IMHO, such commands are to some extent exhortations to act a certain way. (e.g. “Cheer up” = “Stop acting so grumpy.”) And to the extent that they actually are exhortations to feel a certain way, they verge on being nonsense.
Although studies have suggested that action precedes emotion, and if you want to create or reinforce a certain feeling, you should act as if you felt it.
People use the word in lots of different ways, some of them perhaps mutually exclusive. And, after all, this thread is asking “How do you define love?”
I think if you want to match how the word is used, you have to include a feeling component and an action component. “Love” refers to something you do, in addition to being something you have or experience or feel.
I disagree - such commands are commands to change the emotions. The desired end result is, among other things, to change behavior, but the order is to change the emotion itself.
(It’s often a very unreasonable request.)
Only when you’re using it as a euphemism for ‘having sex’. In my experience in pretty much every other context love is described as an emotion or emotive opinion, not an action.
I beg to differ. ‘My’ love is a real thing. I feel it. I nurture it. I lament about it. I enjoy it. I dream about it. I feed it. Sometimes I get mad at it. So it is a real thing. You can never convince me it’s not.
That doesn’t follow. The thing about the things in our heads—the ‘mark of the mental’, as some consider it—is exactly that they can be about, or directed at, something beyond our heads—what philosophers call ‘intentionality’. In particular, the love I feel (which I agree with others isn’t all there is to love, but is a major part) is about the person I love; so it’s not self-, but explicitly other-oriented.
No, the end result is directed at increasing your own happiness; the happiness of the other is just a means to do that. Say I wire our brains together such that whenever mine produces the particular cocktail of chemicals that makes me feel happiness, yours may do, too—and only then. My happiness is now in your interest, but it’s entirely in your self-interest; my own state of mind plays only an incidental role, it’s merely a means to achieve a state of mind you desire. You probably wouldn’t come to love me in that situation—you might not even like me, but instead, resent me for being a burden on your happiness.
In another post, you claim that love is wanting to sacrifice one’s desires for another; but in the case above, it’s actually about fulfilling your desire, namely, that you want to be happy.
Materialists suck, just ignore them. You need to come up with a better explanation than ‘chemicals’ if you want me to start denying my own observations and experiences. After all, if we start doing that, then we simply end up as Academic Skeptics and what fun is that?
I’m not seeing anything in here that says love isn’t entirely contained within the head of the person feeling it.
Everything everyone does is done for ‘selfish’ reasons, at some level - nobody ever does something if they have no interest in the result in some way, shape, or form. The most charitable person in the world is only charitable because they personally think that being charitable is a good thing, and thus have a personal investment in more charity occurring.
The thing is though, while “everything everyone does is done for selfish reasons” is a true statement, the statement “and thus everything anyone might do is equally bad” most certainly isn’t. It just means that “Does a person have selfish motivations for their actions?” is a useless question because the answer’s always the same, so you should be instead more worried about outcomes and likely future behavior.
Bringing this back to love, my personal definition of love is “when another person’s happiness is essential to your own”. You’ll astutely notice that this is indeed framed pretty much in an entirely selfish way: If person A is in love with person B, then that says something about A’s emotions, not B’s emotions. (B may not even know that A exists.) And yes, A is selfishly motivated to act unselfishly towards B for selfish reasons. But that’s okay, because that’s how motivations work.
That’s a good thing, cause that’s not what I was trying to say. Rather, I argued that your inference from ‘all in the head’ to ‘self-oriented’ doesn’t follow.
But that’s trivial: it just says that we do what we do because we want to do it, in some way. Some desire is satisfied thereby; but that’s just what ‘wanting to do something’ means.
But we can want to do things for different reasons; and there’s a difference between whether these reasons are entirely self-directed, or not.
I’m not gonna hijack the thread with belabouring the point, though.
And yet it is all the result of chemicals, from the feeling to the bonding. It could be made that those chemicals don’t get released and therefor so goes the love you claim to be real.
It is little more than chemicals that we make to be more than they are. Love is not so much a force as it is a cocktail.
Speaking as a materialist, this sort of talk is annoying to me. It’s like saying that because food is made of atoms it can’t possibly taste good, or that because computers store 1s and 0s you can’t possibly store text with alphabetic letters in them.
You need to come up with a better explanation than ‘chemicals’ if you want me to start denying my own observations and experiences. After all, if we start doing that, then we simply end up as Academic Skeptics and what fun is that?