Skip, I think that you're missing my point.
Maybe I've not fully expanded on the "Something more," theory of things. The point that I want to make is that not all things are reducible, and that the things that are, lose something in the reduction (where reduction is a process in which things are broken down into component parts to be examined an understood how they work). When you reduce a love relationship into merely a biological imperative, you've lost the subtlety of the multitudinous forms of love. Not all love (and this a problem with an English definition) is biological. What about the love of a parent, or of a friend? The former could be explained, but what about the love of an adoptive parent? The adoptive parent isn't loving a child that is biologically theirs, in point of fact, most adoptive parents are likely to be more loving than the average biological parent, who include within their population those who abandon their children, or have no choice but to do so. The love towards a friend could also be reduced in an anthropological sense, where it is a relationship between tribe or clan members, where working together would allow for the survival of said tribe, but if you examine the mythology of tribes, friendship is something that exists as a further bond, a further relationship beyond that of normal tribe ties.
What I'm trying to point out is that cold rationalism, materialism, and reductionism, in the name of definition, in the name of the compulsive need to explain everything, has slain the anima of the thing they wish to describe. Science, and specifically scientism has a tendency to attempt to explain everything, contain it within a box of words and rules, to observe it and understand it. The last two points are fine, but, the problem is that the way in which we experience life is much more than a set of processes.
Especially when it come to things that as individuals we experience which are hard to explain. An epiphany, a spiritual experience, a moment of transcendent peace, a reallly good Metallica concert, or the look of acceptance and unconditional love in the eye of a lover. These are things that refuse to be quantified. Instead we understand them implicitly as a kind of qualia in our world. These are things that we apprehend, instead of comprehend, something that we percieve in a direct and immediate way. We touch upon something, perhaps tangentially, but we touch upon something that is more, and in a spiritual way, we find ourselves in the mysterium tremendum. We find ourselves in a place where we touch the numinous, the powerful sensation of unconsciously understanding that there is something present that can't be seen. We are confronted with Mystery. It was a wise man that said that is foolishness not to believe in the possibility that there is something (or many things) beyond the limits of your imagination. Simply because they haven't been discovered or quantified doesn't mean that they don't exist. Not merely that, it could be in our rush to explain every little piece of the universe, we miss out on the larger picture, a picture that can be intuited, a picture that, stepping back, may come into focus.
There are scientists who are enraptured by this notion, they make theories that change the world. The theory of gravity, or of relativity. There are scientists who embrace the mystery and set out to explore it with open eyes, and open hearts. They have stumbled upon something that people have sought and pursued for a long time; the wonder of mystery.
It is important to note that we humans are fragile instruments. Our minds are not perfect, nor are our ideas. We've tried to abstractize, or externalize our knowledge and thinking in order to fix our incapability to get things right through our minds, but all to often we forget how fallible we are, how beholden we are to a set of ideas or beliefs about the world. And once we come across something that explains the world in manner that is consistent and logical we forget that still this reasoning is human. Thinkers become caught up in their own ideas, they ossify themselves into rigid stances of thought, and they refuse to accept the notion that they could be wrong. They lack self-reflection, they are caught in the honey-pot of their own ideas. It seems that the more they are challenged, the more they retreat into reinforcing their thinking about the world, instead of considering that someone else might have something to say, and that what they say could be valuable too.
There is more than meets the eye, to quote Transformers.
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