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?
Rational irrationality
Love is the most quintessential of human emotions, highlighting better than any other what emotions are and why we experience them the way we do. As I said in a previous post, emotions act to efficiently interpret a large amount of information to guide your decision making. Much of their function is about efficiency, providing an answer very quickly which is still correct a good percentage of the time. You could logically work through the problem to increase the probability of being correct but it would take far longer. We, of course, do this all the time but when you consider the (at least) thousands of decisions we make every day, many of them seemingly inconsequential, there is no way we could work through them all without the efficiency of our emotions.
Emotions have an additional function, though. Rational though is limited by what we know, limited by our own experiences. To play the game of life rationally we have to consciously know the rules and, most importantly in this case, the objective. Emotions don’t share this limitation. Acting behind the scenes, emotions can make decisions using their own rules without explanation or justification. This is where evolution can work, blindly shaping the emotional rules to achieve the objective with no concern for what or why, only how well. Through evolution, our emotions account for information beyond our own experiences, deciphering life’s rules and objectives not through the ever-absent instruction manual to life but through generations and generations of our ancestors simply playing the game. Our emotions, then, can tell us to be attracted to facial symmetry and colourful plants, displeased by a frown, and to love our family before we ever (and without us ever needing to) know why. It is these hidden rules, unexplained and unjustified but appropriate none the less, that make emotions rationally irrational.
Selfish selflessness
So, getting back to my point, what is love? The answer is amazingly simple, hidden is plain sight by its apparent irrationality. Love is the highest form of trust; we love that which we most strongly believe will benefit us. The apparent irrationality of love is due to not understanding the game being played: as the products of evolution we play the game of evolution. We can understand basic trust and the other emotions through our own experiences; we can see how they act to increase pleasure and avoid pain. This objective, avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, accomplishes the goal of the basic evolutionary game: maximizing fitness through maximum growth, survival, and reproduction.
Love plays a more complicated game, working towards the ultimate objective of maximizing the propagation of our genes, an objective which extends beyond our own wellbeing. This more complicated game is the idea explained in Richard Dawkins famous book, The Selfish Gene: from the perspective of a gene it doesn’t matter if it increases in frequency through directly increasing the fitness of its carrier (you) or through indirectly increasing the fitness of a carrier of the same gene (e.g. your sibling). Most organisms can’t actively play towards this ultimate objective as they are unable to recognize individuals carrying, or likely to carry, the same genes. In those of us who can, though, love acts to make the leap from only considering our wellbeing to considering the wellbeing of our genes. It is for this reason that love seems so abstract and irrational. Loves primary goal is beyond the rationality of our everyday experiences, it is even beyond a basic physiology programed to maximize our fitness… it helps us play a game most of us never know we are playing.
I will lay out the evidence for this hypothesis in a second post but before I do so I would ask that you don’t take my functional description of emotions to be an attack on the emotional experience. I am not the foolish TV portrayal of a scientist who believes that deciphering something’s function makes it any less beautiful or amazing. To discount the emotional response is both arrogant and foolish, just as it is any time we believe we can do better than evolution, that which has formed all of the wondrously elegant organisms which fill our world. So if this helps you understand your emotions let it not be to circumvent them but to better appreciate them, to trust them and to relish in the experience. Most importantly, love, not because it is the right thing to do but because it is your thing to do.
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