Is Love the Universal Language of All Beings?

[hamlet69]

why is love or the concept of love our automatic responce to life , why not hate or fear or anything else , i believe that love is in us as a programe it drives us , it needs us but does it make the world go around or is that just money (ha ha) , love for all the joy and fear it gives us i believe is the primey emotion for us humans but does it also exist in other animals ,plants or even the earth?

 

[Another God]

You talk of love as if it is a tangible item. As if it is a thing that exists, flowing around amongst all the matter...

Love is just an emotional response within the brain to stimulus. It exists only in so far as you feel it. Does it drive us? Absolutely...when it is the driving force. When it isn't, it doesn't. Fear, adrenalin, desire etc all do just as good jobs at driving us. Each has their place, and each do their own particular job.

Does it exist in other animals? I'm almost certain it does. Whether it is 'the same' or not is up to debate, but similar motivators exist within them, otherwise there would be no pattern to the behaviour.

 

[einsteinian77]

How do you assume to have such a universal definition of love? I think love can have several definitions other than just emotions and "good" feelings. Can't love exist in a logical form too. Certainly things such as sacrifice, devotion, and will are assets of love that are manifestations beyond a mere "feeling" and could involve very high forms of contemplation other than just a programed biological feature.

There is no doubt that a form of love exists primitively in most beings as only a function of insuring the survival of their prosperity. However, that is probably one of the lowest forms of it in my opinion.

To address your question, I think that love is associated with life because love mainly encompasses compassion, and compassion is a trait that the highest forms of life have.

 

[Another God]

I assume it because i have never seen any evidence for love outside of biological organism belief, action and imagination.

Being entirely biological doesn't mean that these emotions can't cause actions and therefore be expressed in action. Of course devotion, sacrifice etc are linked to love...but that doesn't contradict the claim that love is only a mental phenomenon of biological organisms.

As for low form of love and high form of love, i believe that the only difference between human 'love' and 'arbitrary animal x' love, is that we suffer from an accompanying decievement within our minds that make us believe that we have something special.

 

[einsteinian77]

An accompanying decievement? Not really its more of a fact that our love is on a different level than "some arbitrary animal x". I don't see any animal giving its life up for anything other than food or its' own self gratification in any case. It seems a little narrow minded to think biology is the solution to such a complex question.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Actually some mother birds will put their own lives in danger, feigning being wounded, to distract a predator from their nest. And of course worker bees and ants sacrifice their whole lives to the good of the nest. There is enough of this that evolutionists saw a problem of profitless self-sacrifice, how could it be explained evolutionarily?

The answer turned out to be kin-selection. An animal posseses successful genes. To be successful a gene doen't always have to give every animal that posseses it a survival edge. If the community of animals that possesses it - the kin-group - can survive at the expense of some of its members dying, that doesn't bother the gene. It will still be passed down to the next generation. So genes for this behavior can evolve and become fixed in a population.

 

[einsteinian77]

but that's not exactly a conscious decision made by them. They don't exactly see both sides of the situation they merely act on instinct.

 

[Another God]

And you think the 'conscious decisions' that we make are actually any different (in the end) to the instinctual decisions made by animals?

Have you ever wondered what it is exactly that makes you feel a particular way? Wondered what it is that makes you 'consciously decide' one thing over another? Thats instinct...

 

[selfAdjoint]

Testimony: When I fell head over heels in love there was no reason or choice about it; it just happened to me like hunger or a headache. I had plenty of thoughts and choices after that but they were all just responses to a given condition. And I believe the question before the house is: Why does that happen to us?

 

[Another God]

exactly. And so I return to my previous claim: Our love is most likely exactly the same as animals, the only difference being that we suffer from an accompanying deceivement. We fool ourselves into believing it is something more than it is.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I thoroughly agree. More personal witness, when I was in that love condition I noticed that (just as the songs say) everything I saw seemed brighter than before. I tracked that down to something going on in the edge detection part of my visual system. And that could only be the effect of some neurotransmitter or other. So then I thought, why do we have this condition, "love" which is mediated by changes in our brain chemistry?

Here is the answer I came up with. YMMD. Chimps go into heat; reasonable guess, our hominid ancestors went into heat. Chimp heat is accompanied by vivid color diplays in the female's sexual regions, and it's reasonable to suppose that the male's visual system is modified to bring those dispays especially to his attention.

Now suppose that in the course of hominid evolution, the heat function was lost. We no longer go into heat. But evolution has no delete key; unless some positive evolutionary cause supervenes, a structure once evolved will remain. So we still have heat mechanisms in our brains. Once in a while some random factor sets them off. And we rationalize that as "love".

 

[einsteinian77]

When I'm talking about love i don't just mean a sexual attraction, which do result in the things that your talking about such as emotional responses to brain stimulus, rapid heart beat, not being able to eat, etc.. No, I'm talking about the ability to trust and to care without any feelings or emotions getting in the way at all. As a matter of fact the love I'm talking about doesn't make you "feel good" because the point of it is is to make others feel good. Its the ability to see yourself in something that's not you. I think that's something that you have learn not something that is already in your DNA.

 

[Another God]

Oh, well that's basically a loyalty function. Something necessarily evolved as a way to maintain social structure. You can't really ahve a society where the members of that society don't trust each other can you? So now we get to know individuals, and if they prove themselves time and time again, we come to trust them. We believe that they will continue helping us, so we in return will continue helping them. We care for them, because we know that they will reciprocate. (IMO)

Still biological though (thats part of being a biological creature...everything is biological)

 

[selfAdjoint]

einsteinian, the kind of love you mean I call dearness. My wife an I had 35 years of dearness together. It grows from give and take, from sacrifice on both sides, from good times and bad, from fighting and making up. It is stronger after many years than it was in the beginning.

And as you say, it owes nothing to, uh, canned heat.