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Love Under a Microscope
smooth wombat writes "As today is one of the top five marketing-induced spending days, the obvious question is, what is love? Anthropologist Helen Fisher studied the brain's circuitry and found that the brain sees romantic love as a reward similar to chocolate, money or drugs. Does this mean that the mystery of love is less magical now that science has studied it under the microscope? According to Dr Fisher: 'You can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and you still sit down and eat that chocolate cake and it's wonderful,' she said. 'In the same way, you can know all the ingredients of romantic love and still feel that passion.'"
From TFA:Since the odds of survival for a human child with two parents is (or at least was) much higher than the odds of a single-parent child, it shouldn't be surprising that humans have a strong drive to forge lasting relationships. Natural selection in action, and all that.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This touches on the issue of mind / brain duality.
Is our mind something that's simply a meta-effect of the brain, so that for instance if you view/control my brain you can fully know / control my mind?
Also note that the answer to this has serious implications for free will, the justice of retributive punishment, etc.
That chocolate cake analogy is good. Just like a cake you can mix all the right ingredients and still make a big mess of it instead of something good.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
The Greeks had four words for love: agape, phileo, eros, and storge. We English speakers seem to conflate everything around eros and thereby miss the point. Love is the act of the will whereby another individual is placed ahead of yourself. That's why Christians are commanded to "love their enemies" and why the Apostle Paul wrote that the greatest act of love was when God gave His Son as the sacrifice for the sins of the world.
No naturalistic scientist could ever write:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
"Fisher studied the brain's circuitry and found that the brain sees romantic love as a reward similar to chocolate, money or drugs."
Explains why when we pursue romantic love our bait often consists of one of chocolate, money or drugs.
We were an unconventional, but very happy couple (I am 42, she was 61).
If romantic love is a reward, it's a reward for something deeper.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There are people who'd say things like that about their preferred batch of ingredients. We call them junkies, the chemical they use is called by many names -- not the least of which is junk. When a junkie is deprived of junk, they go through withdrawal. They experience physical pain, depression, and often behave irrationally or self-destructively in order to get their fix.
I think there's a very big difference between people who say they are willing to die for their partner and people who are willing to commit suicide as a result of rejection. Don't attempt to compare willing self-sacrifice to save another with irrational, self-destructive behavior. They aren't the same thing. One is driven out of care for another, the other out of care for oneself.
Dying for someone you care about is driven by of a sense of protection, and is a trait that has benefits for the survival of the species. Killing oneself because of being deprived of someone's love is driven by a selfish sense of want, and is a trait that just tends to Darwinianly reduce the gene pool..
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You might feel like you're correct but there is no absolute right or wrong when a person alters their brain chemistry. If you're judging me from a moral basis, then I have no argument. You will always be right and I will always be wrong. But why are you wanting to pick a fight with people that have no problem altering their own conciousness? It's theirs, not yours. Do you make the same arguments with your friends (if you have any) that consciously and willfully alter their brain chemistry/nervous system when it's caffiene? or chocolate? Or maybe they have passion for bubble baths. You're arguing against a completely natural and healthy need for human beings to transcend the daily reality they live out. What you're doing is completely unhealthy and probably causes more brain damage to yourself than cannabis will ever do.
Now I'm sure you live a very healthy and productive life. You probably don't smoke, don't drink coffee, will never sky dive or eat chocolate and live a perfectly celibate life. I respect that, I never attacked what you make of your life did I?
For the rest of humanity, for the people that have not graduated with honours from their local high school DARE program like you have, we will continue to enjoy what life has to offer us. I have no problem with your personal choice, but please don't be so quick to judge people based on what you personally believe is a moral failing. Your morals are not mine.
...very much like deciding that tears explain sadness.
I know subjectively, that even my simple emotions are complex, multilayered things. There's the sensation-level feedback which lets me know I'm experiencing an emotion. There's learned-behaviour changes like reinforcement (of love, happiness, etc) or disincentive (from pain, shame, etc). There's thought-ability changes, belief-prioritization changes, even memory recall changes. All in parallel. And that's leaving aside the experience, belief and attention context that triggered the emotion. So, it looks to me like what these guys are doing is picking at one strand (new love's pleasure/reinforcement/habituation mechanism) and thinking they have the totality. Which is just ignorant, and I'd guess it's not accidentially ignorant. More people pushing the "mind is nothing but meat" idea. Not an opinion I share!
A very interesting post, but I wonder:
I suspect that the ideal of a lifetime monogamous commitment was developed by the new State Authorities
Is there any actual evidence that a group of people got together in a back room and actually consciously invented lifelong monogamy? Because the idea seems to me just a little bit far fetched. I don't think that people are quite that insightful and forward-thinking.
At any rate, just to support what you said about serial monogamy, there is strong evidence that it was (subconsciously) an invention of women. Men, I think, would be happy roaming about like nomads, and just mating (forcibly if necessary) with any female they happen to meet. Monogamy was like a contract that women made with men. "I will stop resisting and you'll actually have more and better sex IF you agree to stick around and help with the kids." And then once the kids had aged five or six years, the contract stopped serving its purpose and both parties moved on to their next contract.
I think that lifelong monogamy just evolved out of that, as the contract term kept getting longer and longer. The more complex the civilization, the *more* support that children need. Now you've got to buy them clothes, you've got to put them through school, you've got to teach them the complex behaviors that will allow them to fit into this civilization. That takes more than just a few years.
I just think this is a better explanation for lifelong monogamy than the idea that it was invented for a purpose. I think it evolved.
Nonetheless, what you said about the state supporting marriage for its own selfish reasons, I certainly agree with. I just don't think the state invented it.