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[ZdkDzk]

It's as much a chemical reaction as anything else we feel. Everyone is (as far a we know) a series of chemical reactions chained together to create a continuous consciousness. But being human, we apply value and meaning and purpose to things that lack them (everything really). That generally includes love.

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 don't buy that. Yeah, love in the philosophical sense is a human construct, and some cultures will foster and create their own brand of love; but love as a feeling, a type of intamacy is programmed into us. I think the thing you're talking about is romanticism (or what led to it) and it wasn't exclusively (or even primarily) about love. That world view, which very much continues to tint our modern day perception of love, is a social construct.

Also what you're saying only makes sense if marriage and love are european creations that were then exported around the world, as opposed to something that happens naturally as a result of humans living together.

 

[CronoShot]

Spoiler

The worst

 

[pelicansurf]

I have not read all 6 pages, but my only thing to contribute is that there a bunch of crazy people who have fallen in love with miscellaneous female/male employee at their go-to store by just looking at them. This is strictly anecdotal and probably partially based off the "stalker" image most media has implanted in my head.

Thus it is obviously a chemical reaction.

 

[SturokBGD]

The moment I fell in love with my wife to be the skies literally cleared and a sunbeam shone down on us both.

Also the sex was great.

 

[Chola]

Spoiler

The worst

yep, love is astrology

 

[soleil]

Is an orgasm just a bunch of muscle spasms?

 

[Miles Quaritch]

To embrace that is to deny the supernatural side of things.

I laughed heartily at this.

Well done.

 

[freethoughtbubble]

You're not wrong OP but your mistake is making it seem like that somehow devalues what love is. That's why your friends balked.

Spoiler

The worst

I swear you can see Hathaway's very intellect rebelling on her face at the words coming out of her mouth in this scene. Looks painful.

 

[Comfort Jones]

Spoiler

The worst

I loved that film and that scene still hurts like a kick in the nuts.

 

[Sibylus]

All of the best things and feelings in life are the results of chemical reactions, but you don't lapse into cynicism about the joys of food, learning, or sensation because the last of each disappointed, do you?

You're right in the most technical and reductionist of senses, yet your friends are right to say you're in error. You've wrangled a simple, singular fact of nature into being justification for a pessimistic worldview. Life is not so easy.

 

[Zaptruder]

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.

Ultimately, there's always a lot of different ways to get to the same destination. See exercise. One can do it intuitively, or one can do so with a best understanding of nutrition and biomedical science.

I mean, you say that the extra layer of theory holds one back from interpreting (and by implication appreciating and controlling) the subjective state, but the flipside is it provides some structure for one to make sense of the subjective state - because not all minds have that ability to drill down and really grasp at what those subjective states mean on a more intuitive basis - Indeed most minds are stuck in a very superficial sense of the subjective.

Honestly, I don't quite understand your need to be antagonistic towards empiricism given that the field of neuroscience, cognitive science, neurophilosophy, etc have helped to further refine and improve our understanding of among other things, mindfulness, happiness, love - helping us better and more consistently achieve the desired results and goals.

It also aligns well with the cultural mindset of contemporary nation states - the sort of cultural bubble in which other cultures of mindfulness evolved are largely lost to us now, making it more difficult for us to truly appreciate the intent behind those teachings.

Reading your reply above what I've quoted - it seems your primary objection is 'cartesian dualism' where you believe there shouldn't be a division... but here's the thing - the material universe is the universe from which our minds draw forth its interpretation and experience of the universe. While in our minds, the universe must necessarily exist as a subjective experience of that universe - there must exist this universe that exists independently of our minds in order for others to have their subjective perception of this objective reality.

If there wasn't this split between the material universe and the universe of the mind, then the universe would absolutely be significantly less reliable and much more uncertain and shifting for all parties - unable to come to agreement on an external objective form.

 

[twobear]

Btw I don't think Descartes was concerned with thinking that the contents of your mind was more real than the contents of the external world, only that only the contents of your mind is knowable in the sense of your having certainty about it. It's an epistemological thesis, not an ontological one.