Is NeoGAF a chemical reaction too?
Is falling in love just a chemical reaction or not
- Thread starter hydrophilic attack
- Start date
- Status
Is NeoGAF a chemical reaction too?
I remember my mom once explained us the origins of romantic love, between two unrelated people, in this case a man and a woman like 600 years ago.
I really don't know the details, but it's been said that there was a time where marriages were exclusively a deal between families, and they had little or nothing to do with afection or love.
then the troubadours of the middle age with their songs and poems started giving shape or form to certain feelings (what we call love nowadays) that weren't really the standard in society, thus giving people new ideas about feelings.
in short: Love is a human invention, just like religion, it's not an instinct and not something that would be there even if noone talked about it.
like religion, some people don't believe in it, some people misuse it and other make the best out of it.
up to you do decide to make a powerful, beautiful lie or a useless lie out of it.
I really don't know the details, but it's been said that there was a time where marriages were exclusively a deal between families, and they had little or nothing to do with afection or love.
then the troubadours of the middle age with their songs and poems started giving shape or form to certain feelings (what we call love nowadays) that weren't really the standard in society, thus giving people new ideas about feelings.
in short: Love is a human invention, just like religion, it's not an instinct and not something that would be there even if noone talked about it.
like religion, some people don't believe in it, some people misuse it and other make the best out of it.
up to you do decide to make a powerful, beautiful lie or a useless lie out of it.
The euphoria you feel when being quoted is a chemical reaction.
cloud_sleep
Member
Love transcends space and time.
FriedConsole
Banned
Yeah I don't get how some militant Athiests can spend all their time making fun of people with religion but believe in the concept of love. It really is the same kind of "bullshit".
Kadayi
Banned
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjg5TuXV09U
'love' is a construct built on attraction. It's ubiquity is in large part down to the sheer profundity of the messaging through advertizing and media. Whether that's fairytales, pop ballads, soap operas or romance novels. If you've spent any time in western culture you've been bombarded with this messaging for sure. One particularly insidious aspect is the notion of 'the one' which ties in with the idea of the 'happy ever after'. The reality of divorce rates tells a different story. People change over time and what seems attractive and simpatico now (and not just in a purely in the physical sense) might not necessarily seem so 10 years down the road.
'love' is a construct built on attraction. It's ubiquity is in large part down to the sheer profundity of the messaging through advertizing and media. Whether that's fairytales, pop ballads, soap operas or romance novels. If you've spent any time in western culture you've been bombarded with this messaging for sure. One particularly insidious aspect is the notion of 'the one' which ties in with the idea of the 'happy ever after'. The reality of divorce rates tells a different story. People change over time and what seems attractive and simpatico now (and not just in a purely in the physical sense) might not necessarily seem so 10 years down the road.
Jack The Nipper
Banned
Yes it's an extreme amount of repetition.
Either deal with it for what u feel you want or forget it.
for the most part you are right,
both concepts have the same premise and origin, both are basically things made up to help you through hard times.
but there's one argument on the side of love-believers. Their SOs are right there in front of them, love itself may be made up but there's a real flesh-and-bones recipient to that, what ever that is. Whereas when we regard religion as "I love god and god loves me", it is in most cases a picture of a made up man with a beard.. is like taking the madness to the next level, quite frankly.
However, if we take religion more like a set of emotional, social and intelectual rules with universal value by which we try to abide, then both things are all of a sudden in a similar, more even plane.
we choose to believe in those concepts because by doing so we have a better time while we are here in this plane. That's all there is to it.
Blackthorn
"hello?" "this is vagina"
One of my favourite things to do is slap strangers in the face then say, "Hey, no need to get angry, it's just a chemical reaction."
Unfortunately the world is full of idiots who can't grasp the infallible logical power of my intellect, so I get beaten up a lot.
Unfortunately the world is full of idiots who can't grasp the infallible logical power of my intellect, so I get beaten up a lot.
basically this yeah
FriedConsole
Banned
This sounds like some rationalization. It is like saying lets make fun of a certain group because their lie is bigger?
My thought is that everyone believes in a little bullshit and we should just leave each other alone about it.
