Climbing out of the rabbit hole

After a long hiatus I have decided to add to this little blog some more. I stopped for so long because my previous posts sent me down an unexpected rabbit hole. What was supposed to be a simple question, “what are emotions?” which I was asking simply to lay the foundation for a different question, put me onto a mission to find and explore what I believe to be a better answer than what was available. I stopped blogging because I was initially hoping to publish these ideas and, for some academic journals, blogging constitutes publishing in another venue. Since then, though, my life plans have moved away from academia and racking up publications is no longer that important. I have other goals for my work so I am not ready to spell everything out (the model has come a long way since the previous posts on this blog) but thinking and learning about emotions has led me to enough tangential ideas that I think I can justify taking another crack at blogging. So, let me tell you about my adventures in Wonderland…

Thursday 1 September 2011

2c.ii. – Justifying love


Rationalizing emotions is not particularly socially acceptable and trying to rationalize an emotion as strong and socially important as love is potentially a dangerous endeavour.  I very much doubt I could get away with simply stating that love is the highest form of trust, acting to increase the propagation of our genes, but I do have supporting evidence.  The best arguments at my disposal are considering who we love, showing that my evolutionary model accounts for these choices, and showing how our responses to those we love correspond to what we would expect for targets of high trust in my general model of emotions. 

2c.i. A crazy little thing called Love

                What is love?  It’s a damn good question, one for which the internet simultaneously provides hundreds of answers and no answer at all.  The question is a matter of philosophy and religion, grazed by psychologists and all but abandoned by hard science.  Love is the emotion of the heart, of the soul.  It is what makes us act selflessly and often irrationally, even absurdly.  It is a gift from God or an odd by-product of culture, beautiful and all-important but beyond our explanation.  To get to the heart of it all: Love is what differentiates us from the beasts.

Well… wait, does it?  What is love really?  Can we discern its function?  And can we really say that only humans really love while everything else (e.g. I feel that my dog loves me) is simply personification?  This is the question I will attempt to answer here: what is love and why does it seem so extraordinary? So irrational? So… human?