Is Love Anything More than an Oxytocin Addiction?

[linwood]

Book-smarts is overrated.

Think the people who have none.

For numerous pages of this thread it was glaringly apparent that you had no clue about the subject being discussed.
Yet you kept posting away.

"Book smarts" can keep that from happening again if you give it a shot.

 

[Herr Heinrich]

Hey just a public service announcement from good ol' Herr Heinie: :troll:

 

[dust1n]

Book-smarts is overrated.

Obviously to someone who doesn't read books.

But if you would be willing to look at the literacy rates in America, you would see that if anything, they are underrated.

Unless you just prefer an uneducated public... that ought to go well.

 

[T-Dawg]

We know that "love" is an oxytocin addiction, or at least the kind of love I'm assuming you're talking about.

My question is, and I hope this isn't too far off the topic of the thread, how does one recover from an oxytocin addiction? I can feel one developing for a particular girl (who does not like me the same way and whom I don't respect as a person enough to want her to potentially raise my children in the far future), and I want to crush it before it becomes visible to her.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

So is what most people call "love" anything more than an oxytocin addiction? Why or why not?

I am too ignorant of neuroscience to know the answer, but putting on my scientist hat, i.m.o. no human experience is "anything more" than its underlying neurochemistry. On the other hand, putting on my philosopher hat, love is a lot more than "just" neurochemistry in the sense that it has value and meaning for us; and furthermore, the ideas of love, and how we ought to love or how we ought to feel about it, are interesting subjects in their own right, which can be sensibly talked about without the need for much knowledge of neurochemistry.

So I guess it depends on what you mean when you ask if something is "anything more" than its physical basis. In one sense, a collection of atoms is not more than a collection of atoms, in another sense, a collection of atoms in the form of a human is "more" because I will treat it differently and feel differently about it, I will use "more" care when dealing with it or thinking about it, I would be "more" upset if this collection of atoms was destroyed than some other collection, etc.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Because regardless of whose "idea" of love it is it does exist everywhere any human exists.

Actually, some humans clearly do not have the capacity to love, like people with severe brain injuries or psychopaths with abnormal brains. But these exceptions only reinforce your point about the physical basis of love in the brain.

If you really want to understand human emotion I suggest your reading list should contain less psychology and more neuroscience.

Great advice. The introductory book in a college course I took was Biological Psychology by Kalat. I recommend it!

 

[sandandfoam]

You said that "Love does not occur in all cultures"
Now you`re moving the goal posts.

The "western idea of love" was never specified until now.

Do you stand by your earlier statement that "Love does not occur in all cultures" or do you abandon it?

Because regardless of whose "idea" of love it is it does exist everywhere any human exists..

I stand by my statement. Love as we understand it did not exist 100o years ago

We may not yet understand all the intricate implications and chemical inter-reactions but we do know they cause us to "feel".
This is fact, deal with it.

I do not accept this as a fact. The hard problems of consciousness are very hard. No one has any idea at all why anything feels the way it does. Is there not for example an argument that consciousness is a product of the electrical patterns in our brains rather than of chemical interaction?

Asking a psychologist to speak objective truth about human emotion is akin to asking a Tarot reader if your wife is cheating on you.

They don`t know but they`ll give you an answer anyway in order to justify their existence.

I don't accept the assertion that psychology is without value

If you really want to understand human emotion I suggest your reading list should contain less psychology and more neuroscience.

Lol.
If I want to understand emotion as you want me to understand it.

Even within neuroscience there is resistance to the type of 'degenerate Cartesianism' of the mereological fallacy.

Although they praise neuroscientists for their accomplishments (Bennett is a neuroscientist) and express confidence that neuroscientists will elucidate the brain activity that makes learning, thinking, remembering, imagining, perceiving, and so forth, possible, they state clearly what neuroscience cannot do:

What it cannot do is replace the wide range of ordinary psychological explanations of human activities in terms of reasons, intentions, purposes, goals, values, rules and conventions by neurological explanations . . . . And it cannot explain how an animal perceives or thinks by reference to the brain's, or some parts of the brain's, perceiving or thinking. For it makes no sense to ascribe such psychological attributes to anything less than the animal as a whole. It is the animal that perceives, not parts of its brain, and it is human beings who think and reason, not their brains. The brain and its activities make it possible for us—not for it—to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects. (p. 3)
​

This quotation expresses the theme of the book, that it is usually nonsense to ascribe to the brain psychological concepts that make sense when ascribed to whole humans (and often other animals). This explanatory tendency of neuroscientists (and cognitive psychologists) is called the mereological fallacy. Although occasionally it leads the authors to say things about psychology that behavior analysts would not generally agree with, the arguments against the mereological fallacy in theories of memory, perception, thinking, imagery, belief, and other psychological processes upon which the methods of neuroscience have been brought to bear will be music to the skeptical ears of most behavior analysts.

