Love is just another term that is hard to define outside of a dictionary. We can quantify love and we can compartmentalize love depending on the object of our affection. However, love as most would define it, is a series of chemical reactions in the brain. New found love (lust) is easily recognizable as a hormonal response to stimuli. Old love (established love) comes about through mutual respect and understanding IMHO.

People give themselves purpose for life. Biologically we can deduce that the purpose of life is too procreate and pass our genetics on to our offspring. I know that sounds cold, but when one doesn't define "purpose of life" I tend to go there. The idea that god somehow gives us purpose in our lives does not make any sense to me. We as human beings have a need to find purpose in everything for some reason. Why can't our purpose for life just be, because that we are here?

I consider "love" to be one of those concepts that is more or less impossible to define because it is relative and conditional. It's like asking what is good or what is justice.

Love is further complicated by magical woo-woo stuff that is often attached. (e.g. "soul mates" etc).

My short answer is that the romanticized idea of love, though fun, is mostly bullshit.

In my opinion there are three kinds of love all of which are to help in procreation. The first of them is lust which quite obviously is a physical attraction between two people. This is what makes sex happen which is of course the necessary first step in making babies. The second kind of love is a long term relationship. By making us want to be with the person's whose children we helped create it is guaranteed that there will be at least two adults to take care of the children. This increases the likely hood of survival during the infantile years substantially. The third kind is what I call romantic love. This is either a want for something you cannot have or the process of wooing someone into lust or a long term relationship.

As for the meaning of life I would say that it is not just to personally procreate and pass on your own genes but also to ensure the survival of the group. This explains why we feel the need to care for disabled, ill or simply weaker people. I also believe that people are not only driven to pass on their genes but also their ideas and skills and create some sort of intellectual offspring that can then pass on your ideas after you have died and so on like genes (sorry if this sounds a like memetics).

[edit: fixed some spelling errors]

According to Robert G Ingersoll:

Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.
It is the Morning and the Evening Star.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.

 As for the purpose part of the question, read this:

For New Atheists: Is This Really All There Is?

It starts out debunking NDE's and life after death, but the second half is about meaning and purpose.

As for love, there are two distinctly different types of answer to the question, and they're both right.

Scientifically, love is he state of attachment we feel to members of our social group that causes us to desire their companionship, wellbeing, approval, and reciprocation.  We can break it down into various chemicals and talk about the biology behind love, but that's not what most people are after.

Culturally, love really is a many splendored and many faceted thing, and it simply doesn't mean the same to everybody.  In the end, it is what it is to you.  Some people experience deeper attachment than others.  Some people get butterflies in their stomachs after twenty years of marriage while others never feel "fireworks."  

For much of human history, we haven't had the concept of marital love that we do now.  Men and women moved in together to have and raise children.  Even in much of American history, wives were considered helpmates more than soulmates.  When we read of chivalrous love from the Rennaissance, we're not reading about the stuff we have today.  We see the word love and think of our own conception, but it was quite different.

In the end, all we can say is that human brains haven't had long to adapt to post-industrial global societies, and the best we can do is recognize the biology behind love and try to adapt as well as we can to a world that's very different from the one in which we evolved.  Love is a fundamental evolutionary trait, but we just aren't prepared to deal with the vast number of mating, living, and childrearing options available to us.

Love is a psychological process of attachment that is activated as a sort of emotional program in the brain.  It is hard wired into our nervous systems and it is built on three basic components (according to Helen Fischer - an anthropologist who does functional MRI's on the brain in love).  they are:

Lust - sexual response system that is more or less free floating and doesn't need to be associated with any specific person.  It is the basic reproductive urge.

Love - the process of intense emotional arousal and obsession with a specific person.  This is characterized by sexual jealousy and often a willingness to die for the other person.  It is also characterized by a tendency to exaggerate the positive qualities of the love object (aka "the illusions of love&quot.

Attachment - the process of bonding with a specific person in such a way that you are willing to accept their limitations and shortcomings in favor of finding someone new.  This process is also associated with bereavement when the attachment ends - this is a sort of psychological punishment that our brain inflicts on us to prevent us from ending the relationship.  This serves the function of helping the couple stay together to raise children over time.

