Does love really exist?

Love is felt. It is NOT the feeling. Like an ulcer is felt, but an ulcer is not the feeling.

You feel emotions arise. The feeling of them is not what they are, only your awareness that they are. They are “emoters”, movers of you, the directors of your intention, and clues/signals to your purpose in cognitive existence.

Love is the emoter that drives a person toward devoted support of something/one. You can feel its driving of you. But it is the drive, not the feeling. The chemical relates to the feeling, not the drive.

If given the chemical, the mind will cross associate and stimulate the drive. The mind doesn’t know that someone is playing with its wetware so it attempts error correction and makes assumptions.

As long as the item isn’t a bitch either, you’ll be fine. :mrgreen:

True, and very wise. But I ask, is this political agenda wrong or right in its intentions? (I assume we’re both using “agenda” here very loosely; it isn’t as though a cabal of masterminds are orchestrating media inputs of love, or anything else for that matter.) I’ll expand on this below.

I agree; the anti- and non-Christians are jaded by the idea. We’ve grown nihilistic about it. It isn’t to say that we’re nihilistic about other ideas necessarily. There’s so much social discordance and dissatisfaction some people have been feeling on a personal level that many are wondering if behaviors should/will change? How useful is this “relationship style?” I’m having my doubts about it.

I understand that a rule in the midst of observation and obeisance is rarely looked at as important for extrinsic, consequential reasons. Yet when we do begin questioning the legitimacy of social mores, we begin by reducing them to utilitarian goals. (Think of two-level utilitarianism.) This gives us a critical understanding of the subject/object at hand.

Man, I wish I felt that way.

I totally disagree. As long as we are finite and as long as there is a thing called environment, it will always be a critical environment, and will always be pecking away at us in one way or another.

I totally agree. But this isn’t something I observe on a ubiquitous level, so perhaps we disagree in detail. Like I said above, we’ve still got stressors causing us to adapt. Granted, some of these stressors are in fact existential stressors, giving us another nice little challenge to overcome (i.e., overcoming nihilism). But I stress some.

I think this might be my overall sentiment as well. But I do still criticize love on utilitarian grounds more than existential grounds. I certainly find issue with love in both senses; but it’s especially irking my Millian nerves. Is it really making us happy?

It does seem like scientists are being rather apologetic about it.

I think people in general like order. And I think those other things you mentioned are pretty good. As long as there’s a margin pushing us to be orderly and adaptive, living in a purely existential a fashion will be a nonstarter.

Apparently someone else reads Gilbert Ryle too. =D>

But I’ve got feelings going in the opposite direction. They’re a little more cerebral, but objectifying sexual drives and packaging love in a less romantic box seems pretty enticing.

Meaning a handful of broken hearts will lead someone to find ways of reject the notion of love? What if there’s a large group of people feeling this very same drive?

Not really. It is just that he and I read from the same book. :wink:

Your mind functions almost exactly like the intended functioning of the American government. Your emotions are the advocate groups that lobby congress (your subconscious) which then passes “motions of appeal” (bills to enact) to the Senate (your conscious). The President is your final summed choice (your decision) to enact an effort and do something.

You have cross emoters for the exact same reason congress has cross debating and voting. Different parts of your brain and mind, each have their own issues and suggestions that they attempt to get attended to. A “demon” is formed when one of the emoter incentives (activists) learn how to force greater attention and cheat the natural electoral system. The demon gains control of your congress. That is what was meant by being “possessed by a demon”.

I meant that just because you can use chemicals to cause both the feeling of love and the aberrant result of loving, does NOT mean that love is a chemical reaction. It isn’t. It merely involves chemical reaction as does every other thought and movement you make.

What an elegant metaphor. It reminds me of the elephant and the rider metaphor.

Hm. How does one know that he/she has been “possessed” by such an outlaw emoter?

I agree, but is the ideal of love and the resultant manifestation of it (chemical reactions and all) the same? Are our conceptions of it skewed from reality? Is it an honest notion?

If everybody began committing acts of philanthropy for solely selfish purposes, would it still be philanthropy?

Do you ever feel the urge to do something that you cognitively really think is not smart, and you do it anyway? Every addiction, obsession, or lust is a “demon” that over rides your cognitive decision making authority (your Senate).

Such a behavior says that your House is over powering your Senate. What should take place is that the House suggests the motion and the Senate skeptically accepts or completely blocks. It should never occur that a House bill is denied by the Senate yet enacted anyway. The exact same concern applies to the real US government.

I thought that I had already explained that;

If devoted support exists, then love exists too. They are the same concept merely different words used for different contexts and emphasis. “Love” implies strong feelings of attachment and “desire to be with” in addition to the devoted support. But those feelings are merely the cause and/or additional riders on the wave.

The anti-Love movement is mostly about removing any devoted support in the populous. The attached lusts are still promoted.

Something that we call “love” undoubtedly exists. Now whether what we call love today is the same or different from what the ancients or other cultures have called love is a question that we may not have the answer to.

As for my own personal experience with this issue, what you call passionate love (which I call romantic love) is really more of a lust for love. The romantic feeling of “love” is like an intoxicating drug that the “lover” becomes addicted to and like all drugs, the supply eventually runs out and the “lover” is left in agony. Romanticism is dangerous if it’s not seen for what it is (i.e. an intoxicating stimulant that can become a catalyst for great art), and it seems like this form of “love” is what our culture ultimately calls love.

“True” Love for me is the form of compassionate love you were talking about. Our culture seems to have de-valued this form of love in favor of romantic love.

