Evidence

[Bsuds]

Lust certainly does, so is love just a more lasting form?

[mtnman1]

Does love exist?

YES it does!! AND it has many different forms and is expressed in many different ways.




Love is both an action and a feeling. The action of love generates a blissful feeling called by the same name. When the action stops, the blissful feeling is replaced with pain. Every person is capable of great love (and its opposite, fear, which generates all painful emotions such as hate, greed and jealousy).

While there are many different ways to define love and there are many different ways to love someone (or even yourself), here is a general guide to loving.

[Piecemaker]

My point in asking the question is can the existence of love be proven? Or is it merely a human construct as has been suggested that god is? What Mtnman provided is a definition of love, not evidence that love exists.

I wanna know where love is?

[Fancy]

Does love exist?

Yes but I disagree that the lack of love must mean pain. I love ice cream - gives me a blissful feeling when eating it - almost a ritual act. I also loved my dog and still do even though gone. I don't feel pain when thinking of my dog. Love is an emotion so of course exists in different ways for different people.

[Tumult]

Love is a force analogous to gravity (always attractive).
Like gravity, love can’t be perceived by our senses but only by its effects on reality.
The greater the love, the more attractive the force.

Unlike gravity Love does not require math to understand how it works....

[fluffy]

If you determine that one human being's yearning to better understand his neighbour's contrary viewpoints on varied matters is in some way malicious, then so be it.

Maybe I've been misreading you right from the start, but that was the tone I got from your posts. If I am in error I apologize.

[Born_again]

My point in asking the question is can the existence of love be proven? Or is it merely a human construct as has been suggested that god is? What Mtnman provided is a definition of love, not evidence that love exists.

I wanna know where love is?

Although love was not intended to be the focus of this thread, I had used love to highlight the comparison of one concept and another, albeit one natural, and t'other man-made. Perhaps I should have used infinity as a better example of a concept. Regardless, allow me to clarify how I intended terms in my paragraph to be interpreted:


I believe that love is a natural concept that is inherently evident in *bleep* sapien sapiens, but a concept that is not a construct of *bleep* sapien sapiens. I believe that by chemical analysis, the mood defined as 'love' can be identified with a fair degree of accuracy.

I believe that god/gods/God is a concept, a concept that is is wholly the construct of *bleep* sapien sapiens.

PS: Piecemaker, I always reserve a little love for your posts.

[Born_again]

If you determine that one human being's yearning to better understand his neighbour's contrary viewpoints on varied matters is in some way malicious, then so be it.

Maybe I've been misreading you right from the start, but that was the tone I got from your posts. If I am in error I apologize.

It's no biggie, fluffy. I'm trying to rationalise discrepancies between my thought processes and that of others. In particular, I am befuddled by the seemingly blasé regard to evidence as an important factor in peoples decision making processes.

[Bsuds]

I'm trying to rationalise discrepancies between my thought processes and that of others.

That's easy, you have thought processes while some others don't!

[fluffy]

I'm trying to rationalise discrepancies between my thought processes and that of others. In particular, I am befuddled by the seemingly blasé regard to evidence as an important factor in peoples decision making processes.

Evidence gets pretty scarce when you move into the realm of feelings and intuition. It's like the love thing mentioned earlier. Few will deny its existence but to gather empirical evidence as to its nature is a whole different ball game. I have a feeling that there is some force or power greater than myself, an underlying, unifying something-or-other that we all share with everything else on the planet. It's just a feeling, but I have come to trust my feelings over the years, instincts and intuitions that tell me "yes" or "no" or "right" or "wrong". I don't need reams of facts and figures to keep trusting these feelings, I accept that they are there and that my life seems to run a little better if I pay attention to them. If some day I find something that feels more "right" than the current stuff then I will adjust my thinking, just as I did many times to get where I am today. There used to be a time when if I couldn't take something apart and look inside then it didn't hold meaning but the more I realized that there are sides of life and living that I will never fully understand the more that need for understanding gave way to the experience itself.

[don_pepe]

Love is nothing more than a series of complex biochemical reactions. Saying that we can't quantify love and god=love is simply a god of the gaps argument.

