Lust is fire, passion; love is cooler.Originally Posted by cl154576
Sure, but human beings are social animals.
Lust is fire, passion; love is cooler.
Sure, but human beings are social animals.
Yet almost all people that think they're "falling in love" are just lusting for a genetically-desirable phenotype and don't realise it.
I'm not arguing that love doesn't exist anyway - just that it's a human construct and highly overrated. Most people have no concept of what it actually is. If someone has been partnered to the same person for more than 20 years and can honestly say they're still madly in love with their spouse, I'll accept they know what they're talking about, but less than that, possibly not.
Go to work, get married, have some kids, pay your taxes, pay your bills, watch your tv, follow fashion, act normal, obey the law and repeat after me: "I am free."
Anon
The longevity of a relationship is no proof of its authenticity. There is no way of proving love which makes song writers happy and poets miserable.
No you are wrong. Everybody is not lonely on a deeper or outer level. Do not judge things by what you experienced or read about. There are other domains of reality you have yet to experience
Like outer space, man.
Down here on this planet you can have love, trust. Every human is capable of loving and hating and it lies in us too ignite the flame in the other.
Nobody is completely insensitive, though moderately or greatly he or she is but under certain circumstances the flame of love might have been extinguished, and if you have it, the capacity to love you can reignite that spark
I beg to differ, but maybe I'm just luckier than most.
What's to prove? That emotions exist? We know that already; we know where they occur in the brain, what chemicals they release and what actions they produce, such as why your heart beats faster when with the one you lust after.
Go to work, get married, have some kids, pay your taxes, pay your bills, watch your tv, follow fashion, act normal, obey the law and repeat after me: "I am free."
Anon
Love is not just the chemical reaction when catalyzed, my friend.
Random struggles to define love so it doesn't exist are misleading not to say pointless. Love is not just lust, otherwise you cannot love the ugly. If you're just discussing "couple love" then you're probably stretching the concept too thin -which you can do ad infinitum until it ceases to exist-.
Is love overrated? Probably. Is pain underrated? Definitively. The real question is: Can you blame them?
My blog about literature (in spanish): http://otrasbentilaciones.wordpress.com/
I haven't said it is. Most of it is human construct: learned behaviour.
Go to work, get married, have some kids, pay your taxes, pay your bills, watch your tv, follow fashion, act normal, obey the law and repeat after me: "I am free."
Anon
Love is an evolutionary adaptation.
You love your family because they share your genes and you love your lover because it increases your chances of reproduction.
There are parts of our brain involved in forming long lasting attachments to other individuals. We can see this activity in the brain structure of monogamous mole rats. Part of us simply can't help forming emotional dependencies on contact with other human beings, love certainly exist in that sense.
As a social construct, when we seek to say X is love and Y is not love. We are playing a game of social exclusion, trying to legitimize the emotional experiences of others because we disapprove. Who's to say that the loose woman with a different lover every week does not love. And I'm no stranger to the kind of rhetoric used against lesbians and gays to suggest their emotional relationships are less legitimate than heterosexual ones.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
Hmmm. Love involving sexual fidelity increases a man's "chances of reproduction". I wouldn't have guessed that, but I'm glad cyberbob has educated me.
Everything is an "evolutionary adaptation", I suppose, but so what? How does that help us understand love? Or is it simply a facile truism that has little or not explanatory value?
Monogamy is adaptive to a point, mostly as a way to sequester females from potential mating conflict. In that way, an emotional connection to sexual partners helps drive the prevention of being cuckolded, and also acts as an incentive to stick around and improve one's fitness through improving offspring survival.
Of course, it's also adaptive to sleep around if you can get away with it and cuckold other males. Conflicting selective pressures are common in evolutionary biology.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
I doubt OrphanPip knows whether monogamy or polygamy is 'adaptive'. That's one (of the many) problems with evolutionary explanations for complex, culutrally constituted behaviors. People simply assume that if a trait exists, it must have adaptive value. This is a logical error. Evolutionary theory states that if a (inheritable) trait has adaptive value, it will tend to spread.
Simple logic tells us that we cannot infer from our acceptance of this postulate that if a trait has spread, it has adaptive value. If A, then B does NOT imply: If B, then A. We're simply guessing as to whether monogamy or polygamy have adaptive value -- I'll grant that it makes sense that they probably do (in particular situations) but to "explain" the traits based on a wild guess seems a little silly, especially when the guess offers no predictive or explanatory value.
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