Love Is Not An Instinct

And someone who believes love is not an instinct is definitely qualified to lecture on child-rearing...

In context, Richard distinguished love from mating. Once that's done, there is at the very least no evidence against what he's saying that I've seen.

'Even mating is not an instinct. If it were an instinct, it couldn't be lost, suppressed or fail to develop, as it does in wild children who do not develop consciousness.

A further surprise was that the feral children did not have a normal sexual response. At puberty, feral children like Victor gave every indication of arousal and sexual feelings, but it was somehow undirected and frustrated as if the child had to have a social model to know how to satisfy its urges. Itard described how Victor went up to a woman and flung his arms around her neck, but: "This was all, and these amorous demonstrations ended, as did all the others, with a feeling of annoyance which made him repulse the object of his passing fancy." http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/webtwo_features_feral_kids.htm

Back before humans developed consciousness, they mated because of a repetition compulsion. That is, parents masturbated and had sex with children in order to sexualize them and "teach" them what to do. The higher primates do this.

As for love, it's so completely not an instinct that it isn't even funny. When the caregiver (the mother for nearly all of human history) of an infant doesn't meet the infant's gaze sufficiently in the first three years of their life, the child fails to 'bond'. When that happens, the child fails to develop empathy and most human emotions. They become psychopaths, unable to love.

While it may seem natural and "effortless" for modern parents to bond with their children, in actuality it is anything but. So given how much enormous effort it takes on the part of the caregiver to make it possible for children to love, calling it an "instinct" is deeply misguided. Especially since even in modern societies, there exist parents who fail to bond. And the current trend towards child-care (condemned by pediatrists) makes bonding more difficult.

Sounds to me like both love and lust are instincts, but like all instincts among sapient beings they fit a cultigenic framework. "Instinct" does not mean "permanently obligatory" - an irish setter can resist its instinct to chase a ball if it has guide dog training. The urge to chase is no less an instinct just because one can adjust it.

A dog can resist an instinct if you train them out of it. What kind of instinct is it if you have to train humans into it? The best, most accurate and most useful, way to categorize love is not as an instinct but something along the lines of a 'conditioned response'.

Your entire premise hinges on the single medical observation that "withholding" parents, in cases of extreme neglect, can raise sociopathic children without empathy. Raising healthy children is easy if you love them (experience talking here), so if love is an instinct...

In your scenario, society would enter a negative feedback loop and unravel to the point where such simple offices as building a house or planting crops were impossible.

Early peoples tended to have high levels of infanticide, which really suggests that they didn't care much about their children. They still managed to plant crops and build much larger things than houses. RK can undoubtedly say a lot more about this, but he has elsewhere - for now the main point is that the fact that people can love children is definitely not the same as that being instinctive.

'Raising healthy, well-adjusted children is difficult no matter how much you love them. It takes a lot of time, energy, creativity, and emotional resources. The more people are aware of the investments required, the less willing they are to have children. If the author above thinks raising hir children was easy then sie is 1) very altruistic, 2) filtering their memories, or 3) male and comparing himself with neighbouring parents (in most places, even in modern societies, parenting simply isn't that good). Or perhaps we have to interpret the "if you love them" condition strongly and I only have to observe that many parents, who were raised badly, stop loving their babies almost the moment they start crying. Sustaining love for your child is not an easy thing if you weren't raised well; most modern people weren't.

Are you speaking from experience, or just theoretical/observation here, Richard?

Both. I know I was raised extremely badly. I know that my parents were, and are, incapable of anything resembling love.

Sorry to hear that. That sucks

It's funny how people speaking about "personal experience" of parenting never ever refer to one's experiences as a child. Perhaps their childhoods were so traumatic they still can't revisit their memories to draw lessons from them.

I'm not sure it's true (in my experience, anyway - my conversations with other parents among my friends often talk about their childhood). I wouldn't call my childhood particularly traumatic - there are things I think my parents could have been better at, and I try to do what I think it right in those areas, but mostly they did fine. Sounds like I was lucky.

From a purely deterministic point of view, one could rely on the following evolutionary JustSoStory?: Any tribe whose members possess the love instinct has an overwhelming ecological advantage in their niche over competing tribes who do not.

Further, this model does not even presume bipedalism...

I don't think it's clear that having a love instinct would be a distinct advantage. It would only help someone who was separated from the group during their early life, and were that the case chances are they wouldn't live to mate anyways, because people also get most of their survival skills through interaction with one another. Which, by the way, is something else suggesting that instinctive behaviors are not always selected for. Learned behaviors can be much more complicated and robust, and adapt in far less time.