Naming Our Concerns about Neuroscience: A Review of Bennett and Hacker's Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience

 

[sandandfoam]

Great advice. The introductory book in a college course I took was Biological Psychology by Kalat. I recommend it!

Biological psychology is interesting. But it does not offer the last word.
No single perspective has established itself to be 'true'.
I do not agree with the modern concept of a person as an individual thinker in society upon which the biological approach is based.
The post-modern concepts of Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Gergen etc. make more sense to my mind.

 

[sandandfoam]

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
(Yeats)

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Biological psychology is interesting. But it does not offer the last word.
No single perspective has established itself to be 'true'.
I do not agree with the modern concept of a person as an individual thinker in society upon which the biological approach is based.
The post-modern concepts of Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Gergen etc. make more sense to my mind.

I'm sorry, I'm confused. What are the two competing perspectives? It seems to me that the field of biological psychology has established the truth of its claims like any other science, through observations and experiments.

 

[DallasApple]

I agree LOVE sucks!!! LOL!!!!!

 

[DallasApple]

[youtube]M2SsjJkmMZ4[/youtube]
YouTube - Love Hurts Nazareth Cover

HA HA HA!!!!!!!!~!!

 

[Sunstone]

I agree LOVE sucks!!! LOL!!!!!

Who the hell is saying that?

 

[T-Dawg]

Who the hell is saying that?

I believe she was trying to express sympathy in response to my question, which everyone else ignored:

We know that "love" is an oxytocin addiction, or at least the kind of love I'm assuming you're talking about.

My question is, and I hope this isn't too far off the topic of the thread, how does one recover from an oxytocin addiction? I can feel one developing for a particular girl (who does not like me the same way and whom I don't respect as a person enough to want her to potentially raise my children in the far future), and I want to crush it before it becomes visible to her.

Thank you, Dallas .

 

[Sunstone]

My question is, and I hope this isn't too far off the topic of the thread...

Actually, it is too far off topic, but I'll deal with it anyway.

...how does one recover from an oxytocin addiction? I can feel one developing for a particular girl....

The odds are great that you do not have an oxytocin bond with that girl unless the two of you have had sex or have at least spent time cuddling with each other. Do you have "warm and fuzzy" feelings when you think of her? If not, then you do not have much of an oxytocin bond with her.

None of that means that other neurochemicals besides oxytocin are not involved in your feelings towards her. For instance, if you feel giggly around here, that's usually a sign of a neurochemical abbreviated as PEA. PEA is associated with romantic love -- which is not the same kind of love that oxytocin is associated with.

As to how to recover from an oxytocin addiction, time heals all wounds.

 

[Sunstone]

So I guess it depends on what you mean when you ask if something is "anything more" than its physical basis. In one sense, a collection of atoms is not more than a collection of atoms, in another sense, a collection of atoms in the form of a human is "more" because I will treat it differently and feel differently about it, I will use "more" care when dealing with it or thinking about it, I would be "more" upset if this collection of atoms was destroyed than some other collection, etc.

We're pretty much in agreement here.

 

[DallasApple]

Actually, it is too far off topic, but I'll deal with it anyway.




The odds are great that you do not have an oxytocin bond with that girl unless the two of you have had sex or have at least spent time cuddling with each other. Do you have "warm and fuzzy" feelings when you think of her? If not, then you do not have much of an oxytocin bond with her.

None of that means that other neurochemicals besides oxytocin are not involved in your feelings towards her. For instance, if you feel giggly around here, that's usually a sign of a neurochemical abbreviated as PEA. PEA is associated with romantic love -- which is not the same kind of love that oxytocin is associated with.

As to how to recover from an oxytocin addiction, time heals all wounds.

Yeah! But you can get the "chemical" thing just being in "close proximety" of the other person..Like an "adrenaline" thing..smelling her could give him some oxytocin!

He just needs to get away from the girl...He's fixing to pounce on her.!!! LOL!!!Until he learns some control..how to cycle that out..

Love

Dallas

 

[DallasApple]

I believe she was trying to express sympathy in response to my question, which everyone else ignored:


Thank you, Dallas .

You are pretty good for someone with aspergers(or for anyone in general for that matter)..Very able to relate and understand human emotion..Im impressed..

And you are welcome darlin..

Love

Dallas

 

[Sunstone]

smelling her could give him some oxytocin!

Where did you hear that?

 

[DallasApple]

Where did you hear that?

Um...I dont know "where" but its I believe in her armpits..and in her breath..

Like "phermones"...

Its a "scent"..Comes out of people..

Look it up..

Love

Dallas