So is love just a chemical reaction in the brain that identifies an ideal mate? is that all to it?

No.
I think there is sexual instinct, in that when we see naked members of the opposite sex we are sexually aroused but that is not how self-conscious beings solely chose their mates.

There is also aesthetic judgement which seems to be lacking in most of the animal world. We find human beings beautiful like we find work of arts beautiful. We see beauty in symmetry, efficient proportions, uniformity in diversity, ordinariness, and subsumption under an ideal of perfection(alpha male/female which changes with society).

Love is more of an emotional connection, for me anyway, I tend to think of holding hands and laying next to someone rather than thinking of sexual desires when I get a major crush on someone.

Is this autism...

it can. i mean, the chemical reaction has to be caused by something.

why dont people just do MDMA all the time then? even if we set aside social restrictions and opinions, what if everyone did that instead of "looking for love"?

>We find human beings beautiful like we find work of arts beautiful.

i agree. but isnt "symmetry, efficient proportions, uniformity in diversity, ordinariness, and subsumption etc." just what triggers the chemicals? why do those things trigger them?

what im proposing is what if your emotions are just chemicals? do they have any other significant value? especially if your this user and can just replicate that with drugs?

Why don't they?

I mean this whole shit in the middle east would be solved if we put MDMA in the drinking water.

>not including vasopressin

That's arguably the main hormone in male pair bonding.

Read The Brain in Love and Lust by Helen Fisher

No. Nothing is A chemical reaction. That shit it stupid and reductionist, the brain doesn't works like that.

Now if you were asking
>Is love the product of our brain or os there some invisible-to-our-eyes mystic connection?
I believe its more likely the first one. That doesn't make it any less magic anyway. It still feels absolutely awesome to love someone and be loved and sharing that with another human being is incredible.

Love is a miracle from God. Cherish it.

Cartesian dualist here.

I think the soul exists and that at its core it is a substantial unity with self-referential knowing and the harmony of this self-knowing is what is experienced as love.

I think that free will exists and that the soul and brain are inter-related. The soul causes changes in the brain which causes changes in the soul.

Taking ecstasy to experience feelings of pure love further support my case. You don't need a woman to feel love, it exists in your self. The feelings of romantic love are an expansive variety of the love we feel all the time for activities or our selves.

No.

Love is an emotion, which is a more complicated thing than just a simple chemical reaction. It's many billions of chemical reactions that play off one another in a way that we don't quite understand fully

Everything is just a chemical reaction in your brain. Even your perception of this post is a chemical reaction in your brain, then your """""decision""""" to give me a (you) or not will be another chemical reaction that your brain does for you.

Free will doesn't exist.

Interesting post.

i really want to agree

cant tell if youre baiting or not, but if not i hope it is

>the brain and soul are inter-related
thats what i was thinking, but does art reveal something about another yourself in the same way? dont you think thats a bit narcissistic? why wouldnt it reveal the good of the other person?

also, what is beauty according to a cartesian dualist? that title is interesting.

>its not a chemical reaction, its a lot of chemical reactions

what? why havent scientists figured this out yet? how complex is it?

>we're all just slaves to our brain

user, are you baiting?

Cartesian dualism just means that there is a mental reality and a physical reality and that the two are separate as posited by Descartes. The physical is separated into parts and the mind or soul is indivisible.

Beauty to me is a mental phenomena. As Kant put it, the harmonious freeplay between the intuition and the understanding in which each is a further extension of the other.

>just a chemical reaction

This fucking meme needs to stop. The chemical reactions in your brain and the emotion that you experience are correlated but you can't specify where exactly love is found physically. Maybe it's not found in the physical world at all. Saying its "just chemicals in your brain" tells you nothing. Why would you assume that the answer to the question of what love "is" would be found in the material reality? What does the material reality say about anythings meaning? Looking at the material reality in this scenario only tells you what chemical reactions are associated with what emotions, but it tells you nothing at all about the emotions themselves as they are in subjective experience.

