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what is love?

RGB said:
I think I'll take a shot at this, since I'm in the mood to ramble. :)

In my opinion, love, like every other emotion, drives a wedge between objective and subjective views of existence.

If you try to view the universe objectively, you come to the conclusion that emotions are at best survival mechanisms, and at worst some kind of confusing side effect of being the gross biological beings that we are. A holistic view of the universe in the objective sense emphasizes passiveness, and awareness (and consequently intent) is merely a transient and meaningless phenomena.

If you instead view the universe subjectively, emotions become the sublime motivating force. We trust personal experience over the usual observation and pattern recognition, and the more inchoate and unconscious the experience, the more we tend to trust it. I think this is what people mean by "going with a gut feeling" -- the less able one is to examine the source of an impulse, the more it becomes a part of that mystical personal identity that we can appeal to for truth.

I think it's the tension between these two perspectives, each of which seem equally likely, that makes emotion so confusing. Throw psychedelics into the mix, which in my opinion make one far more aware of the internal workings of our bodies/minds, and you're practically forced into confronting this puzzling dichotomy.

<<Insert standard disclaimer about having drank too much coffee, having had too little sleep, not having learned grammar correctly as a child, etc.>>
Click to expand...

Impressive post. :) Ultimately, subjective experience IS objective. Because you experience something, it must truly exist in some form (however, this form is something we can never be truly certain of -- whether it's the result of neurotransmitters binding at receptor sites in the brain, or if it's all a massive illusion).

In case anyone cares about my quirky ideas, my latest theory is that love is a signal, within our biology, which alerts us to the fact that we've begun to channel a constructive or "positive" energy of some sort. Let me clarify. Consider the premise that reality was engineered to maximize constructive energies -- in this case, the inclusion within this reality of machines of some sort, designed to sense and then seek this energy, would logically follow. Human beings, biologically hard-wired to seek and maximize the generation of the internal signal which we call "love", or sometimes in less profound cases "pleasure", are these machines.

Imagine the human race as a giant network of organic supercomputers, programmed to focus our computational capability toward carrying out the "divine will". Weird, I know. These aren't "beliefs" of mine, simply ideas that I enjoy toying with.


Oh, and pain is a distinct lack of aforementioned energy, and therefore our behavioral tendency to avoid it is also advantageous (i.e. maximizes the energy).
 
Love is definitely an abstract notion that the word "love" completely fails to capture, that said, you will know when your in it. for me it was like waking up for the first time in my life, ha well the second, the first real awakening for me was mushrooms
 
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