Love Is An Instinct

From ParableOfTheIdiotFlowers:

That idiot flower, that just stands there naturally and accepts its due - does it have a responsibility to enlighten his brother flower which seems to be caught in confusion?

It does indeed. And it does so by its example, for the other flower should look over and say, "How is it that my brother flower grows so beautifully in the sunlight?"

I doubt it has any such responsibility. It grows while the other withers, and so, by evolution, its offspring become stronger.

Yes, but then those flowers that assist one another by sharing helpful information will outcompete it. This is why LoveIsAnInstinct for humanity ... love occurs to us because there's an evolutionary advantage for it to occur to us.

And the evidence "against" the Love Instinct occurring in the lower animals is...?

WhatIsLove? Anyone who's spent time around social animals has seen them treat each other with tenderness and concern. Who's to say that's not love? Even when all those millions of slime-mold protozoans seek out each others' mutual stink, self-organize and rise up as one, who's to say that's not love?

The difference between love and infatuation is that if you're infatuated, you assign a high value to something about the person. For example, you desire them to be with you. OTOH, love is assigning a high value to the person. And person includes 'a being with a will'. So you assign a high value to what the person wants, needs and desires.

As a simple illustration: if Pyrrhus is happy enslaving Andromache to keep her close to him, then that is not love. The large gap in acceptable behaviour between love and infatuation puts the lie to the claim that they are similar emotions.

So love crucially depends on assigning a high value to a person's will. But in order to do that, you have to recognize the existence of that will. You need some measure of empathy for that person. Preferably, you need a lot of empathy for that person. In history, as it happens, love and empathy emerged at about the same time; a couple centuries ago at most.

Neither love nor empathy nor any other advanced psychological phenomena are possible for lower animals. And that's simply that. There is no evidence for "love" in the lower animals. If someone thinks there is, the burden of proof is upon them to prove it. Same thing for love being an instinct. Or for it being an "evolutionary advantage". Pop evolutionary psychology has always been crap and apparently always will.

Some people seem to believe that just because something has a "feelgood" value to it, they can say it whether it's right or wrong, and damn the consequences. Of course, that is complete nonsense. For example, "love is an instinct" which is both clearly wrong and just as clearly can be used as justification for neglecting children.

You (obviously RK) seem to have little problem appying pop EvolutionaryPsychology? when it backs up your theories.

Next they'll be accusing me of being a capitalist when it suits me. -- rk

Bought, sold, leased, or rented anything recently? Paid taxes or used the transport/electric/information infrastructures paid for with taxes? You shill!

Richard, maybe I missed it, but I don't see a definition of love for this context. Do you have one handy? -- gh

"assigning a high value to a person". Pretty abstract but there's no helping that.

I think we can agree that "assigning a high value" is not an instinct. ;-)''

"assigning" is too active a word for the concept I have in mind. I don't have good words for the concepts I do have and I don't have good enough concepts either.

Be patient with yourself then. Think deeper about what's written by the others here - you've only replied to its surface so far.

Nahhh, the other views on this page are useless. I may not be able to define what 'value' means but I can still define 'love' in terms of it well enough to distinguish it from infatuation. Even this much seems to be beyond most people.

Quoting ConfederacyOfDunces?, right?

Don't mistake vacuum for depth. People often confuse the absurd, the lack of any meaning, with the deeply meaningful. For this reason, it's better to stick to simple meanings. Like the simple meanings of 'love' and 'instinct', thus the "superficial" fact that 'LoveIsNotAnInstinct'.

Don't mistake vacuum for depth. People often confuse the absurd, the lack of any meaning, with the deeply meaningful. For this reason, it's better to stick to simple meanings. Like the simple meanings of 'love' and 'instinct', thus the "superficial" fact that 'LoveIsAnInstinct'. It's deep.

It's crap is what it is. What definition of "love" and "instinct" are you using to arrive at the idiocy that love is an instinct? "simple" does not mean naive, fuzzy, confused or Zen-like. "simple" doesn't mean absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous nor idiotic.

The allegedly "simple" meaning of love as affection or preference (eg, "I love apples more than oranges) is complete unmitigated BS and not at all simple! The simplest possible meaning of a word in any language is no meaning at all. So the "simple" meaning of instinct cannot be "conditioned response" because there is already a proper term for this: conditioned response!

As things stand now, Rich has provided some interesting material, the original suggestion that LoveIsNotAnInstinct and some examples to show that it is not innate, such as infanticide and forced marriages. The second especially should make it clear that sex and love do not always go together, though really it's a surprise that anyone should need that pointed out to them. Yet various others have insisted that love is nothing more than biological syngamy, or worse still amalgamation, which even the worst self-help author can tell you is a thorough debasement of the term. And then, instead of providing any examples or reasons, they have backed themselves up simply by mocking their opponent, suggesting he has problems, and the like.

C'mon, guys, get with the program.

Special note: I, PhlIp, wrote the referrence to Evolution on the page LoveIsNotAnInstinct. I did not write the re-wording of it here; someone else did. And I did not write the beautiful 'graph about slime molds. RK is not railing against one person here, though he may feel like he is...

In conclusion ( ;-), the evidence strongly suggests that a belief in the non-default non-automatic nature of Love is the core of the special problems that RK finds dealing with the world in general. We await evidence to the contrary...

For some reason, I strongly doubt I can be reduced that way.

Then listen to yourself: "Love is the most misused word in history." Not "very", "most".

And this is a matter of fact. Other words, such as 'existence', are either not nearly as important to the vast majority of people, or didn't even exist a couple of millennia ago. And in the rare cases where they are as important (eg, 'reality') then it's not the case that modern people still believe in obsolete conceptions of it. You still find people around who think that beating children is a sign of love. But more important than these idiots' existence is the fact that saner people give them a measure of respectability, instead of simply dismissing them as the raving lunatics they are. This is not so with, say, Creationists who are dismissed as complete loonies by educated society.

Anyways, just because I clearly understand what matters most to nearly all people doesn't imply that this is the only thing I value personally.