| |
|
In the Religion thread, Ignatius_J said:
"And we don't "need" love. We need air, water, carbohydrates, protein and a certain temperature range, and that's it."
Well, now.
At the most basic level, I think that's an unproven claim. It's possible, perhaps even likely given the recent upsurge in evidence showing that mood and personality are closely linked to life expectancy, that the bio-chemical manifestations of love are good for the body, and that the sense of well-being of love might act on the body in the same way as some yogas seem to. So we don't 'need' love in the same way that we don't need the kind of diet which will keep us alive into our mid-eighties rather than dying at thirty five.
More interesting, to me, is the suggestion that our body's needs are those which define what 'we' need. Are we our bodies? Well, up to a point. I think it's a mistake to entertain the kind of crude dualist approach which asserts that we are nothing so crass nor so crude as physical beings, that we somehow ride a fleshy robot and that our bodies are just life-support systems for a Mind.
On the other hand, it would be disingenuous to assert that "we" are only our physical characteristics. It may well be that consciousness and a capacity for abstract thought evolved as a survival trait, a particularly effective weapon in the DNA's arsenal, allowing it to conquer ever-greater areas of the globe - even space, perhaps - and wipe out the competition. However, that allows for the possibility that consciousness, as an emergent property, can take us in a new direction, exhibit behaviours which far exceed the relatively small change which produced it.
Have we grown into organisms of thought, defined as much by our ways of thinking and our consciousnesses as by our physical bodies? I'd say "obviously, yes". There's a thought experiment which is often proposed in the study of identity: suppose you write a document containing your opinions and thoughts at a given moment in your life, an artwork which captures the ethos of your life extremely successfully. And then you experience some form of traumatic epiphany, and change all those opinions. A mental patient with no memories reads your earlier artwork, and takes it on board in toto, becoming the person in the book.
Which of the two of you has a greater degree of identity with the the person you once were?
It doesn't matter if you settle on "me" as an answer, so long as the experiment makes it's point: that we're creatures of pattern of the mind as much as presence of the DNA.
In which case, "do we need love?" is a far more vexed question than Ignatius was suggesting. |
|
|