For those agreeing that love is felt, and is not the feeling:
you are creating a subject/object divide that separates ‘you’/from the love and the feeling.

If love is “felt”, it is the object of which the subject is - you. You are the one who “felt” the love. This creates, or comes from, the mindset that one is somehow different from their emotions and drives - and the chemicals that appear at the same time as all this.

This is where all the bullshit about souls/distinct from the body originates. People developed a fetish with their memories, preferring to capture a sensory image to be remembered before it is paid any heed to. Compared to immediate perception, memory feels far off - it is limited, blurred, broken up. Memories don’t feel that dangerous. This kind of fetishism would have developed the more safe societies became - allowing the luxury of extended contemplation of memories. With the feeling of distance between an immediate perception, and the recollection of a memory, hindsight feels like one is distanced from their memories of perceptions and feelings. The lack of immediacy allowed one to think of oneself as the observer of one’s memories… from afar, as though separate to them.

Only then could one think of feelings as felt BY the self, separate from, the self. With this distance, love and other “things that are felt” feel like drives - things that cause one to move/act. An outside force. Without this fetish, one feels love immediately, love is the feeling in the present (with no need of the past participle “felt”). One is one with the love, it doesn’t occur to one to “acknowledge it”, recognise or note it, it is the feeling it is the action it is all one.

Love is the feeling to anyone who really loves, and does not merely look back on love - or upon it from afar - to feel a kind of fond voyeuristic nostalgia and lame gratefulness towards it. This is the weak love that is - contained - which can occur to one as something nice to hold onto, that one becomes nicely devoted to maintaining. It is not the creating and destroying love that grabs you by the heart, overtakes and IS you.

Both these types undeniably exist, but it is obvious I prefer the real, immediate, strong, overtaking-one-with-love love.

I’m a bit drunk, so I’ll give you a quick rant.

To my view, love exists, but it is not a thing you can distill from the greater range of feeling. Rather to me, it is the combination of all emotions referenced about a single individual.

In the same way a picasso attracts our eye and captivates our attention because it combines within a single image both the frontal and the profile of an individual - stimulating two areas of our brain at once - producing a ‘superface’ - ie. a collage of usually separate perceptions; love, in the same way, is a superposition.

I love my wife. But I also like her. And admire her. And also hate her sometimes, and despise her. Count her faults, count her blessings. See how beautiful she is, see how she has aged. Know what she does well, know what she does badly. See the music in her walk, the verve in which she converses, the selfishness she portrays, see the thoughfulness of her actions, the childishness of her outbursts.

In short, only the positive emotions are not enough to articulate the ways in which I feel about my wife. In order to fully embrace her being, I must also embrace the full range of what one human being is capable of feeling about another. The one you love must also sometimes be the one you hate, with absolute abandon - otherwise they will remain emotively two-dimensional.

Of course, Hollywood movies will ill-prepare you for this.

Everyone that doesn’t have the love you are describing is at fault for not having it.

I hate the English language.
We have one single word for an emotional entanglement that involves many developments beyond the scope of a single word.
The Greeks had it pegged much better.
Agápe
Éros
Philia
Storge

To think that a lifetime with another person (or more) whom you cherish emotionally and chemically is only Éros without any other growth is grossly short-sighted and I largely blame our language for coming up short conceptually for our culture’s articulation of what they feel.

No more so than you. When you say that you feel the hunger, does that mean that that you are not hungry, but rather something else is just making you feel that way? It is just the language. My finger is not me, yet I feel its pain because it IS me.

Love is the thrill of someone else being thrilled. And yeah… uncommon these days, but it exists.

Lol uncommon for you, maybe. Not everyone finds someone else being thrilled by them an uncommon experience. No doubt this is to do with the fact that I am a lot more wild and impassioned than your precious virtue will ever allow you to be. I would even go as far as to say that being virtuous or religious is bad for your lovelife.

Once again I am astonished by your misunderstanding of my understanding. Your “No more so than you” comment is about as insightful as saying “I know you are but what am I?”. My talk of “creating a subject/object divide that separates ‘you’/from the love and the feeling” was an explanation of what you were doing, not an explanation of how I think of things. It is not an indication of how I think of love, but an observation of what others like you must be doing in order to get such a warped idea of love.

Hunger is the feeling that is happening when you feel hungry. Saying it is “felt”, as opposed to what I just said, is to make a subtle qualification that tends toward the suggestion that someone or something else is making you feel that way, separate to you. If you want to avoid this qualification then don’t make a thing out of making it - fairly obvious really. There are ways to say your finger is not (all of) you, but it is (of) you (just as the pain is) - use (just the) language to be more clear. Don’t say it wrong and then blame it on the language. Definitely don’t make a point of saying it an incorrect way over a correct way and then blame it on the language.

Here is a video from TED that might help.
This woman identified three partes of the brain that are more activited in people in love.

ted.com/talks/lang/eng/helen … _love.html

Love is not felt, it is known. Its not an emotion but, more of an instinct or a part of what you are.

In response to the OP, I’d like to understand your miffedness, but I won’t make an issue of it.

I would agree with the general sentiment of the thread and say that love is more complex than the general propositions of either science or art, while understanding that, theoretically, nothing is too complex to understand, and then represent through science or art. Perhaps we have, thus far, honestly witnessed and sincerely recreated, either through imitation or standardisation, the thing of love in only snippets and distant, minute aspects, but that we might do so fully, is not an impossibilty, and whether that eventuality should be a tragedy is a matter of individual concern, and none of mine, at that.

The other question might be this. If love does exist, but you don’t experience it, is there anything else that could replace it?

Splenda

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing: