What is love????

[Taybah]

Some say its shows in your actions while others believe its a feeling

[Dreamwoven]

Can't it be both?

[Taybah]

Not really! LOVE shows in your actions
This is how the other person come to know that you love them

[Dreamwoven]

That's a clever game. You wait to see the answer given and then decide the response. Caught me out, it did:)

[fudgetusk]

I came to the conclusion that love is enjoyment, and enjoyment is learning and learning is surprise. Love is being surprised.

[kiz_paws]

Well, the concept of LOVE has always been a very broad one, in my humble mind.
There is the love of coffee (or whatever your pleasure is)
There is the love of your pet dog (or whatever pet you have in your life)
There is the love of solitude in nature,
There is the love of you to your parents/family
and ... there is the love of your soul mate, one whom you commit a lifetime to.

So..... having said all this, what is LOVE? It covers enjoyment (coffee), it covers a deep feeling of affection (your family or pet, etc.) ...

If we are speaking of LOVE in the sense of finding a soul mate and joining two lives as one, well, then LOVE is bliss. LOVE is commitment. LOVE is acceptance. LOVE is dependable.... I could go on and on.

Anyhow, them's my thoughts on the subject. :)

[Yorick7]

I think the easy part of the definition is all the good, wonderful stuff, from deep fascination to euphoria. The hard part of the definition is that a true love would give up everything to save the beloved. There are a million definitions for "give up everything" (including to die) and "save," but the idea is that it is selfless action, perhaps unfathomably selfless action.

[YesNo]

Given brain research on sexuality there is an individual component of love that comes prior to culture. It is important to acknowledge this so one can go beyond it. That it depends on chemical sources of pleasure as well as pain implies that we have some free will. Our species tries to guide our free will by making sure that enough of us reproduce, hence this carrot-stick chemical motivation in our brain toward how we express some aspects of love.

Some would say the individual, isolated brain is all there is to love, but I think the brain is only an epiphenomenon of love. Love is beyond the individual, even the group viewed as an aggregate of individuals. It manifests itself as individuals who have the ability to act and feel love as their bodies permit. This universal mind comes first, individuals (of various species) second. As individuals we participate in this universal mind/love and we love to the extent our bodies permit us to.

This also motivates us to participate in, as well as resist, group activities. That leads to evolutionary change. This makes what is referred to as “natural selection” also an epiphenomenon of this universal mind/love.

Just some thoughts, trying to tie together different perspectives I've been looking at lately.

[fudgetusk]

Love is God's drug to keep us from being monsters.

[Pompey Bum]

If so, it doesn't work very well. :)

[fudgetusk]

You need to find a better dealer. :)

[Pompey Bum]

Ah, but there is no other. Which makes me think it is our responsibility to kill the monsters in our own hearts and turn ourselves to God's love. Opiates are for *sses not masses. :)

[fudgetusk]

You cannot escape drugs. everything is a drug. anything that has an effect on you is a drug. God is a living narcotic. Self aware heroin.

[Pompey Bum]

Do you know this from personal experience?

[fudgetusk]

It is from logic that I stretched like a piece of chewing gum.

[Lemonade]

Love is the reason we get up in the morning and go to bed at night. Love is selfish and selfless, a motivator and a deterrent, a reason to life and die. In the end it all comes down to love.

[Pompey Bum]

It is from logic that I stretched like a piece of chewing gum.

Well, my advice is that you scrape it off your shoe and turn your heart to the Good. Whether you do, of course, is your own choice (which suggests to me that God is not heroin, but good luck with that).

[fudgetusk]

Well, my advice is that you scrape it off your shoe and turn your heart to the Good. Whether you do, of course, is your own choice (which suggests to me that God is not heroin, but good luck with that).

I thought I was turning my heart to good. Truth is good...isn't it? suppose it wasn't? What if God lives a lie to keep us happy? Maybe we are not wise enough yet to know the truth about love or anything.

[fudgetusk]

Love is the reason we get up in the morning and go to bed at night. Love is selfish and selfless, a motivator and a deterrent, a reason to life and die. In the end it all comes down to love.

all comes down to love? What about horrid things like what Corey Feldman went through? Surely that wasn't love.

[Pompey Bum]

If we are not yet wise enough to know truth then you could not possibly know that you have turned your heart to the Good by virtue of the fact that truth is good. And since false premises produce false conclusions, your chewing gum logic may be useless, too. How could you possibly know?

