Existence of "love" and other emotions.

[SherdogGoat]

Pics or work.

You would need an OLED screen if you really want to appreciate the intricacies of it

 

[Michaelangelo]

You would need an OLED screen if you really want to appreciate the intricacies of it

With a 3 inch screen

 

[SherdogGoat]

With a 3 inch screen

You can look at pictures of Mount Everest on a 3 inch screen, so that's a moot point.

 

[Michaelangelo]

You can look at pictures of Mount Everest on a 3 inch screen, so that's a moot point.

Yeah but not to scale

 

[Thurisaz]

Well, as a Christian I have to point out that love is not an emotion.

 

[Concrete]

I think it's great that there's scientific evidence of love. It doesn't ruin it, it proves it.

 

[JonesBones]

The idea of love is a cultural concept as much as it is physiological. What does a feral child think of love?

Empirically, love is not even a chemical reaction. Nobody experiences love that way, it is an abstraction from experience. The idea predated the physiology, and scaffolds it.

 

[JonesBones]

What?

The idea of love, predated any dissecting of the brain or imaging. It is not like a scientist was dissecting a body one day, and unexpectedly found "love", like the gall bladder or something. The idea came first, and THEN we tried to fit it to physiology. Like this brain imaging. It is a mirror that reflects our own concepts back at us. We define "guilt" for example. Harden that concept. As if it is an actual thing. When it is an idea. Then we try to say the idea and thing are the same.

Hegel summed it up by saying, these things are "products of reflection, mistaken as their first grounds." Love, is a product of reflection. An idea. The physiology is not where love is, or where love started though. We "reflected" it to physiology. Nobody experiences love chemically. That is an idea too. lol. You have to be taught that, nobody actually experiences it that way. Like Goethe said about Newton, he told us everything about light and color, except what it is like to see. The experience itself, the authentic experience, is lost in an abstraction.

 

[weed]

 

[JonesBones]

Experience may not feel like a chemical reaction to us, but that's all it is.

Somehow, my argument seems more well developed, than your "No!" Don't waste my time. Take on my points specifically.

 

[JonesBones]

"Love" and "guilt" are words used to describe feelings. Feelings are chemical reactions.



How does any of that contradict the fact that no matter how things make us feel, no matter how we experience them, or what those experiences mean to us, ultimately, they're nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain?

Think of what we are doing right now. We are communicating. Barely. How is this possible? Because there is shared meaning. We understand concepts like "feeling", because of language. Culture. Education.

I am saying, this is also about things like linguistics. There are cultural elements here too.

Science is just a chemical reaction in the brain. Everything we think and do is.

 

[Krav McGraw]

Reductionism. So boring.

 

[minute bull]

Carl Lewis?

 

[Krav McGraw]

Might be boring but at least it's accurate.

But it's not accurate. It doesn't tell the whole story. Look up the concepts of "emergence" and "overdeterminism". This topic has been thoroughly scrutinized for a long ass time.

Arguing that love is just a chemical reaction and therefore doesn't really exist is tantamount to saying biology is just chemistry therefore biology doesn't exist. Better yet, chemistry is just physics therefore chemistry isn't "real".

Uninteresting.

 

[minute bull]

Nihilism is easy, folks.

 

[JonesBones]

But it's not accurate. It doesn't tell the whole story. Look up the concepts of "emergence" and "overdeterminism". This topic has been thoroughly scrutinized for a long ass time.

Arguing that love is just a chemical reaction and therefore doesn't really exist is tantamount to saying biology is just chemistry therefore biology doesn't exist. Better yet, chemistry is just physics therefore chemistry isn't "real".

Uninteresting.

It is lazy. Nothing buttery. Or medical materialism. It is a tautology that tells us nothing. A monkey could repeat it. William James addressed this:

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.

According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see the liver determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.

 

[JonesBones]

When did I say love doesn't exist? Why would love being a chemical reaction mean that it doesn't really exist?

And if there is anything more to thought and emotion than chemistry, what is that more?



You're basically arguing from a religious perspective, aren't you? Judging by those quotes you chose, it seems that way.

Some people are incapable of abstract thought I guess. If you could understand that argument, you would realize your point is stupid.

 

[Chaos Spawn]

but how do you define "real"
Is water real?
Is any of this real?

the older i get the more credence i give to the "life is a simulation" theory. no, im not joking.

 

[Krav McGraw]

When did I say love doesn't exist? Why would love being a chemical reaction mean that it doesn't really exist?

And if there is anything more to thought and emotion than chemistry, what is that more?

Saying "X is just chemicals" and nothing more, neglects the emergence and higher order/purposes of X. It also ignores the everyday common sense understanding of X.

It's like saying your computer is just chemicals. What more is there? Well there is a lot more than just the sum of their parts. We can talk about computers in countless contexts beyond their parts.

 

[sleepwalk]

So basically we have this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

It would seem that the electrochemical processes of the brain occur at a level that is far more complex than that of other nervous tissues and that the "how and why" may be beyond our perception for at least the time being. Personally, I find reductionism/materialism/physical naturalism to be an unsatisfying answer intellectually and spiritually. While not "wrong" per se, it is perhaps better to say that it is "safe" but (to me) seems incomplete. "What we don't know about can't affect us," has been proven fallacious thus far scientifically and it stands to reason that it still does.