SolidusDave
Member
You are factually correct OP, but it's not something you let other people know as somehow they think that makes that feeling less real to you.
Basically, just roll with it. There's also no true free will but... meh.
I don't think knowing this stuff de-mystifies these aspects of life and effectively it doesn't matter at all to your life.
You don't feel love and go "aw, that's just hormones and stuff, nvm, cya". You still experience it. It allows you to care deeply about another person an and from there all the interactions involving love spark (building trust, enjoying your time together, sex with a partner, doing all kinds of romantic shit etc.).
Sweets taste good because we're evolutionary wired to like sweet-tasting things (=high energy intake), do you suddenly not enjoy eating them anymore because of that knowledge?
Basically, just roll with it. There's also no true free will but... meh.
I don't think knowing this stuff de-mystifies these aspects of life and effectively it doesn't matter at all to your life.
You don't feel love and go "aw, that's just hormones and stuff, nvm, cya". You still experience it. It allows you to care deeply about another person an and from there all the interactions involving love spark (building trust, enjoying your time together, sex with a partner, doing all kinds of romantic shit etc.).
Sweets taste good because we're evolutionary wired to like sweet-tasting things (=high energy intake), do you suddenly not enjoy eating them anymore because of that knowledge?
A Fish Aficionado
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
The parasympathetic effect to posting is a fight or flight response.
I honestly don't see any fault in taking such a reductionist view of matters such as this.
In fact, I dare argue that it's healthy to do so as it can help insulate one against emotional distress when one can take the view that such distress is simply a matter of biology rather than some kind of metaphysical/transcendental notion.
In fact, I dare argue that it's healthy to do so as it can help insulate one against emotional distress when one can take the view that such distress is simply a matter of biology rather than some kind of metaphysical/transcendental notion.
kinoki
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
If love is a chemical reaction, then: so what? Doesn't make love any less fun. It doesn't tie the universe together but it is fun and worth it. I don't get why more people aren't satifisied with the mundane. The mundane are where we live. Be happy with it. Embrace it.
Solemn_In_Berlin
Member
Epistemically it is chemical.
Ontologically it is transcendent.
Ontologically it is transcendent.
you got your posh words the wrong way around
Foxtastical
Member
Reading the thoughts and ideas from kids talking about love right after they take a Philosophy 101 course in college is probably my favorite thing ever.
I'm always reminded in these situations of this quote, I always attribute it to Chomsky but I dunno if it was actually him (because I can never find it again), but, paraphrased, it was something like 'if you want to understand how humans think and interact with each other, don't speak to a cognitive scientist, go and read Dostoevsky'.
NeoGAF is a collection of chemical reactions interacting over a distance using electricity and light.
Imperfected
Member
Literally everything in the universe is a chemical reaction, so yes.
To the OP, though: as everything in the universe is a chemical reaction, the fact that love is a chemical reaction doesn't make it less "real" than anything else.
I would actually say that "love" isn't necessarily a chemical reaction. At least not any more than thinking about something and making a decision based on those thoughts is. Everythnig is a chemical reaction when you break it down, but that's such a reductionist view that it's almost asinine and nihilistic.
Attraction, both physical and mental, are the chemical reactions--and are both necessary for love itself to actually form. Love is something built on experience, though, and to take both your own and another person's experience into account when making a decision that will affect both of you. You can love a friend, you can love a significant other--because you care about both of them. The degree with which you care can vary, and that impacts the decisions you make in regards to them.
Love is being available to someone when they need you. Love is caring enough to not do something that you know will hurt a specific person. Love is letting someone else use you to push themselves higher, love is using someone else to push yourself higher. Love is a great many things, and all of these things are chemical reactions, but to call it just a chemical reaction is to ignore what it is to be a person.
I can't agree that love and religion are one and the same. There's a fundamental difference between someone's direct actions bringing you happiness and security--someone you can physically reach out and touch, and influence, and help grow--and the nebulous words bringing you comfort. I don't bemoan people that are brought comfort by religion, but love and faith are two fundamentally different things.
You cannot, as they say, reach out and touch faith.