Well, development and regression of instincts is really something pre-psychological, so I think evolutionary biology would still apply to them. But all it ends up saying is that minds are a considerable advantage even when they come with self-destructive social modes, and so instinctive behaviors tend to be submerged in their favor, with psychology taking it from there.

So if love were an instinct, then one would expect mindless people and animals to show an instinct for it. And of course, they do not. Primates kill infants and babies without a shred of guilt or remorse. And they'll abandon orphans to die without demonstrating the least shred of empathy. If love is an instinct, then where is it in the animal kingdom?

''Birds need to be taught to fly, and cats need to be taught to hunt - so these are not instincts? NissimHadar

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you on that. I'm simply saying that the matter isn't one of EvolutionaryPsychology?.

Well, in a way it is since 'love' is a psychological concept. Without empathy, there is no love. Only lust, infatuation, possessiveness, desire, and a host of other things. All lesser emotions which parents make do with in order to provide "good enough" parenting, for some low value of 'good enough'. Since love requires empathy and empathy is a complex psychological concept, the idea of a 'love instinct' seems absurd to me. In the notion of "love instinct" you have a highly advanced psychological concept coupled with, as you say, a biological concept. It just doesn't make sense.

The Hate Instinct, meanwhile, remains entrenched in modern psychological understanding and the subject of no debate whatsoever... ;-)

Too true. I don't think there is any hate instinct either. There's even less evidence for one than for a love instinct.

Not sure what instinct means in humans so calling love an instinct or not instinct is difficult. Clearly animals bond to each other, many times by smell. I usually think of love as an addiction. Addiction and love seem very similar.

Instinct in humans means the same thing as in animals. A behaviour which is known since birth and never had to be learned. Humans have quite a few. Grasping of the hand and holding your breath underwater (the reason why babies can play in water at all) are just two.

As for bonding, that's something which is again completely different from love, or sex or anything else. And you're right that bonding is an addiction (to oxytocin presumably) but since love and bonding aren't the same, that doesn't imply that love is an addiction.

Then human instincts aren't very important because they don't do much. That means most everything is built on our base capabilities. Love seems to buildable on these capabilities so LoveIsaCapability?. My contention is that love is based on the same mechanism as addiction.

Then the first question I would ask is what do you mean by love? Do you mean love as a preference (eg, for apples over oranges), as the emotion of affection (eg, for a pet), as the emotional state of being 'in' love, or as the condition of loving someone?

If the last then you should understand that empathy is crucial to loving someone (in order to distinguish love from infatuation). In that case, your statement raises the question of whether empathy is addictive or in some sense an addiction, or whether it was merely built upon something else which is or was addictive. Which raises the question of what do you mean by addiction? And whether the sense you mean it in provides a useful distinction of mental phenomena.

Referring to love I mean RomanticLove?. And I don't think love requires empathy. A TrueLove would probably be dulled by empathy. Of course there are any number of words available that require a poet's sensibilities for distinction, so I don't want to endlessly argue infatuation vs love vs whatever. Addiction is "The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something." Sounds like love. It's in the chemicals.

If by romantic love you mean being "in love" then I think you're right. Of course, this is not what is meant by love in "love is not an instinct" (the first line, obliquely referring to parental love gives it away). I also don't think the definition of addiction you provide is very useful.

There is not much gain in being oblique. You only invite confusion by being unspecific. That's the definition for addiction at dictionary.com. Feel free to supply your own better definition, but your rejection of the definition is not useful either. Personally, the feeling of love is similar across all loves, and it is personal because I have no idea what love means to another human. The quality and intensity however is different across TypesOfLove. Why this is I'm not sure. A fmri study wold be interesting.

The "feeling" of love can't be the same across all loves. In the case of love as an emotional condition, it isn't even a feeling at all. Love of that kind is a generator of feelings. So under certain circumstances you'll feel affection towards that person but under others you may feel anger or joy, or anything in between.

Emotional condition has no technical content at all. Love is a feeling. And I notice a commonality among all the loves that I have. This may not be the same for you, but that doesn't make my observations of my own state suspect.

If a parent loves a child, do they have the exact same (small set) of feelings towards them all of the time? Is it not permitted them to feel anger, frustration or anything else towards the child? Or are you going to claim that this is not love, or that they only love the child at particular times when they experience the particular emotions which you have chosen to associate with love? 'Emotional condition' (though 'mental condition' may be more accurate) is chock-full of undeniable technical content. It just doesn't mean what you think it means.