[fudgetusk]

If we are not yet wise enough to know truth then you could not possibly know that you have turned your heart to the Good by virtue of the fact that truth is good. And since false premises produce false conclusions, your chewing gum logic may be useless, too. How could you possibly know?

You've formed a Mobius strip with words. Beats me.

Orrrrrr. I have reached a level of wisdom so I am allowed to know the truth. Maybe I should not share it. That would make me the devil.

[Pompey Bum]

You've formed a Mobius strip with words. Beats me.

I'll take that as a concession. Have a nice day. :)

[fudgetusk]

I'll take that as a concession. Have a nice day. :)

As I did not understand your point I cannot concede. You could be talking nonsense.

[fudgetusk]

So yeah. Love is a drug.

[Lemonade]

all comes down to love? What about horrid things like what Corey Feldman went through? Surely that wasn't love.

I never specified a love for what or whom. Love of self, power, money, another person, a beliefs system, one of them (or any other) is always at play.

[YesNo]

Love is God's drug to keep us from being monsters.

Without the chemicals in the brain we would not survive as a species since we would not reproduce. However, I don’t think we would be monsters. We would not exist. For our species (as well as other pair bonding species) we need two types of love-motivating chemicals that can be found within our individual bodies: (1) We need to be motivated by pleasure to reproduce, and (2) we need to be motivated by pain to keep the reproductive pair together.

That there are pleasure-pain approaches to achieve this implies we can make choices which go against them. The very existence of these chemicals imply we have some free will. We are agents.

If we were isolated individuals, it would stop there. We would be our individuated bodies. However, we are also members of a species, not isolated members of an aggregate or group. How we relate to our communities comes from motivation outside our individual selves. This is where we can talk about our species and perhaps other forms of consciousness above our own and get to God or Universal Mind or Love.

The motivation I am talking about can also be explored scientifically through studies asking if aspects of morality originate in our species. See Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” to see how this can be developed from an atheistic perspective. It doesn’t have to go all the way to God, but I don’t think it makes sense not to go all the way.

[fudgetusk]

Something to read about love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_basis_of_love

https://www.zenlama.com/oxytocin-the-love-hormone-vs-cortisol-the-stress-hormone-a-complete-comparison/

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/275795.php

This one you should read.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9080749/Love-really-is-a-drug-scientists-find.html

"The brains of people shown images of their lovers react similarly to those of drug addicts, a US experiment found. "

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/loves-evolver/201302/the-science-behind-falling-in-love

[fudgetusk]

Without the chemicals in the brain we would not survive as a species since we would not reproduce. However, I don’t think we would be monsters. We would not exist. For our species (as well as other pair bonding species) we need two types of love-motivating chemicals that can be found within our individual bodies: (1) We need to be motivated by pleasure to reproduce, and (2) we need to be motivated by pain to keep the reproductive pair together.

That there are pleasure-pain approaches to achieve this implies we can make choices which go against them. The very existence of these chemicals imply we have some free will. We are agents.

If we were isolated individuals, it would stop there. We would be our individuated bodies. However, we are also members of a species, not isolated members of an aggregate or group. How we relate to our communities comes from motivation outside our individual selves. This is where we can talk about our species and perhaps other forms of consciousness above our own and get to God or Universal Mind or Love.

The motivation I am talking about can also be explored scientifically through studies asking if aspects of morality originate in our species. See Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” to see how this can be developed from an atheistic perspective. It doesn’t have to go all the way to God, but I don’t think it makes sense not to go all the way.

There is a psychological aspect to love. Which is a fear based psychology. We fear being alone. Because we can better protect ourselves in a group. Animals do not have this on the whole. evolution did not go that way.

Love is fear. And a drug.

As for the spiritual aspects we can only guess. I believe if love is a spiritual energy(words do not really work with this kind of thinking)then it has an effect on us. Otherwise why would it exist? It brings pleasure. Anything that skews your mind in the favour of pleasure is a drug and is a form of mind control. If not then heaven will be just as bad a place as earth.

conjecture, but logical?

True with out any influence we would be nothing. I would take love over hate. But I have no illusions that all things are a form of restraint. Even my words.

[YesNo]

Prairie voles have pair-bonding like we do. These animals helped researchers in the late 20th century identify where our pair-bonding came from.

