between the couple is at a low point. Even if one partner grows attracted to another person, that is only the romantic / eros love that brought the initial couple together, while that platonic love still exists and would take a lot longer to build up with the new romantic partner, should they choose to give up all the progress they've already made and re-marry.
At the end of the day we are biological machinery.
It’s all so strangely religious-sounding. :)
This is why I don't think the Black Mirror promise of "uploading" your brain is that simple. Without hormones, you will be a husk of your former self.
When did that happen?
As I understand it we've got to the point of understanding some of the chemical signals our bodies use to reflect the idea we called love, and that's about as far as it is reasonable to take that notion. Taking it further is unscientific.
We don't even remotely understand our own bodies' signalling processes so I'm not sure how we reached the conclusion that love is solved.
Love is quite boring, hardly the most stimulating thing in a relationship, almost the dullest thing because it’s the force that keeps you together through the pits. The feeling of emotional security, someone to care for / be cared for by. The reason it takes a longer time to fall in love than wanting to bang is because you need the previous qualities to appear, peak and then wither to notice it.
Old people aren’t all going at it like knives, familial love is pretty mundane, even the love people have for pets is not very exciting. But that is the essence, the ecstasy of divine tedium.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love
For Aristotle (Rhet. ii, 4) and Aquinas (STh I-II,26 4), to love is to "will the good of the other"; it is an act of 'reason' rather than emotion. That is how one can "love one's enemy": it's not necessarily that we find pleasure from them, but rather we desire that they (e.g.) reform their ways.
That said, I find it interesting that there is no mention of the phenomenon of same-sex romance. This exception alone would seem to fly in the face of the notion that romantic love can be conceptually-modeled as a mere epiphenomenon of genetic sovereignty and autonomy. I guess the counter would be that this lies outside the boundaries of ordinary romantic love and therefore should be taxonomically-distinct?
Who knows. These gene-centered theories of evolution require quite a bit of ad hoc rationalization, speculation and routine defiance of folk phenomenology.
Biologically romantic love between same sex partners is more or less equivalent to love with an infertile partner. Such love doesn't have to mean that there has been evolutionary pressure for such feelings to those particular partners. It could just mean that there has been strong evolutionary pressure to support the feeling of love, but the genetic mechanisms for identifying a fertile partner of the complimentary sex is imperfect. If it works often enough that sufficient babies are produced those false positives are tolerable.
This can be thought of as similar to disease resistance. When someone young dies from a disease it isn't evidence that we are evolved to die from the disease, just that our biology has limitations.
Of course we can't rule out that homosexual and other infertile relationships have evolutionary advantages. See e.g. John Maynard Smith's "sneaky fuckers strategy".
I am uncertain as to the intention of the adjective "biologically" is in this sentence, but it seems to me that to maintain the above thesis consistently in the face of counter-evidence you would have to reduce vast portions of the conscious decision-making matrix to the epiphenomena of a genetic teleology. Infertility is typically not an acknowledged fact prior to romantic engagement, while same-sex attracted persons go to great lengths to hide their romantic pursuits from others. Unless we are assuming a highly-restrictive helpless spectator theory of consciousness, dismissing the difference between these two sets of phenomena as reducible to some kind widespread of lack of discretion is quite the hypothetical leap.
It seems far more parsimonious and practical to assume either a multi-level or meme/concept-centered model when attempting to explain something as abstract, private and irreplicable as romantic love.
You have put your finger directly on the issue. How could it be possible for sequences of amino acids to influence our emotional reactions to particular classes of stimuli in the real world? Whatever influence there is must come from long and tortuously complex and unreliable chains of causation. Those amino acids cannot simply encode a virility detector in our neural nets. Your skepticism of the connection is quite reasonable.
And yet we keep finding examples of the connection. Like the funny reaction of cats to cucumbers in all of those youtube videos. Something biological and not social makes many cats fear a certain class of shapes. Somehow, that emotional and physical response is genetically encoded. Something similar is at work with romantic love. Like a cat fears a snake-shaped blob, a human is aroused by a mate-shaped blob or smell. That arousal in turn influences our emotions, notoriously blinding us to other inputs.
Our emotions are written on the dirtiest slates imaginable, scribbled on over and over for billions of generations.
That being said, I suspect you're right that evolution is much more constrained than evo-psych explanations give it credit for (though I wonder what a non-gene-centered theory of evolution would look like!). There are only 20,000 genes or so, and most of them are just simple recipes for necessary proteins. Obviously evolution does a lot with a little, but it still strains credibility to suggest that every aspect of human behavior is so well controlled by so few genes.
