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What is Love?

Migrated topic.
--Shadow said:
Obviously it's a chemically induced state of mind in the ants. Is this love? :?
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Maybe in ways.

Ants heavily rely on each other for survival and have been shown to protect one and other, but do they pick some ants that they like more than other based on matching characteristics?

That would be interesting.

From Do ants have feelings?

Each ant’s brain is simple, containing about 250,000 neurones, compared with a human’s billions. Yet a colony of ants has a collective brain as large as many mammals’. Some have speculated that a whole colony could have feelings.
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A little off topic but still rather interesting :)
 
Reading through the thread while i'm on some LSD and thought..

What if love is experience beyond the ego?

Love is care, interest, concern, and much more. To me it seems love is treating someone as a valued part of the self. it can explain sacrificing yourself, deep interest, care and appreciation, for another if you feel you're both one in some way.

Starting to lose my trail of thought so i will update when i am more collected lol :lol: what do you think about it though?
 
indydude19 said:
What if love is experience beyond the ego?
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This is kind of the essence right here because on the main, the ego is self serving. It's main function unto itself is its own preservation.

When love is felt truly it is in complete presence in the realisation of another. Awe of the moment, unmistakable one-ness etc.

As all the ego has is a filing cabinet based on what has been and what may be, it is very short-sited of what is.

Love is :)
 
Thank you guys for all the thoughts you shared here, some of them are really insightful, especially the ones concerned with going beyond one's ego. This really helped me expand my understanding of this phenomenon and helps me going through this tough moment in my life.

To people who try to understand feelings and other typically human phenomenon in terms of biochemistry let me point out this simple fact. There are different levels of organization of reality and assuming that one is superior over the other is nothing but an axiom. And there is also the case of emergent properties which states that you can't understand many phenomenon by simply analyzing only its elements. Like in the case of brain you won't understand it only by researching the functioning of neurons. Neither you will understand the behaviour of communities only by focusing on the structure of individuals.

Fundamentally it is always a matter of choosing in what to believe. I prefer to believe that there is much more in human experience than the result of their biochemistry. The reductionist perspective strips out our existence of the experience of being alive. The experience of cosmic melodrama, full of ups and downs, sufferings and joys, which essentialy is beautiful and where love plays the main part.
 
Love is stronger than Like: It is a force that draws me to certain things regardless of whether or not I like them. In that sense, love is stronger than rationality and thus I consider it to be unfavorable for purposes of optimization, which is ironic since it probably resulted from evolution.
 
Ive been wondering if the "divine love" that is being talked about in certain spiritual teachings is actually a totally different form of love then what we call love in a romantic context.

When we fall in love with a person, the first rush is like total euphoria, a true high.
Ive felt the same on certain psychedelics, a insanely euphoric feeling, that seems to come from total appreciation of everything. But sometimes these experiences also seem to be triggered by things like a musical piece, that would already make you euphoric while sober, so you interpret it as divine love when tripping.
While it feels divine, it still has some manic aspects to it, like your as high on life as can get, but you know youll eventually come down. The happiness is so profound it almost makes you explode. It seems a bit unbalanced.

Then theres this other feeling, its much more tranquil, just a total openness to everything and everybody. Letting everyone into your own space, transcending your boundaries.
Its not necessarily euphoric, but a very intimate, soft and open state.

I wonder which comes closer to this divine love everybody seems to talk about, but rarely somebody is able to put a finger on it.
 
woogyboogy said:
Ive been wondering if the "divine love" that is being talked about in certain spiritual teachings is actually a totally different form of love then what we call love in a romantic context.

When we fall in love with a person, the first rush is like total euphoria, a true high.
Ive felt the same on certain psychedelics, a insanely euphoric feeling, that seems to come from total appreciation of everything. But sometimes these experiences also seem to be triggered by things like a musical piece, that would already make you euphoric while sober, so you interpret it as divine love when tripping.
While it feels divine, it still has some manic aspects to it, like your as high on life as can get, but you know youll eventually come down. The happiness is so profound it almost makes you explode. It seems a bit unbalanced.

Then theres this other feeling, its much more tranquil, just a total openness to everything and everybody. Letting everyone into your own space, transcending your boundaries.
Its not necessarily euphoric, but a very intimate, soft and open state.

I wonder which comes closer to this divine love everybody seems to talk about, but rarely somebody is able to put a finger on it.
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Could it be a perfect equilibrium between 'agents'? Some describe love as oneness, but isn't oneness the most perfect equilibrium?

For instance, in the case of a romantic relationship, the perfect equlibrium between 'being one' on the one hand, and still being an individual yourself, on the other hand?

You need to be a souvereign individual to at least some extent, to be able to love and to be loved, yet you need to be able to give up some of this autonomy as well, if you would ever want to reach a state of oneness with somebody else. So there needs to be a sort of optimal point where you have 'the best of both'. A point where you to the maximal extent can be your own unique self, as well as to the max, part of something that is greater than yourself.

I would say that, if you reach this point with somebody, it would be desirable that this would be a Mutual thing...but also somewhat unnavoidable. So if the equilibrium between these two properties within you as a person would be reached, you automatically would have reached this equilibrium between you and the other person as well.
 
I thought about this recently, that autonomy (based on oneness) and binding are not contrary but different aspects, which build up on each other. A "healthy" binding results from at least 2 autonom lifeforms.

Related to the equilibrium; Seeing a relationship as the body of a butterfly, whereby each lifeform represents one wing. If the wings are just close or spread away, the butterfly cannot fly and stays on the ground but if the wings come close and spread away in a fluent movement, it blasts off. :lol:

tseuq
 
Something for Animals . a Barrier, a limitation, but if one is satisfied with Animal Realm n Ape life then Love is your ultimate answer and if your religion is something like christianity you mine as well stop using psyches and just follow your gods plan.
 
hixidom said:
Love is stronger than Like: It is a force that draws me to certain things regardless of whether or not I like them. In that sense, love is stronger than rationality and thus I consider it to be unfavorable for purposes of optimization, which is ironic since it probably resulted from evolution.
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lol I love your brain hix :lol:
 
An epistemological abomination of meaning itself, with real consequences. Some good, some bad.

But, it is the most universal approximation we have at this stage and there is no mistaking that it is in reference to something very real. Whether the user of it, or the abuser of it or the.. one-off conjurer .. of the verb has even the vaguest recollection of it or does not. Man is still yet so low and profoundly muddled with the dirt and the vermin and the worms of its conscience that his concept of things is inevitably warped, at best.

We are little more than ants, marking the way with our own scent. The way we came, understand.
 
--Shadow said:
..I think that love is a product of the brain for a few reasons...

When I think of "love" , universally between all creatures, the best example I can think of is the love that a parent feels for it's offspring. In any animal species I can think of that has a brain, they would willingly sacrifice their own lives, so that their children live on.

Is there any species without a brain that does the same?

What about ants? Do they love their queen?
They put their lives on the line for the sake of the queen, without hesitation.
Obviously it's a chemically induced state of mind in the ants. Is this love? :?
Click to expand...

but thats a little different to looking deep into someone's eyes and "feeling" who they are no? Or holding somebody in a deep embrace before nodding in silent recognition at the end. Human and ants are very different creatures too..

Sure there is a chemical representation of what is happening at the time.. but to say it causes it is "woo woo" to me.. is the mother's unconditional love for her child a product of her brain chemistry? or is her brain chemistry more of a physical representation of what the body is doing while a person "feels" .. I think a person's stance on this really comes back to whether they believe consciousness to be "made" by the brain or whether they are just in cahoots..
 
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