These three brain systems together have evolved in order to help us to reproduce, bond with our sex partner, and stay with them throughout the extended childhood of our species.  They are activated as behavioral programs in response to a verity of behavioral and cultural cues.

Pretty cool if you ask me.

Purpose = sex then die

On love I have to say it's merely an emotional response tied to pleasure and comfort responses in our brain. Nonetheless the only thing I love for.

On purpose, I have to agree with anyone who says life has no purpose, or someone who sardonically retorts something simple about human nature. But, I have to go a step further and make it clear how and why I think so: life is the product of chaos. Chaos is merely the compilation of meaningless events clashing in a convoluded pandemonium. However, just because life has no purpose does not mean it cannot be experienced to the greatest of possible lengths.

Love is a battlefeild.

Although I agree with your viewpoint about love and your refreshingly logical reasoning, saying that the purpose of life is to survive seems very much to me an incongruity. It is a common existentialist view that life has no meaning, but that fighting death somehow gives life meaning. I think this is bullshit. If life has no meaning then why would you bother trying to find any? This conclusion is really just a rationalization for the fact that people don't tend to desire death, and existentialists might think if life is meaningless then there's not point to living. Which is also bullshit.

I realize there's a difference between "meaning" and "purpose," but in the end it seems to me to be the same rationalization. As I see it, we are all the product of chaos, thus we do not have purpose. We only exist because of the evolutionary logic that things which accomplish survival and reproduction most effectively will do so. However, just because we are the product of chaos and thus do not have purpose this does not mean we should not experience our short, convoluded lives as best as we desire.

In the end, we're going to anyway.

Asking the purpose of life is somewhat like asking if one's thoughts have been putting on weight. It doesn't make any sense. "Purpose" is, by it's very nature, a subjective and arbitrary term. There is no intrinsic purpose in a rifle to shoot and kill. You can use the butt of the rifle to hammer nails. Someone may have built the rifle with the express purpose of shooting and killing someone, but that's a totally different matter to saying that "killing" is the innate purpose of the rifle. There is no such thing as innate purpose. Even if there were some sort of all-pervading conscious entity controlling the material universe, it wouldn't change that fact. That entity might decide that certain objects have certain purposes, but that is still arbitrary and subjective, and does not give any meaning to the term "intrinsic purpose". That the term is contradictory is inescapable. You, as a biological entity, have no purpose whatsoever outside the designations of various other conscious entities. If you are in the military, a commander might decide that your purpose is to defuse mines. If you are in the corporate sector, your purpose might to be compile reports. If you are a factory worker, your purpose might be to assemble machines. You get the idea. Where do these labels come from? From other people. Are the meaningless? No. But they are not intrinsic. Any attempt to attach the label of "purpose" would be just as arbitrary and extrinsic.  This renders the term "purpose of life" meaningless, since purpose is defined by entities which are conscious and alive and have the capacity to consider the concept. For the concept of purpose to exist at all, conscious life must be present, rendering the term "purpose of life" ridiculous.

And please do not say that the purpose of life is "to procreate". Biological life by definition procreates and possesses the functional capacity to procreate. The former is nonsense. The latter is correct.

 Synchronicity!

I was just about to post a rant about a commercial I just saw.  There's a spiffy new version of the IUD being advertised all over TV.  I saw two different ads for it this morning.  During the disclaimers at the end, the lawyer voice said, "Candidates for [name of the device] have had at least one child, have blah, blah, blah, etc, etc..."

I've run into this before.  When I got a vasectomy, I had to call several places before they would allow me past the initial screening.  You see, I am childless, and would like to remain so.  To that end, I got a vasectomy.  Smart, right?  Really logical.  Rational.  Pragmatic.  And also discouraged by pretty much every health professional in the world.  

The same thing goes for this new IUD.  There's no health reason why a woman needs to have had a child before getting an IUD.  It's all ideological.  I'm fucking tired of this cultural myth that people are "supposed" to reproduce.  