>we're all just slaves to our brain
When did I say that? "You" are your brain, you just don't have the conscious control that you think you do.

everything is just the some of its parts.

Why people act like this somehow negates the beauty of it all is beyond me.

these anons aren't ready for this Divine Comedy like catharsis user

fpbp

>you just don't have the conscious control that you think you do.

can you explain?

so, when you're dead, what happens? do you cease to exist or does the physical side cease to work? if you dont feel like answering that, suggest me something to read.

> each is a further extension of the other
what does this mean

youre saying that each is just as good as the whole. its reductive. the whole is better. it also presupposes that humans are just a collection of atoms and shit and denies anything supernatural about people. basically it says humans are machines

When you cease to exist materially, that is the end of the material side of your life, a dot in a vastness of spiritual energy.

I believe that when you die you enter a period of slumber waiting to be revived.

It means that first there is the sense-data of an object, then you have a concept of the object which focuses on the sense-data which further clarifies the concept, and so on and so forth. It results in a specific joy reckoned by Kant to be the joy that is experienced when a purpose is fulfillled.

so no one is responsible for anything they do?

Don't respond to a neurologist. They have no spiritual sense.

but when a man gets shot, he doesnt cease to exist materially, but he is dead. he is "lifeless"

isnt it logical to think that that "lifeness" goes on somewhere else?

what happens in the so on and so forth that results in purposeful joy?

check out the hard problem of consciousness. there is more here than meets the eye.

they have it, they just shut it out because science doesnt accept spirits

>so on and so forth
The concept is further clarified by sense-data and the sense-data is more deeply understood. It appears to exist as if for a purpose or intent which we know not, so Kant calls it the appearance of purpose or "purposeless purpose"

Yes...but

Yes, in the same way the Mona Lisa is just a bunch of plants and rocks smeared on a piece of wood for decorative purposes

>youre saying that each is just as good as the whole. its reductive. the whole is better. it also presupposes that humans are just a collection of atoms and shit and denies anything supernatural about people. basically it says humans are machines

So. I believe this.

Why is this supposed to bother me?

The universe is a recursive rube goldberg machine. It is the lack of predictive power that makes it exciting and beautiful, not the independence of our thoughts and action, which there is no true independence. No true freedom. Just stimuli and response.

Of course they are. As I've already said in a manner of speaking people are their brain, even if they have no conscious control they're still only acting according to their own impulses, instincts and learned behaviour.

Not to mention with the realization that there is no free will comes things like responsibility and punishment/reward become even more important. Because it's not possible to rationally convince someone to stop committing crimes, you have to cultivate an unconscious restraint from crime within them. This is why negative and positive reinforcement works. Not because the offending party is making a logical, utilitarian judgement that they'd rather not commit the act because it's in their interests to get the reward/avoid the punishment. But rather because it trains them to instinctively fear or desire the deed itself by its association with the punishment/reward. Like training a dog.

>can you explain?
Basically what I mean is all our actions and thoughts are manifestations of subconscious activity. For instance if you decide "I'd like to get out of bed now" that was no decision of yours at all, rather it was the realization of what your subconscious has already decided.

Likewise your subconscious is itself informed by external phenomena, which themselves are a chain of events going back to the dawn of the universe and punctuated by random quantum events.

If my brain becomes damaged the ability to feel and express emotions/thoughts is greatly hindered.

I don't see how love isn't just an intricate series of chemical reactions.

I also don't see how love "Just being" a series of chemical reactions should reduce my respect for it, or desire to feel it, or its beauty in the eyes of its many beholden.

Shit is a buncha junk floatin' around and colliding. Stimulus and response. This should bother us why?