Attraction, both physical and mental, are the chemical reactions--and are both necessary for love itself to actually form. Love is something built on experience, though, and to take both your own and another person's experience into account when making a decision that will affect both of you. You can love a friend, you can love a significant other--because you care about both of them. The degree with which you care can vary, and that impacts the decisions you make in regards to them.
Love is being available to someone when they need you. Love is caring enough to not do something that you know will hurt a specific person. Love is letting someone else use you to push themselves higher, love is using someone else to push yourself higher. Love is a great many things, and all of these things are chemical reactions, but to call it just a chemical reaction is to ignore what it is to be a person.
I can't agree that love and religion are one and the same. There's a fundamental difference between someone's direct actions bringing you happiness and security--someone you can physically reach out and touch, and influence, and help grow--and the nebulous words bringing you comfort. I don't bemoan people that are brought comfort by religion, but love and faith are two fundamentally different things.
You cannot, as they say, reach out and touch faith.
Solemn_In_Berlin
Member
Now that I think about it, they're both (love is.../I love...). Still, thanks.
Love is a chemical reactions just like all things are, okay great. The OP is still boring their friends to death over drinks and hasn't been in love since they were 16. Whether you're right or not doesn't really matter. You've been given the greatest gift of all: humanity. The great illusion of reality and self importance. Its yours to shape and imagine any way you please. Try having a little fun with it. You're certainly not going to fall in love or have too much fun moping about chemical reactions. Leave that to the scientists.
Omegasquash
Member
Yes and no. The "falling" part definitely is, but I think lots of that is lust/infatuation.
I don't think so. I mean, I guess you can boil all cognitive activity down to chemical reactions. But consciousness is still very much an enigma to science, and I suppose love could be an aspect of that.
It feels like more than that, anyway. It can be the most amazing thing in the world, or the worst. Only time in my life I've been absolutely head-over-heels, smitten, was with my first serious girlfriend at 18. Over a year of pure bliss, I didn't care about anything else in my life half as much. When that relationship ended, I was a wreck for a long time. I have a new girlfriend now and love her very much, but not nearly as blindingly. Probably a good thing.
It feels like more than that, anyway. It can be the most amazing thing in the world, or the worst. Only time in my life I've been absolutely head-over-heels, smitten, was with my first serious girlfriend at 18. Over a year of pure bliss, I didn't care about anything else in my life half as much. When that relationship ended, I was a wreck for a long time. I have a new girlfriend now and love her very much, but not nearly as blindingly. Probably a good thing.
You're not wrong in that emotions and feelings are technically chemical reactions in your head, but it's a gross, gross overgeneralization. You could also say that all life is worthless because it's a set of chemical reactions that happens to sustain itself, much like a fire burning but more complicated. And by that logic, the lives of everyone on the planet have no more value than a set of twigs. And you'd be a cold-hearted asshole of epic proportions for thinking that way.
So you're technically right, but you're overgeneralizing so hard that you might as well be wrong.
Being so reductionist in an attempt to be "logical" leads nowhere. Life has aspects of it that can't be rationalized, and no human being makes perfect logical sense. Trying to be "perfectly logical" just turns you into an asshole who is unable to understand other people. You see a lot of roughly college-age people on the internet trying to be super logical in an attempt to look smart, but they just end up looking like gigantic tools.
So you're technically right, but you're overgeneralizing so hard that you might as well be wrong.
Being so reductionist in an attempt to be "logical" leads nowhere. Life has aspects of it that can't be rationalized, and no human being makes perfect logical sense. Trying to be "perfectly logical" just turns you into an asshole who is unable to understand other people. You see a lot of roughly college-age people on the internet trying to be super logical in an attempt to look smart, but they just end up looking like gigantic tools.
FriedConsole
Banned
There is a lot of "don't think about it too much". I think we should think about it. To me anybody that believes in a concept of love is not a true Atheist because you believe in something spiritual and not scientific.
cereal_killerxx
Junior Member
It's more than just chemicals. There is a spiritual side to love as well.