And don't get me started on the hypocricy of fundies who don't like the "unnatural" union of gays, and would freak the fuck out at them going to a fertility clinic, but are ok with straight women spending a hundred thousand dollars trying to get themselves knocked up by a test tube.

That shit should be illegal. I heard of that happening to women wanting a tubal ligation - they won't do it to women under 30 that don't have kids. Don't they get some people don't want kids (or even can't STAND children? )

 Nicely put, Susac.  I said something similar in my essay on purpose.  To quote myself:

I like the way you flip meaning around so that it comes last -- after life, not before.  I'm going to shamelessly borrow the concept and put it to my own good use.

I was listening to Christopher hitchens in a debate last night (on the RD website), and the reverend he was debating kept asking why be moral if there is no god?  What difference does it make if you kill someone if there is no there is no god and no afterlife?

It seems to me that the root issue here is meaning.  What meaning does morality have in an uncaring universe?  Hitchens made his usual reply about how horrible it is to think that human beings will only be good because they fear the  creator, but I think this is both a week argument on his part and a non-sequiter.

Human beings are moralizing creatures.  We have psychological and emotional response systems that effect both our behavior and our subjective sense of self.  These systems are evolutionary equipment that serve the function of helping me to live with my fellow human beings.  Does the universe care if I kill my neighbor?  No, but I care.  I care because I have cognitive systems of empathy, and fairness.  I care because I want the people around me to trust me and feel that I am safe.

Let's say I do kill my neighbor.  I am risking my own health and safety by doing so.  I am risking these things because I have a support system of other people who don't want to live around a murder, and who will toss me into prison with other murderers.

Let's say I get away with it.  I now have to live with being a murderer.  This becomes a part of my psychology.  killing my neighbor has wounded me, because I have psychological systems that cause me psychological and emotional pain for taking another life.  In addition to this, I can see the damage that my act has caused to the people around me - my neighbor's family and friends.  My empathy causes me pain as well.

The people around me see the pain I am in.  They pick up the non-verbal cues I am giving off.  I start to give them the creeps, because at some deep level I am communicating my crime to those around me.  This effects my relationships.  My self-esteem is damaged.  Over time I choose other damaged people to hang out with.  My relationships degrade and become less healthy unless I am able to find a way to heal my wounds.  Note that talking about the killing is probably an important part of the healing process, so now I am on the horns of a dilemma, one that causes me more pain.

These psychosocial and social processes  are all part of a package deal that comes with killing my neighbor.  Does the universe care if I kill him?  No.  But I do.

Consider war.  A soldier is a person who is given the role of killing other people for the benefit of the society.  One of the things we do in war is the society honors it's soldiers.  We all say we honor them for risking their lives.  This is true, but we all know, down inside, that we also honor them for doing the killing.  For making the sacrifice of killing another human being. 

This support and appreciation doesn't remove the wound the soldier suffers from killing other people, but it at least removes the stigma of being a murderer.  We are basically telling the soldier "I know you are a killer, but you killed for us, and we still love and trust you."  This does the soldier the service of at least giving them an emotionally safe place to work on healing their wounds.

War is an act of killing in the context of social support.  We are now in the middle of what many consider to be an unjust and immoral war, but none of us condemn our souldures for killing in this war.  So you can see how important context is in determining the morality of an act.  Conversely, in Vietnam we DID condemn  the soldiers, and we as a nation, have agreed that failing to support our soldiers was an immoral treatment of the people who killed for us.

Do the rocks care if we go to war?  No.  But we do.

Meaning comes from us.  Morality comes from us.  God comes from us.  

We are a complex series of processes embeded in a nested hierarchy.  Quantum mechanics -> Atoms -> Molecules -> Cells ->  People -> Families -> Neighborhoods -> communities -> Nations -> International Coalitions.

The rules at each level of the hierarchy is built on top of the rules from the the lower levels, and the rules at any given level operate in the context of the levels above.  An atom makes a molecule depending on the kinds of other atoms it finds itself associated with.  A cell's behavior is determined by it's neighboring cells and the molecules it is bathed in, which are all part of the organism as a whole.  A person's behavior is influenced by his biological capabilities in the context of his social culture, a nation's behavior is determined by it's resources (both economic and human) in the context of the other nations it finds itself with etc.