Because there isn't something "supernatural"?
What need is there for the supernatural? Everything people like about the supernatural boils down to "it's mysterious" and "it can't be explained." Well fuck, that applies to natural phenomena. You don't need to be a genius to know that things are infinitely reducible and increasingly abstract the closer you get to their essence. Nature itself is on its most fundamental level dodging a clean explanation. You don't need the supernatural when you have an incomprehensible whole, a tiny brain, a finite lifespan, etc.

"supernatural" is just a superstitious name for the beauty and the mystery of the natural world, which is a bunch of junk colliding and no worse for it.

The universe is not just a bunch of junk floating around, it's ordered and subjected to laws which are definable.

Take your fucking hypersimplistic meme worldview back to flatearth gen

ITT: Spooks

*tip

Just because the brain and mind are strongly correlated does not make them the same.

It doesn't make sense that chemical reactions can produce consciousness. There is no adequate physical explanation for consciousness. Science only confers what it detects.

Define consciousness.

The brain may be the machinery used by the body to experience consciousness.

If the machinery is damaged, the body will not experience the sensation. We're not the chemicals, but the messages.

this. the brain is like an antenna by which consciousness is recieved. The chemical reactions are byproducts.

>isnt it logical to think that that "lifeness" goes on somewhere else?
Your body is the meeting place of physical energy and mental energy. Body and mind are intertwined. Your spirit is expressed through your mind. Once the physical body ceases to exist, your spirit continues.

That which is aware. I am aware of many things, love, pain, vision. There is a continuum of awareness uniting all these events. There is an experiencer in the backseat.

Chemicals shooting through a cell just don't add up to consciousness. It's like the ghost in the machine. Taken from a reductionist standpoint we see no trace of it, when we should expect to see something more like a field organizing all of the events of the brain and being informed by all the events of the brain.

We detect electromagnetic fields by there interaction with charged particles and we detect awareness through our subjective phenomena.

>There is no adequate physical explanation for consciousness.
>There is a gap in our knowledge, therefore magic.

Fuck off. There's absolutely no reason to believe in a non-physical explanation aside from our current lack of an explanation, which itself is not reason sufficient.

And what evidence is there for this proposal?

None, I'd suppose, it's a completely deductible argument.

You'd have to build a brain and see if it were conscious or not

How does someone end up like this? Lack of parental attention?

>what youre proposing: theres nothing beyond what we can measure. existence is floating junk that just happens to be here

two questions for you anons:

1. why is there something as opposed to nothing?
2. what was the initial stimuli? (Aristotelian first cause)?

>I also don't see how love "Just being" a series of chemical reactions should reduce my respect for it, or desire to feel it, or its beauty in the eyes of its many beholden.

Because by reducing it to simply the associated material processes, you aren't taking into consideration the emotion as a phenomena. Even if you were to say that love IS the chemical reactions, you would be wrong to say that it is that and ONLY that.

also imwhen it comes to questions regarding what consciousness is and how it comes about, really all you can do is make conjecture.

But it's not really all that deductible. "There's no explanation for our consciousness and the most probable conclusion of a physical one doesn't have satisfactory evidence for it, ergo our brain is an antenna for magic" makes no fucking sense.

Yes. Laws which define the means by which junk floats around.

I'm not trying to demean the world so much as I'm explaining that our capacity to reduce things to predictable laws does not diminish the mystery or the beauty, which are the elements people seem to care most about when they wax sympathetic about the need for the "supernatural" or the "sublime."

Our individual capacity for knowledge is finite, and our time is limited. Why should people be upset by "reductionism" or the lack of the "sublime" "supernatural" and other such hogwash names for what amounts to "as-yet-unexplained material phenomena."

I think you'll find we don't differ too much on this. I hope my flippant choice of words didn't result in you missing my broader point. That would be rather unfortunate.

I think it has less to do with cool and more an awareness of the influence chemicals have on your thoughts and emotions.

>when it comes to questions regarding what consciousness is and how it comes about, really all you can do is make conjecture.

Why are you making conjecture on things you can't possibly have any grounds to claim knowledge of?

