Philosophical Cud: The biology and being of love

Whenever I start thinking too hard about biology, and especially neuroscience, I become slightly anxious. When people start explaining what happens in the brain, and how this correlates to what we feel or experience, one of the first things that springs to my mind is the awareness that something valuable is in danger. It seems to me that the very meaning of human emotion is at stake, and the danger lies in its depreciation. An explanation of why or how we feel is a fundamental belittling of our experience. This should be nearly obvious: If someone says, “I love you,” and a fellow of the scientific persuasion explains that the feeling is merely a biological reaction to pheromone intoxication or an evolutionary drive to procreate, the meaning of the statement is changed in a bad way. It is lessened. How could something like happiness, anger, love or any human emotion retain its meaning when the cause is found to be so perfectly banal? If emotion is only a chemical process, what keeps it sacred? As it turns out, I think our emotions are perfectly safe from a disimpassioned death by science. Let me tell you why.

When we communicate our emotions, what we’re talking about is a particular experience that we’ve had and the way that it felt. In communicating, we assume that whoever we’re talking to has had a similar experience, that they are able to understand us. Emotion exists in that it is something that we, as humans, experience. I believe this to be key in differentiating between love or hate, which happens to us, and a particular brain state, which attempts to explain these phenomena.

A feeling may be identifiable by a particular neuro-chemical brain state, but a feeling ‘as such’ is removed from biology. It is something strictly and essentially human. The essence of emotion is removed because the value of an emotion is an intrinsic part of what that emotion is. We couldn’t talk about what love or happiness feels like in value-neutral terms, but this is something that a scientific account of emotion would necessarily do. To describe endorphins in a scientific journal as “feeling good” or “delightful” doesn’t make sense. In the exact same way, it doesn’t make sense to refer to chemicals when describing how we feel. After post-Roscoe’s sex, nobody would say, “I just had an intense rush of serotonin and dopamine, how was it for you?” (Hilarious as that may be.) The chemicals don’t mean anything to us, but the experience does. The poet and the scientist are talking about fundamentally different, incompatible things. The phenomena of emotive feeling, in that we feel it, is something distinct from the spatial, physical description of our brains. To accurately describe a feeling requires that a value be associated with it. To talk neutrally about something like love or happiness would be to talk about something that was in some way less than what we experience when these feelings come to us.

I believe that the importance of identifying and understanding the difference between the physical explanation of emotion and what it is for beings like us is absolutely paramount if we are to make our way in the world. I find it unbearably depressing to think of all of the poetry, expressive music, and love stories of history as nothing more than products of small electro-chemical reactions. Surely, Romeo and Juliet was inspired by more than a chemical cocktail. Right? I doubt it even possible to listen to The Weepies, and then say with a straight face that love doesn’t exist. Physical reactions have something to do with feeling, but they aren’t it. So, until next week, be happy – and be it with confidence!