This article talks a little bit about the neurotransmitters involved in love:
http://www.youramazingbrain.org/lovesex/sciencelove.htm

[Born_again]

Evidence gets pretty scarce when you move into the realm of feelings and intuition. It's like the love thing mentioned earlier.

After considering the above statement I found that my position has shifted from "somewhat agreeing" to "I'm sorry, I disagree".
Had you not used "love" as an example for "evidence gets pretty scarce" then I'd likely have passed over the statement without much thought. My position is this:

Love is undoubtedly evidenced; physically. It carries properties of cause and effect(both physical and emotional) and relates from one human to another. The physiological effect is measurable in laboratories and is consistent from subject to subject. My guess(and it is only a guess) is that we are neurologically 'wired' to subconsciously seek love by means of a complex series of assessments of evidences presented. Once a basic data set is analysed and accepted as favourable to the host, a specific sequence of chemical triggers is put into action. The result is the physical state, or emotion, called 'love'.

As far as I can determine to date, no-one has ever witnessed God & Co., and thus their propensity to believe that God exists was not based on assessment of physical evidences presented. The evidence is not scarce, I believe it is simply not there. I agree that a subject may have evaluated a range of circumstantial, anecdotal, or coincidental evidences to sway their judgement and perceptions, but that assessment still falls short of actual evidence.

Let me try to explain by way of practicable examples:

For me to declare "I love you"* I would have assessed a set of shared physical and neurological evidences over a period of time through physical and mental interactions and intercourses, and the reciprocal actions of causal nature. The benefits of such a statement would be mutual, physiologically and neurologically, not to mention the increase in survivability within our natural environment.

For me to declare "you will not go to heaven because you don't believe in God" is a statement of fact, but a statement of fact based entirely without evidence for the conviction. Nothing. For heaven to exist there must be a God to preside over it, yet I see no evidence of God & Co..
Why would I offer such a statement if I could not back it with evidence? At best it is emotionally hurtful, and at least it is downright dishonest. My only explanation would be that I was exploring the darker side of my nature for some sort of personal emotional, ambitious, authoritative, controlling or financially-driven gain. There would be no physical gain to be had. In fact, I cannot see any evidence of true mutual benefit whatsoever. None.

*Does not apply in the case of Piecemaker -- I love her cyberly, ubberly & wubberly

[zzontar]

Love is nothing more than a series of complex biochemical reactions. Saying that we can't quantify love and god=love is simply a god of the gaps argument.

This article talks a little bit about the neurotransmitters involved in love:
http://www.youramazingbrain.org/lovesex/sciencelove.htm

According to the article, love starts with lust, then attraction. Not one thing in that article applies to love for parents, children, pets, etc. Does this mean it doesn't exist because it can't be proven?

[Born_again]

I'm trying to rationalise discrepancies between my thought processes and that of others.

That's easy, you have thought processes while some others don't!

But what if my thought processes flawed when viewed on a social scale with zeitgeist factored in? I would rather assess my thought processes objectively first, then proceed to the subjective 'fine tuning', or refinement. We are social creatures after all, so elements such as empathy and compassion are vitally important to the way in which I think. I am not looking for affirmation or concordance, but a better way to understand why we think the way we think. Why do we allow double standards within our own thought processing? Is it healthy, ... beneficial, ... acceptable?

[Piecemaker]

B_A--Are you sure that love isn't a human construct, as you say God is?

It wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things that humans lived in conditions and relied on one another for survival. Love as we think of it today, did not exist. Even in relatively recent times marriages were alliances for economic and social reasons.

Now, back to God/gods...you say "love" can be measured by physiological responses and the like. There are also measurable physiological responses to spirituality. There are those that find great peace and joy in their beliefs and in love. There are those that feel excitement in their spirituality and in love. (and so on) Also, I find it interesting that everywhere on this planet people have some sense of a higher power. Sometimes it's a source of good and sometimes it's a belief of a higher power of evil...or that both exist.

Like there appear to be universal emotional responses, there appears to be a universal sense of a greater power than ourselves.

I don't argue that Religion is any more or less accurate in its portrayal of God/gods, than the sexualization of love that now exists is an accurate portrayal of love. Religion is probably not where I would seek connection to a higher power.