These nesting hierarchies are the context in which human moral systems operate.  If you go "UP' or "Down" too many levels, morality becomes meaningless.  Theists argue that without morality going "all the way down" it's meaningless, but the universe has shown us again and again that basic processes can and do give rise to complex systems that cannot be understood by the rules of the lower order systems.  Inorganic -> Organic -> Consciousness is an example of emergent systems giving rise to capabilities that cannot exist without historicity and emerging complexity.

Theists base their morality upon a "top down" model.  They assume that god made us and god is moral therefore if I follow god then I am moral.  This is bullshit on several levels.  First, any honest reading of the bible will tell you that god is NOT moral.  Second, it doesn't follow that just because I am following god that I am moral.  Third, obedience to authority is a lousy standard for morality.

Most educated theists are smart enough to know this stuff, although they may be systematically ignoring it.  So what's really going on here?  Why do they object to bottom-up morality, and why do they so often do so with such emotional furor?

I want to hazard some guesses:

1)  They are afraid that if they are not getting their morality from god, then they are immoral.  They don't want to lose their reason for not being the bad person that the doctrine original sin tells them that they are.

2)  They don't want to loose the authority they get from using god as their sock-puppet.

3)  They fear that without "objective morality" their lives will have no meaning.

4)  They have built a career and/or sense of self around the idea of serving others and doing god's will, and they realize that it will take a lot of personal work on their identity to reconstruct a functional sense of self without the meaning that this imaginary relationship gives them.

5)  Having bought in to the "top-down" model of the universe, they lack the flexibility of mind to recognize a bottom up understanding of the universe.

Just some thoughts.  Please feel free to comment.

You.

(That song rocks!)

 Good post, susac.

I'd like to add a bit of an addendum, though.  Killing is not always a wounding experience, and that is also an evolutionary trait. To quote myself from my ESSAY ON MORALITY :

Furthermore, I make a point about modern culture that shouldn't be glossed over:

So, we have to deal with the reality that not only is killing not always wrong to humans, it's not always harmful to the killer, either.  I don't think you have stressed enough the fact that soldiers are not just given a free couch in the psychologist's office.  They are given ticker tape parades.  Groups of young men crowd around them to hear stories of killing.  Men join the army because they want to kill.  Killing is part of being human.  It's in our genes.

I recommend that you read a book called "The Lucifer Principle" by Howard Bloom.  One of the main premises is that humans have a falsely dichotomous view of good and evil.  What we often call evil is a force for progress as well.  Like it or not, from a socio-anthropological level, we can't deny that the Roman conquests advanced society, as did the Viking invasions, as did the Crusades.  War drives innovation and technology and it unifies states or countries or kingdoms in ways that simply aren't available in peacetime.  Our moon landings were driven by war, remember.

In short, any discussion of morality is incomplete if it doesn't deal with the reality of evil as part of human nature.  Part of why I think atheists have been so unsuccessful at communicating the true nature of human morality is that we are not honest with theists or ourselves about it.  Theists are afraid of the implications of godless morality, and they are right to be so.  Where they are wrong is in thinking that god-centered morality is any different.  They are afraid of something that really exists so they are framing it with a mythology that makes it easier to explain away.  The real concept is harder to explain, but I think the effort is worth the trouble.

As a side note, I'm glad you think Hitchens' morality argument is weak.  I have always thought so myself, and part of the reason for my extensive writing projects is to try to provide a better one.

Loved both posts!  Awsome!

I have this idea that we have these biologial sub-routines that get activated in response to our interpretation of the situation we find ourselves in.  I am working on this idea that narrative is a fundimental component of both identity formation and of determining which emotional response "module" is getting activated.  Culture can train us into having specific emotional responses to specific narratives.  I'm "thinking out loud" right now, but it seems to be a workable model for explaining some things. 

I need to get some work done right now, but I'd like to kick these ideas around some more.