So love is basically some chemicals causing us to feel lovey. Makes sense...
> That’s what separates us from the animals. Animals don’t use love to manipulate others. We do.
Wait, what? Do none of the animals have the same chemical processes? This is a big red flag to me. Time and time again we have found that when people have said "animals don't X, only humans do" we find that to be wrong.
I stopped reading after this.
I'm not convinced this isn't the exact modus operandi of my cat.
> But a lot of women, in particular, find it hard to accept that they are still looking for a protector and a provider.
Our biology doesn't care what your carefully crafted self-image looks like; in the end male and female are two reproductive strategies that perpetuate the genes.
It would do us good to keep that in mind and not be willfully blind to the biological sources of our behavior.
Who is this guy? I’ve seen a few other links to videos of him flying into outer space on other topics posted on HN recently. I just went and read a bit of his Wikipedia page, so I see he’s a philosopher, but I don’t know what the abstract terms materialism and Hegelian idealism and Lancanian psychoanalysis mean. Is there a less abstract way to understand his position, or important philosophical contributions he’s made that would help me understand him or his ideas on love?
He is interesting and from the little I know he says some useful things, however I suspect you really need to spend some effort to understand his philosophy before you can understand a stand-alone video of him. The “Love is Evil” video on its surface certainly seems just like nonsense to me too.
On a side note, I am pleased though that you find him entertaining to watch regardless. I find it disappointing when people take speakers like Zizek too seriously; I think even if 80% of what is said is not insightful/intelligible, the occasional grain of truth can be very much worth it.
The biological need for sex is rooted in the necessity for reproduction.
> this need is so crucial, the body works to help obtain it similar to food or water.
The body serves the need for reproduction.
Likewise, offspring cannot be a risk to you if you don't exist.
The point of life is to reproduce. The point of life before the moment you reproduce is to not die.
The psychological is biological.
> The point of life is not reproduce,
The point of life is the continuation of life - that means reproduction. It might not be your own reproduction, but the reproduction of your genes. That's what the last 3.5billion years of your own cellular existence has been about.
> In order for life to have a point you have to talk about intent behind life
Life has a point whether you talk about it or not. The point of life is life itself.
Quite a lot of species take this reality to the extreme. They die immediately after reproducing. Or, they generate thousands of offspring of which 99.99% dies within the day.
Humans, like all species ever, are hard-wired to reproduce. Whatever bullshit story you tell yourself on top of that (opting out, or optin in for wanting to maintain a legacy) are mere fabrications of a mind, only possible in recent luxury times in very particular parts of the world.
Some people call this nihilism but I call it freedom. Not only does life other than reproducing have no point, your life is also completely irrelevant at macro level. When you embrace that, you can finally start living.
Plenty of people don't want to have children, most people want sex but even then the goal is primarily pleasure. What I dislike about your reasoning is that it is basically "Sex causes reproduction and people like to have sex, therefore people are hardwired to reproduce" in other words "Action X causes result Y therefore people who have a natural desire to commit action X do it because of result Y" . In reality, the action(sex) has many other effects both beneficial and harmful.
Another reasoning I hate: "If you do action X you will die, therefore not doing it is a biological trait" this presumes humans can't transcend instincts. As far as I know, we are the only creatures that regularly commit suicide. Our ability to reason and evaluate ourselves and the world around us and desire to seek meaning and purpose gives us a Psychological component unique to us. People can litetally die by willing themselves to death (really!), ask any medical doctor and they'll tell you the will to fight and live in a person can help them overcome or be overcomed by disease. In the military theh have a saying:"If you get shot, don't die." (Thinking you will die will kill you faster than the actual would by itself). Given all that, why would you presume something much less impactful than survival itself is not significantly if not entirely controlled by the mind?
I think perhaps you are not considering that psychology isn't restricted to the conscious mind.
As far as the purpose of life, I would hate to start a whole other debate but let me just ask you to empirically prove one thing that exists without prior cause or prove the origin of all things then I can take your opinion seriously, until then I think the best you can do is you think that might be the case but you really have no idea if life has a purpose.
Sex is for reproduction, plain and simple. Any other function - be it societal or psychological - has simply been tacked on. It might feel good to imbue it with some higher purpose, but in the end it is simply to perpetuate the genes.