A Fish Aficionado
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
That's dumb. Like saying there is no consciousness because of spiritual concepts, or thinking about the duality of consciousness.
That just seems like one of the overreaching conclusions that new atheism brings on. Like atheists don't marry or have relationships.
What about concepts of justice? Happiness? Those aren't strictly empirical concepts.
lol
I'd recheck the definition of "atheism" if I were you. Hint: it's in the name. You're thinking of "rationalism", if I have my epistemological systems correct, and a myopic view of it to boot.
Even these guys wouldn't assert something so naively condescending.
Spiritwalker
Member
Anything can be explained in scientific terms. Doesn't make the feeling any less magical.
LookAtMeGo
Member
Lmao.
So you will never tell your partner you love them?
HappyBivouac
Member
Depends on what you mean by "just" a chemical reaction. Everything that happens in your brain is chemical.
But it's the best chemical reaction.
But it's the best chemical reaction.
CharminUltra
Member
So since god is love, does that mean god is a chemical reaction?
cereal_killerxx
Junior Member
To embrace that is to deny the supernatural side of things.
umop_3pisdn
Member
It absolutely isn't. We can be unsure if we're having a hallucinatory experience, but we can't be unsure of whether we're having an experience. Trying to establish knowledge decidedly in the former over the latter is a product of a weird epistemological exercise that probably started with the Greeks and then was carried on by Descartes and others. We tend to think that our minds are somehow more reliable because the objects they can conceive of are fixed and thus 'reliable'. We can, for example, conceive a thousand-sided polyhedron rationally, but we can't visually imagine one. This makes it seem like our means of directly interacting with the world is somehow faulty, so enter Plato and other dualists.
But if we want to understand what is real, the answer seems to be neither materialism nor idealism, because both of those are completely unnecessary theories that actually warp our perception of experience to make it agree with them. It doesn't mean we can't use the sciences to acquire kinds of knowledge, but that knowledge will only be abstracted mental models like that imagined polyhedron. To then go on to say that that is more real than our actually experienced reality is getting into some kind of perverse Cartesian dualism.
And I'm saying that you're engaging in a kind of Cartesian dualism. None of that seems in any way essential, an intelligent person could learn all about their feelings merely by observing them, the saner philosophers have been doing it for forever. If it spares us from reducing an actual palpable experience to the movement of hypothetical quanta then we've avoided the far more pressing problem of reinterpreting our experiences as something that they're not, because we can no longer look through our layer of theory to actually get to them to look at them with a sane inquisitive mind.
There is no supernatural side of things.
Airola
Member
Yes, and when the sun dies, the universe collapses and time stops existing, every single feeling anyone ever had will be completely meaningless. Then, what once mattered something to someone, doesn't even exist in anyone's memory anymore. Then, if by a "butterfly effect" some feeling caused something happen 1000 years after the feeling had happened, it also doesn't matter anymore. When there is only an empty void, every good deed are completely forgotten and have no value whatsoever, and it's the same with every atrocity anyone has ever done, and every feeling of sympathy anyone ever had for the victims of those atrocities also don't matter and have no value at all.
That's the ultimate endgame for naturalism and atheism.
Now however, you can choose to believe that falling in love is not just a chemical reaction, but that the chemical reactions are necessary to connect our physical bodies to love, which still exists even if we temporarily might not feel it. Love would be there without the chemicals, but the chemicals help our bodies to recognize it better.
Also, falling in love is different than being in love. And "being in love" is different that actually being in love, which happens when person doesn't require the chemicals to remind them of it anymore.
That's the ultimate endgame for naturalism and atheism.
Now however, you can choose to believe that falling in love is not just a chemical reaction, but that the chemical reactions are necessary to connect our physical bodies to love, which still exists even if we temporarily might not feel it. Love would be there without the chemicals, but the chemicals help our bodies to recognize it better.
Also, falling in love is different than being in love. And "being in love" is different that actually being in love, which happens when person doesn't require the chemicals to remind them of it anymore.
cereal_killerxx
Junior Member
Prove it.
NoblesseOblige
Banned
Love is increased blood flow to the fun bits. I don't know whether that comes from chemicals or not.
- Status