>you aren't taking into consideration the emotion as a phenomena. Even if you were to say that love IS the chemical reactions, you would be wrong to say that it is that and ONLY that.

i fucking love this user

>why is there something as opposed to nothing
Because nothing can't exist

There is no initial stimulus, everything was always there, and always will be forever, don't question it

>That which is aware.
In that case consciousness is perfectly physically explained.

There's a clear evolutionary incentive for perception among animals, being able to see and hear nearby danger or goods is for obvious reasons beneficial for survival. Thus why animals that need to look for food and mates are conscious, whereas plants that have sustenance beamed down from the sky and reproduce automatically aren't conscious.

but we can. read aristotle

>but user, infinite series of causes. dont ask why
but the purpose of any logic is to ask why.

without a first cause, there would be no subsequent causes. there couldnt be, it doesnt make sense. plus, do you really believe that something as ordered as reality could come from floating junk?

You mean mr. "I was wrong about everything except for the shit so far off base that you can neither prove nor disprove it, but I'll become popular because my philosophy can be used to legitimize then-conventional institutions of rulership and religion"

Sorry, being able to make a logically coherent argument for something doesn't make it exist, you're not a wizard.

>Because by reducing it to simply the associated material processes

Uh huh....

> you aren't taking into consideration the emotion as a phenomena.

To me, the material process is the phenomenon. Where do you differ?

I think, and I could be wrong, that you're taking the word "reduce" too literally and negatively, and in its original context, as in, "to subtract."

I don't think anything is lost when "reduction" is taken to mean "precisely define."

>Even if you were to say that love IS the chemical reactions, you would be wrong to say that it is that and ONLY that.

There is a feeling that results, yes, but the result is composed of something, and that something is the material phenomena, which taken together and placed into a self-aware feedback loop called consciousness produces a feeling. My ability to take love apart and stitch it back together does not decrease my love for love.

A car mechanic loves his cars, and his love for his cars is increased and informed by his ability to reduce his cars to their components, and recognize them as fundamentally being just that: Their components.

In software languages there is a an abstract superclass for all software objects. The abstract superclass has no properties, and its only purpose is to have subclasses derived from it. It reminds me of Aquinas's "universals."

(was it Aquinas? I'm a pleb on these things)

People take this idea of a "universal essence" from which all other things are derived by the addition of properties, and that things essence makes things greater than the sum of their parts, but the way I see it the "essence" is just one of the parts. Is that so bad? Is it just too autistic for your taste, perhaps?

I don't know.

I feel like we're having the argument in pic related. Again.

Why should we assume there's a first cause beyond the Big Bang?

If at some point there's an end, why not the end we know?

thad bicture gav me gancer :DDDDD

"A phenomenon (Greek: , phainomenon, from the verb phainein, to show, shine, appear, to be manifest or manifest itself, plural phenomena)[1] is any thing which manifests itself. Phenomena are often, but not always, understood as "things that appear" or "experiences" for a sentient being, or in principle may be so.

The term came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon. In contrast to a phenomenon, a noumenon is not directly accessible to observation. Kant was heavily influenced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in this part of his philosophy, in which phenomenon and noumenon serve as interrelated technical terms."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenon

Phenomena in the philosophical sense. Phenomena as it appears to a subject.

Honestly I think reading Kant would help you with this.

>why is it worth knowing

first of all, why stop? we can prove its there, we just can't quantify it like we can a piece of grass.

because it gives a reason to why good things are good. it gives meaning to beauty

whats your definition of "prove"?

>but logically coming to the conclusion that something exists doesnt make it exist

youre in a loophole there. then logic fails. if it fails, then it is not good for anything

>if it fails, then it is not good for anything

Well so far every attempt to conclusively ground anything in logic (that wasn't first built u up around the idea, E.G. computers) has resulted in sweet fuck all.