> As far as the purpose of life, [....] you have idea if life has a purpose.
The purpose of life is life itself. Not in any eschatological sense, but in the sense that life perpetuates itself to perpetuate life. Because anything that didn't has died out a long time ago and anything that doesn't perpetuate itself will successfully remove itself from the pool of reproducing things.
> Our ability to reason and evaluate ourselves [...] unique to us. People [...] die by willing [...] medical doctor and they'll tell you the will to fight and live in a [...] overcomed by disease.
People are good at fooling themselves. They can even fool themselves into believing that they are rational actors. But humans are not thinking machines, we're reproduction machines. All the funny "humans are special" stuff is simply an outgrowth of excessive wealth.
Again, the only reason you're able to reason about reproduction in the first place is because your parents produced you. They were hardwired to do so and it's the only reason humanity exists at all. Every single species on the planet is hardwired to reproduce otherwise it would fail to be a species.
Your genitals are there for a reason, as are the various chemicals luring you into using them for their purpose. Even your mind largely works subconsciously, outside your control, to steer you in that direction.
It doesn't matter if you overcome that instinct and don't reproduce or even end your own life. You'll simply not be in the future gene pool. If enough people do that, a species dies out. Which is a total non-event as almost every species that once existed, no longer does. Hence, reproduction is not a "nice to have".
We're not the only species to commit suicide, many have a strategy of sacrifice directly after reproduction. Many adult insects can't even feed, they live for just a few days with the only purpose to reproduce. Male spiders mate and typically get eaten by the female directly after. An octopus guards their nest whilst not feeding, until death.
The point of all these strategies is to reproduce, and to then die. Skip the reproduce step and your species has no future.
Seeking meaning and purpose is a human hobby, of no consequence to the underlying need for biological reproduction. Fail to reproduce and this hobby ends quite soon.
As for a higher purpose to life other than reproduction, it's basically humans making stuff up in the form of culture or religion. It is whatever we fabricate in our delusional minds. They are ways for insecure people to cope with there not being any purpose.
This "explanation" is utter rubbish mumbled by the philsophically inept. It even pretends to be "science" all the while bringing in their "darwinian" "evolutionary" philosophy. (One thing I wonder often is, don't these people know fallacies, e.g. when trying to prove sth. to be caused by evolution, as a proof for evolution, while assuming evolution to be true in the first place? Classic "begging the question"-fallacy.)
Now I read the article and wonder the same question: Is there a way to recreate the experience of love by agitating the brain to secret certain chemical substances?
yeah agreed with the addiction things.
Yes. But I really don't think you want to go there.
We would do better to differentiate these and make it clear what we mean when we say 'I love you'. Someone looking for a partner does not mean the same as someone under the spells of passion and desire.
No, love is not chemicals & emotions but the state of chemicals & emotions that is cause-effect for inter-human attraction/stable togetherness.
Wow! IMAGINE THINKING LOVE EVOLVED at some point in time. There are other issues as well.
To start off if I defined love minimally as that which is the cause of attraction then,
--- What is the cause of attraction between poles of a magnet? * Using the socratic method, the concept of an "ideal North Pole" is inseparable from the "ideal South Pole", their togetherness is eternal and when they are not together they are attracted to be together, when they are together it is sustainable, so much so that the reason for their creation is for the other to exist.
Why do they behave so though? Because they are "circular". No they are not circular jk but because they have a "natural configuration" or simply put its their "nature". Nature of circles is to roll, similarly, what is an object that has nature is to be attracted to this subject. ---
Love itself, is eternal, and has no origin. It is name for a "thing"(conceptual, abstract, but a noun), like a circle.
We say one's mind is in prayer but technically whole of their "natural configuration" is praying. Similarly, we say someone's body is in the game, but their whole self is involved. Similarly thus, heart is in love but their "whole configuration" is in the act of active loving, during their existence.
At the very least it must NOT be taken for granted that a common subset of such configuration exists for all humans. Nature of their lover is subjective to lovers.
Furthermore, to end, when you study the properties of theos and of love, they turn out to be same 'things'; god is love and love is god. OP needs to read about what they are writing.
A) you are your brain chemistry. It makes no difference to the nature of love that you can point to chemical mechanisms.
B) It is easier to cooperate between people with asymmetric wants and offers, as you a far more likely to have a mutually beneficial trade. It is rubbish to say that somehow building a relationship with someone of the other gender is harder, or evolutionarily more 'advanced'
This reads like someone just using the credibility of research (which may or may not be credible) to put forwards their only slightly related pet philosophising.