If you restrict your language to emotions and feelings, you won't be able to meaningfully talk about human behaviour at all. Even the term "caring about someone" refers to an emotional condition and not to any particular emotion or set of emotions. Love in the sense I mean it is just one particular instance of "caring about someone".

I don't for a single second think that your emotions are different from the rest of the species'.

As for definitions of addiction. Your definition unfortunately admits artistic inspiration and other obsessions as addictions. The standard definition of drug addiction as a physical or psychological dependence on a chemical substance also leaves something to be desired. If someone takes a psychotropic substance to regulate their moods, is that addiction? I get the strong impression that it is not. Especially given that psychiatrists distinguish between normal cocaine use and cocaine use as self-medication. Then there's the issue of normal mental states such as depression being reclassified as abnormal (welcome to the wonderful world of Prozac).

I don't have a good definition of addiction because there aren't enough different examples of addictive behaviour for me to analyze. I suspect it may have something to do with whether taking a substance leaves you more or less functional after having taken it. If you're better off then it was medication. If you're worse off then it was a drug. But using "except if it's a drug" in the definition of addiction is pretty ad hoc.

Anyways, I've been thinking lately about the nature of love especially as it relates to slavery. Elsewhere, I point out that identification with the master's desires, goals and decisions is what constitutes a slave mentality. So if someone decides something and you, not being involved in the decision-making process, consistently say that "we" decided something, then you are a slave to that person. Some of the popular conceptions of love seem to border on slavery, and in literature love and slavery are often explicitly related (eg, "slave to love").

Yet love is not slavery and it is not identification with another person. People who love each other maintain their own identity, and an awareness of their own needs. When they sacrifice their own wishes, it's "to make the other person happy". Which is either one's own need (eg, pleasure at seeing a lover happy) or a clear separation between one's own needs and the other person's (you know that it's not you that wants this, it's the other person). Relationships without any boundaries between people, between their distinct wants and needs, are flawed, sick and damaged. Such relationships are unstable (because there is no conscious oversight to ensure both partners' central needs are met) and as a result end in tragedy. Ironic then that the romantics proclaim such a sick relationship to be the epitome of being "in" love. Or that people should confuse such diametrically opposed notions as love and "in love".

Of course everyones emotions are different. Emotions are based on chemicals. The processing of these chemicals is different in every person. So by definition emotions are different per person.

Ok, the emotions may be different on a chemical scale, but that doesn't mean, that you cannot compare or equate them on a higher level.

I don't think you mean the same thing by that as the other poster. But here's something to clarify the issues.

Emotions are not chemical or even physical. Emotions are qualia, and nothing in science provides, or is ever likely to provide, any basis for explaining qualia. The only thing science explains is the structure and relationships between qualia. So science doesn't tell you why 'red' looks like it does to you but it tells you why the spectrum of colours you see can be broken down into three primaries.

The correspondence between what you see as 'red' and some particular wavelength and what other people associate with that wavelength is fundamentally non-scientific. And in fact, ordinary (and scientific) language doesn't have the concepts necessary to speak about such things, to routinely make a distinction between what you see and what I see when our eyes are trained on the same thing.

What this all comes down to is that when discussing emotions you can be referring to one of two things. 1) the structure of emotions or, 2) the content of emotions. #1 is fully subject to scientific investigation and any talk about how different people "feel differently" or "have different emotions" is completely besides the point. #2 is completely outside the scope of science and even outside the scope of ordinary language. To even refer to it is pointless.

You can say that people have different distributions of emotion; different ranges, different frequencies, different amplitudes. But to say that an emotional experience in one person isn't the same as that same emotional experience in another person, is to say nothing meaningful at all.

Obviously you folks need to read up on how your brain works. http://www.brain.riken.go.jp/bsinews/bsinews3/no3/speciale.html. By moving the discussion to qualia then of course you have moved the discussion to philosophy. As these phenomenal states are accessed only by introspection there's not much to talk about, but a lot to argue about. At the risk of reductionism, I can manipulate you completely with these simple chemicals, so there is definitely some relation.

Good points. I too felt that the discussion was moving into areas fundamentally un-discussable.

Also I feel that the word Love, in most of the discussion on this page, is horribly ill-defined. I will say that I don't believe in an "in-love kind of love". I believe it's all just cultural bullshit. There is empathy. There is valuation, or esteem. There is friendship. Closeness, intimacy. And then of course there's the biggy, unbridled lust. "In-love" love is just lust plus compatibility and excitement. And an extra large helping of culturally-originating romantic fantasy.

Don't get me wrong. Being "in love" is fun stuff. But it doesn't mean anything.