A word on love
January 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The thoughts below are all pseudo-science and just my views on the subject:
Under Greek philosophy, love is categorized into several types such as affectionate, intimate, selfless love and the love for the supernatural (Deities). Bearing in mind that people experience these emotions, we can safely assume that they culminate from various hormonal mixtures. Generally these types of love provide people with feelings of well to do or comfort, for instance in loving a brother or god respectively. Because these consequential feelings are felt within the person experiencing them, we can also safely ascribe them to the hormonal alterations that occurred from experiencing love.
So basically love makes people happy thanks to the rewarding properties of dopamine and what have you. Unfortunately the intimate type needs some kind of reciprocity – I’ve never met a person that felt limerence for another while being acquiescent with the fact that the other person is completely apathetic about the situation. I’d go so far as to say that people don’t really seek love but seek reciprocity instead and just want to see their own desires mirrored from another person. It would explain why people impartial to emotion don’t seek love – because they themselves are impartial, don’t desire to have love beset upon them.
If this were true, why people feel a love for the deities is well beyond me. But perhaps the delusion that their feelings are being appreciated by a super-being is enough for their brains to reward them anyway. This sort of turns everyone into a drug addict – everybody is out to find the next rush, all good intention is just a ruse to get the kick of dopamine that will be excreted for behaving in an apt manner. All the stoics would then be considered as having underdeveloped hypothalamus parts in their brains.