I feel this is actually doing a disservice to the wider community of those who try and discuss and study e.g. evolutionary motives, or gender differences, by being full of so much dross.
Can people get a test for this?
I ran an email list at one point where we posted articles about research into brain wiring and discussed it and this doesn't jibe with my understanding.
My understanding is that emotion is another means to relate to certain kinds of information. It's like a TLDR, a file summing up all of your experiences with X and informing you how to relate to X.
So if your brain tells you "I'm in love!" that's shorthand for something like "This person meets some bar compared to other people." It's a summary of your life experience with all people, all romantic situations and all of your interactions with this one individual.
People with high affect can make snap judgements because they have a strong signal, a loud TLDR file telling them "I love this!" or "I hate this!" People with low affect can't make snap decisions. They have to take their time to think things through and make conscious, intentional choices. They can't go with their gut.
So I don't think of love as bribery. Love is a density of information telling you don't sweat the small stuff. You think this is someone to bet your future on when it's not possible to ever know for sure how that will go.
The second thought is that her idea of choosing your friends doesn't resonate with me. Just like with romantic partners, my friends are people I just hit it off with. That mutual spark is there or it's not.
I work at friendship. Friends are important to me. But if I could just decide somewhat unilaterally that "I want to be friends with x person" and make that happen, I wouldn't have been so socially isolated in recent years.
The reason (imo) it gets so messy is because we have elevated and romanticized co-dependency as a culture. Biologically, a woman only really needs a man around for the first few years of infant vulnerability, and not even that these days, however, the flipside of that is that we ignore the weaning and developmental effect of having fathers around to offset the dependent identity a child has on its mother.
I'm of a more conservative view that when we started raising kids to become adults, we stopped raising them to be men and women, and so we are left with adult, vaguely defined persons, who take supervision from proxies for their mothers in a co-dependent relationship with interchangeable authorities, and who are not fully actualized men and women.
Language itself comes from our mothers, and to keep us surviving as children, the base sentiments complex language is designed to transmit are disgust and shame, to warn you away from danger and misbehavior, so as to keep us safe. Our internal monlologue of self speaks to us in language, so most of our ontology of being is predicated on this substrate. It's that powerful. When you look at traditional or tribal rites of passage, they tend to have an element of disgust and danger in them, where you are forced to become the thing that as a child you were forbidden to be, and then in this state, you are celebrated and accepted into the group as a trusted man or woman, because you have survived the disgusting things that were forbidden, and you are now you, and the tribe loves you for that which is the true you, and not your child identity defined by good behaviour.
We don't have those rites of passage anymore, and so we have generations of unweaned "adult people" who aren't accepted men or women, who can still be operated on by pulling these childhood linguistic levers of disgust and shame. Love in a world of adults, and not of men and women, is an absolute disaster as a result, since the long tail of men are treating women like their mothers, and women have to hide who they truly are to represent as these weird sexless adult authority figures.
This is a bit much for an off hand comment, but it's important in this context, as by rethinking love as being invested in someones happiness, it creates the necessary personal boundary that enables us to have something to bring to a relationship, instead of self sacrificing for a co-dependent identity regulated by an internal monologue of shame.
Emotions like hatred, greed, jealousy etc have no place in that state.
We know that the law of attraction manifests collaboration & cooperation from the smallest parts like our models of the atom, to a single cell, to a human's body, to the mind & the global subconscious.
This law is love. Love is not always right but it's the fuel, it's what drives this whole mad universe and it's you and it's me and we are excellent! Can you imagine, your heart beating for you each and everyday, the bacteria in your gut digesting food for your cells to uptake and absorb. Everything in perfect balance and homeostasis!
Sure we may fall ill, but our bodies repair even without our focus. In fact it's often better to sleep when feeling sick and turn down the conscious ego altogether and slip into lala land: to the place of archetypes, the shadow, the subconscious, and unconscious. Our bodies rescue us, we do nothing (wu wei) and only need to wait through the uncomfortable now. A new day will rise and after a short time we feel whole again. We have all experienced this. We know this because this is love. Our bodies love us and if we treat others inside the universal system with love, I don't see why peaceful Freedom United with Love cannot find a natural balance, especially if love were inherently part of the technological constraints and engineering decisions.
You know what true love is, you might have forgotten, but you know it.
Love must be grown voluntary.