So it's good for something, it's just not good for anything that wasn't expressly designed to work with it.

yeah, it's pretty great for practical purposes. the same goes for science. science is great for advancement in technology etc but in the end it's just one way of viewing things and most of the time doesn't really inform you on what things mean even if it can give you a picture of what things are or how they might work. I think this is where the necessity of religion comes in.

why are computers good?

i mean, how do you walk around and socialize with people and think "oh, im a machine and this person im having a conversation with is a machine".

who "programmed" computers? humans

who "programmed" humans? ______

>I think this is where the necessity of religion comes in.

I don't think that's necessary either. As a society, we're growing increasingly more OK with the idea that there is no appreciable "why" to everything. But I'm also not from the Bible Belt of the United States.

>In contrast to a phenomenon, a noumenon is not directly accessible to observation.

Here's the thing though. All phenomena are only approximately observable. Even if you have all the current knowledge on physics, you can't be fully precise. There's always more to it, when it comes to any phenomena. This is why looking at components can often multiply the mystery: For instance, you "reduce" a thing to its parts, only to find out that the parts have to be reduced as well. This is why I don't see why "reductionism" as such a cold, sterile, heartless thing that people make it out to be.

Most "nouemon" though, things that aren't instantly observable, like infrared radiation, for instance, are observable if you use tools. The human sense can be extended.

All noumenon are observable with the right tools.

All phenomenon are reducible to nouemon that have yet to be investigated.

What's wrong with this?

>As a society, we're growing increasingly more OK with the idea that there is no appreciable "why" to everything.

i guarantee you, if you go in a crowd and say "hey everyone, existence doesnt have a meaning. youre all just floating space junk" people will be uncomfortable with that idea. people want to know the "why". why then, is religion so popular (still)? people want to know why things have meaning

why dont you? youre not saying i have considered this, and its invalid. youre saying: its not worth considering.

nothing is not worth considering.

also see

Yeah. What else could it possibly be, divine inspiration?

>i guarantee you, if you go in a crowd and say "hey everyone, existence doesnt have a meaning. youre all just floating space junk" people will be uncomfortable with that idea. people want to know the "why". why then, is religion so popular (still)? people want to know why things have meaning

More people would be OK with that idea than previously and even the discomfort itself would be less than before.

>why dont you?

Because as far as I can see, there's no reason to think things have meaning.

>youre not saying i have considered this, and its invalid. youre saying: its not worth considering.

I don't think I ever said it's not worth considering, I think you might be confusing me with someone else. I just don't think religion is an acceptable substitute (I agree whole-hearted with Camus that it's intellectual suicide to swallow the canned meaning of religion rather than accepting that your narratives are inherently transitory).

>linked post

No one programmed humans (more aptly, there is absolutely no reason to think someone programmed humans, and I'm not just referring to an empirical stance). Our thoughts are an accumulation of a slow evolutionary process; they're just an outgrowth of instinctive behaviors that have become too sophisticated and complex for their original environments.

read the thread user

Yeah maan, just put everyone on the Kush. All problems would disappear :)

>All noumenon are observable with the right tools.

you are simply misunderstanding what is meant by noumenon.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason

The noumena isn't that which is yet to be discovered. You can't by definition know the noumena.

I'm serious, man. I think reading Kant would help clear things up.

but why is there order as opposed to non-order? why does logic, existence, and computers exist in the first place?

honestly, i am thoroughly annoyed with people who follow religions. they seem like such drones.

but acknowledging something that is beyond science doesnt have to be associated with religious conventions and or communities. those can be used for social power-gain. but as an individual, you dont have to be like them or associate with them.

>as far as i see

more like, as far as you'll allow yourself to see. see pic related. think about how existence came about. the idea of first cause: it makes sense that there is something greater than us. there has to be.

it´s imaginary like any other fairytale promoted by bs bible:
youtube.com/watch?v=2L2jyru7xNw

Why no English page for this, history?
pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiajna_da_Moldávia
>sorry, don't know link correctly