Papal Visit to the UK

[Boris Godunov]

"Love" is an imprecise and subjective word human beings have come up with to describe an extremely complicated set of feelings--it's not a single "emotion" as people are implying. It's also incredibly subjective, considering we have no real way of knowing if any two human beings experience "love" in the same way. Do you love your parents with the same feelings that I love my parents? There is just no way to really know. We use the word "love" to describe feeling towards people, but obviously feelings towards spouses/children are quite different than the feelings we have toward friends, music, artwork, food or any number of things we say we "love." It's completely useless to have this argument when there doesn't even exist a precise definition of what constitutes "love."

It seems to me some folks are treating "love" like the initial view of the atom, as if it were just a solid, single thing and it stopped there. In truth, of course, there is not a single solid thing, it's a structure made up of smaller bits, which are in turn made up of smaller bits, etc. Love is just like that--it's not a single emotion unto itself, it's just a word that describes a very large underlying structure of feelings and memories that intertwine. There's no such actual thing as "love" any more than there is an actual thing of "zero," so asking for a scientific explanation for "love" is a bit absurd.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Yeah, except it's not.

You keep telling yourself that.

[Asher]

The accusation of delusion here is somewhat amusing.

[giblets]

Your faith in science is almost religious .

Religion is the wrong word to use. People who decide everything can be explained by natural laws will usually come to the conclusion that people are machines and science can find out everything we want to know about how they work, it's a worldview, not a religion.

[dannubis]

Can someone of the "believers" explain to me why love is any different from hate ? Except of course the social construct around love is far more idealized than the one surrounding hate.

[Sava]

it certainly would remove a stain form the map

the Pope or Britain?

[Sava]

Yes, it is an illusion.

so is urface

[Cort Haus]

Boris - I agree that love is a multi-faceted concept, and that there are a whole basket of emotions that are described as such, but that doesn't change the basic premise - which is that all our emotions can be understood without recourse to metaphysical explanations.

[Cort Haus]

Sava - nice to see you again, but kindly **** off with the trolling - this has been a good and mostly civil thread so far.

Thanks

[Cort Haus]

Can science explain the nature of self-consciousness? This is what I've been struggling with for the past 6 months.

If it helps with survival, which it surely does, then evolution will favour it.

[onodera]

If it helps with survival, which it surely does, then evolution will favour it.

But what part of the brain does it reside in? Why aren't people philosophical zombies?

[Cort Haus]

Perhaps 'self-awareness' is the word you mean here. 'Self-consciousness' tends to refer to a heightened state of self-awareness, often negative, and perhaps associated with the sense of making a fool of oneself.

How it works and where it resides within the neural architecture are certainly interesting questions. Cognitive / Artificial Intelligence scientists are doubtless having fun working on this.

[C0ckney]

"Love" is an imprecise and subjective word human beings have come up with to describe an extremely complicated set of feelings--it's not a single "emotion" as people are implying. It's also incredibly subjective, considering we have no real way of knowing if any two human beings experience "love" in the same way. Do you love your parents with the same feelings that I love my parents? There is just no way to really know. We use the word "love" to describe feeling towards people, but obviously feelings towards spouses/children are quite different than the feelings we have toward friends, music, artwork, food or any number of things we say we "love." It's completely useless to have this argument when there doesn't even exist a precise definition of what constitutes "love."

It seems to me some folks are treating "love" like the initial view of the atom, as if it were just a solid, single thing and it stopped there. In truth, of course, there is not a single solid thing, it's a structure made up of smaller bits, which are in turn made up of smaller bits, etc. Love is just like that--it's not a single emotion unto itself, it's just a word that describes a very large underlying structure of feelings and memories that intertwine. There's no such actual thing as "love" any more than there is an actual thing of "zero," so asking for a scientific explanation for "love" is a bit absurd.

i broadly agree with this, and you've put it better than i could. my questions were in response to mike h's assertion that every question can be answered by (hard) science. JM and i have posed some questions which we believe cannot be answered in this way, and obviously, there are many more besides.

we use the word love to describe many things, or rather our feelings towards many different things, and so of course, the question "what is love" is a necessary and interesting one. people can say that it's only about chemistry, but this ignores the fact that humans do not consider the question in this way, and not, as cort says, because it's too hard to do so, but because such thinking would not help the person in a situation arising from love. therefore we require, and indeed have, other ways of looking at it, and so when we talk about love (or the approximation of our feelings that we call love), we need to examine these other ways.

[C0ckney]

i forgot about this, so sorry for the late response, but anyway...

Existentialism is not religion.

in asking those questions, and in trying to come up with answers to them, and then in exploring the questions those answers raise, and so on and so forth, you get philosophy and you also get religion.

Superstition is not necessarily religion either. A lot of these practices formed over time and have real world use behind them (eg, burying the dead to avoid diseases and decomposition smells). Sometimes they happen coincidentally with other behaviours which then get seen as an essential part of the "ritual" because the people don't know if the act of burying the bodies prevents the diseases from spreading, or if it's the ritual behind the burial. It's not necessarily religion.

You seem to be confusing ritual with religion.

Oh look, some specific groups of people MAY have worshipped animals. That certainly is proof that all humans are inherently religious.

Thanks. Guess we can shut down the discussion now.

you wrote that you weren't aware that cavemen were religious. i've provided evidence that cavemen had, in fact, beliefs that we would recognise as religious. this view is supported by people who study prehistory and ancient peoples. we know as well (or rather we have a lot of evidence), that the humans who first domesticated animals, planted crops, invented writing etc. had religious beliefs. you might disagree of course, but the evidence is pretty clear.

[dannubis]

So why love and not hate ?