Love and the Immediate

Ah, Skip, it is so easy to let words run away from us, become things that are alive in their own right, and so easily injurious. A fascinating concept, Love. So hard to define, hard to capture, hard to chase, hard to hold on to, yet the object of so many people.

If we are to take the materialist's perspective, particularly the physicalist's perspective, love is nothing than chemicals. Love is a biological imperative, the name that our brain gives to label the impulse to pass on our genes. Love is nothing more than chemicals. Materialism only allows for the matter to exist, and hard physcialism is hard determinism too, we are nothing more than the means to the end of some random, incredibly lucky, configuration of billions upon billions of atoms. We are cosmic accidents in their eyes. Can't you see that there must be something more?

We see love as something that we are attached to that is bigger than ourselves, it exists, but according to the physicalist, on in the waves of hormones produced by our amygdalas. To them we are small, we are finite, we are reducible. We are the corpse on their autopsy table of scientism, slain by the axe of reason. Indeed valuable information is gleaned from the corpse, how the innards work, the shape and structure of the brain, the processes are discovered, the blood is analyzed. But is not life. The brain is not alive by its chemicals, but by its mind. The heart is not alive by its pump, but by its feelings, the body is the house of a person. These mortal coils are exactly that, coils that contain personhood, a container that must contain something, call it a soul, call it a mind, but it is so easy to intuit. Perhaps that is why it is so hard for us to prove, because it requires a lateral kind of thinking, instead of linear one, perhaps our understanding of God is also in this way.

The conception of something more is what all of this is predicated upon. The more leads to the ultimate, the ultimate lends us the notion of a God.

Think on the concept of the person. If we are nothing more than matter, than how should be recognize the value of other human beings, or even simply recognize people as people? We should, instead, according to the physicalist, the materialist, simply see them as walking meat popsicles, meatbags full of chemical reactions, animated by the process of a lucky series of mutations.

Think on the concept of self-reflection. What is the use of self-reflection to a materialist? We should all live life as immediately as possible, as close to evolutionary forces as possible, spreading our genes as far and wide as we can, and protecting that gene pool as much as we can. We are subsumed by the necessity of the propagation of our species, we are beast, we are nothing more than flesh. Self-reflection belies this, as does the concept of the mind, as does the concept of the something more, or the concept of the Other. Self-reflection presupposes an existence of the mind, and an understanding of time and causality and morality. Self-relfection allows us to see ourselves as both subject and object, instead of an ever-present subject of nascent impulses.