At the individual level we can study the brain and try to see what influences our minds there. Calling those influences a “drug” makes sense to me. The extreme, materialist (or physicalist) view is that our brains generate our minds, but I don’t think that is true.

If it is not true then there are other sources outside of us that also provide us with an influence or drug. I think one can immediately point to the species level for the source of this larger influence. This means the Universal Mind(s) is at least as large as each species of life out there. Just establishing the existence of that is problematic for the physicalist view because it means our minds are not reducible to our brains. The brain becomes more like a transformer of a larger mind.

I think there is evidence for a larger influence than our brains in Niles Eldredge’s punctuated equilibrium, a species based view of Darwinian evolution, in Robert Prechter’s social mood using Elliott Waves in socionomics and in Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations that we participate in prior to socialization. I don’t know if any of these people are theists, but their arguments don’t depend on theism.

The kinds of restraint we experience are evidence that we are not determined. In spite of all the environmental influences, both from within and from without us, the fact that they are carrots and sticks, pleasures and pain, “drugs” suggest to me that we are agents, able to make choices, or there would be a stricter determinism involved, more like pressing a button on a robot kind of determinism.

[fudgetusk]

Depends how tasty the carrot is. Brain love can sure be powerful. It's an influence. That's what I'm saying. God love, if it is as good as some say, would be even more of an influence. The debate between influence and determinism is difficult to evaluate. Who knows how many subtle influences there are in any decision we make. Mentalists demonstrate how predictable and easily influenced we are.

>>Niles Eldredge’s punctuated equilibrium

There is a conspiracy theorist who relies on science called David Wilcock. who says there is fossil evidence that there are leaps in evolution across the planet every few thousand years. Animals die off and new ones appear. I haven't read his evidence though. He puts it down to cosmic rays. :) He says we are due one of these change periods. Hope I develop a trunk.

[ALIEN]

An idea, often confused with "like" or "lust".

[YesNo]

Depends how tasty the carrot is. Brain love can sure be powerful. It's an influence. That's what I'm saying. God love, if it is as good as some say, would be even more of an influence. The debate between influence and determinism is difficult to evaluate. Who knows how many subtle influences there are in any decision we make. Mentalists demonstrate how predictable and easily influenced we are.

>>Niles Eldredge’s punctuated equilibrium

There is a conspiracy theorist who relies on science called David Wilcock. who says there is fossil evidence that there are leaps in evolution across the planet every few thousand years. Animals die off and new ones appear. I haven't read his evidence though. He puts it down to cosmic rays. :) He says we are due one of these change periods. Hope I develop a trunk.

I haven’t read Wilcock either, but I don’t trust neo-Darwinism (phyletic gradualism) and it doesn't seem like Wilcock does either. I don’t think the every few thousand years is correct. Perhaps he is saying something different? It does not seem to be cyclic so much as spiral-like. I expect the human species to be around for hundreds of millions if not billions of years from now without undergoing phyletic gradualism although some speciation might occur.

I recommend Niles Eldredge’s “Eternal Ephemera” (2015) for a survey of ideas associated with Darwinian evolution. He and Gould promoted punctuated equilibrium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

[mtpspur]

Speaking only for myself I think for the me the highest form of love I have bene capable of is always putting the welfare, needs, and desires of the other entirely before my own with no real attempt to make a claim for myself in return. I have been honored in return with trust, care and a true concern for my hopes, desires and needs. There has what began as affection and friendliness to a genuine care for the other and without really either of us 'working' at it-it has become a relationship of great value and a firm foundation bsed on mutual respect and yes--love--of a sort (for this I mean-a deep friendship--not erotic in nature.

[Dreamwoven]

Love is something that takes a long time to bring rewards. One must be patient, which, when young, is not always easy. Always rushing for the next thrill...

[YesNo]

If we are in a rationalist perspective, love is a relationship between individuals. If we are in a traditional perspective love sustains a local community and beyond.

It is very hard to see this traditional perspective today. Today we confuse love with individual altruism toward other individuals aggregated into groups (not communities) as opposed to individual selfishness generated by the chemicals in our individual brains. True, our individual bodies will need erotic love for the species to survive, but we are not forced into erotic relationships.

These pleasure/plain chemicals encourage pairing up and not leaving for our pair-bonding species, but they do not force it upon us. There is more. It is that more we have forgotten, thinking we know it all today. The living out of the experience of love keeps bringing us back to reality to continue to question rationalist common sense.