The Pulsations of Love

What else is the evolution of man but the pulsations of love?

But what is love?

Seen scientifically, love is a product of two similarly organized telelogically-focused minds, experiencing one another in a sympathetic way.

Breaking it down, love is an inclination to connect. An inclination to subsume, to skip space, to cross over, to find something essential in the other that makes the self greater. What else is a molecular reaction and the creation of a super-ordinate structure (polymer) than a spontaneous bounding - a tendency to find some 'sympathy' between separate states?

But the real love, and not some philosophical confabulation, is a product of a brain. But not one brain, but at least two brains.

When did this brain become as we know it today? 400,000 years ago? 200,000 years ago? A process began, for sure, about 2 million years ago with Australipithecus Africanus, when an ape became upright, and began to forage and live with its conspecifics in terms of this new vantage point.

What about our hands? The smartest creatures, us, and elephants, we have this capacity to interface with our own body, but not just any part, but the part we use to manipulate external objects. The part of us we call a tool, our hands, an instrument for manipulation. Elephants too use their trunk to manipulate objects, with the center of their consciousness - their head and eyes - interfacing with their trunk/tool. But the elephants trunk is nevertheless far less nimble than our 5 digit hands, which we have only because we evolved as "brachiators", or animals who swing around in trees.

Stop, right now, and think about that: you could only be what you are because your ancestors millions of years ago were brachiators - creatures who lived and evolved in trees. Deep in our past lies the trees, the forests, and the adaptation made was lengthening forearms and the differentiation, elongation and ennervation of small protusions into full blown fingers. And with fingers, for ancient man, came the capacity to hold, and manipulate, directly in front of the face. It was the geometry of this relationship - mind interfacing with the extended self, the hands, over and over again in day to existence, being brought before the face in combination with dexterous cognitive perception, so eventually, an 'emergent' property will emerge: existential thoughts and feelings. Insights into elements of the other, and then seeing it in yourself. Through this circular motion of 'seeing into the other' and then into yourself, the mind grew by cognitive associations, "essential constraints", we could say (in the language of Terrence Deacon); bit by bit, year by year, in many different lines of hominids. But this growth reached a critical juncture in Homo Heidelbergensis, from whom Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens evolved.

Of course, even before full blown self-awareness emerges, creatures "like" being positively evaluated. Is it too much to say that dogs desire positive feedback, and so expect their owners or other humans to respond to them with an approving affective expression? I think so. Dogs expect and want, in the sense that they seem to actually enjoy the flow of sympathetic play. Yet, we can't say that they foster thoughts the way we do, for example, when we hope for a certain result, a certain feedback, as occurs daily in a human beings life.

This continuity between our own experience with the experience of other creatures is strange. It is homologous, as biologists say. The dog is attracted to positive feedback just like the human is. But the rodent seems less responsive. A snake doesn't care at all for it. Even less fish, salamanders or lobsters. Transitions have occurred that seems strongly associated with brain development. In whales, dolphins, elephants, apes, and many other creatures, what we vaguely call "social", has of yet to be handled in a truly scientific way. This sympathy between interacting creatures seems to be a basic inclination of the organisms, yet each organism evolves along this line in terms of its own intrinsic constraints - its body and it's environment being primary. A Hominid, for instance, is able to foster a far greater differentiated awareness because of it's unique evolutionary advantage of being a brachiator. If we want to be poetic about it, we can say that to have human awareness, you need to pass through the following stages: Mammal (a social plancental organism) -> Primate (a tree dwelling organism) -> Ape (have grown in body size and moved partly to the ground) -> Hominid (Land dwelling, uses arms and hands to manipulate the environment around him). The process of exaptation, or using an outdated evolutionary structure for a new function, such as socializing mammals becoming long armed primates becoming land dwelling hominids who use the brachiating arms of their monkey ancestors for very different purposes on land.

On the inside, neuroscience has told us that consciousness is being generated every .25 milliseconds. We know this because our minds do not catch stimuli that happen too quickly. Ergo, we aren't aware of things that happen at very short intervals. Because of this knowledge, I think we can better appreciate the dynamic and emergent quality of human phenomenology - of the subtle changes and the big "ahah" moments which seem to be dynamically related to the iterated moments of earlier experiences.

The neuroscientist Merlin Donald postulates that Hominids underwent three stages in the evolution of consciousness: episodic, mimetic, and theoretic. Ignoring the last two, the first one is a very basic property shared by all animals and is basically the fundamental unit of perception. What happens in the mind at any moment is partly a function of the homeodynamic logic of body-maintenance, as well as the 'meaning' of an environmental cue to the perceiving organism. Looking at humans (and presumably all hominids) the growth of the brain seemed not so much to be a function of tool use or fire or hunting - the typical postulates of paleoanthropology, but of sympathetic interactions between different centers of subjectivity. From this perspective, the dynamical life - and raison d'etre - of the experiencing organism, registering its body's needs and decoding meanings from the environment, comes, I believe, the beginning of an opening to a new source of energy.

Most scientists treat mind as epiphenomenal, which is unfortunate, since mind in fact may be a force in the universe. However, mind, in the evolutionary sense I have so far described, is an elaboration of a sympathetic affective impulse (or resister) in the organism, so mind is fundamentally co-extensive, or synonymous in some mysterious way, with the sympathetic affective impulse. However, although were talking about mind and feeling, or perception and emotion, we have to realize the fundamentally dual nature of it: we have a center of consciousness (a head) and a body that's full of feeling. So, we can say Love -> Mind, with the sensation, or impulse of two interacting organisms, when finding a proper elaboration in an evolutionary lineage, becomes elaborated into mind, or episodic awareness.

In humans, perception has become very entrained to affect. In us, there is a fundamental and basic need to be recognized, and to be recognized means to have your "output" into the world be reflected and transformed into the activity of the...

I started to read your thread.

But it was just a wall of words.



I need to sleep.......

...other.

But how wrong, I believe, we may be, when we think that modern human consciousness is identical to that of ancient man living 150,000 years ago. This ancient man was far more symbiotically inclined in his relations with others because his life was organized harmoniously with the environment. What I mean is, in living as a hunter and gather, ancient Humans were far less cognitively side-tracked by external constraints - such as the inclination to feel pride in the accumulation of a natural resource i.e. as in agriculture. The life of the mind of ancient man was intensely cooperate, by which I mean, ancient humans were responsive and cordial and tender because their social relations were scaffolded by environmental circumstances as to promote cooperativeness in ways that were built around the core pleasure of sympathetic emotions, or love.

Ultimately, although this little piece I've written isn't meant to be a scientific paper, I believe human beings will eventually discover that the expansion of human brains has been a function of 'coincidental' ecological circumstances and the irreducible pleasure of being positively evaluated (in the sense of being "recognized as a center of subjectivity") as well as sharing a deeper meaning, with the other. That is, in addition to the known physical forces (gravity, electromagnetism,weak and strong nuclear force) love, will come to be seen as a force in the organization of physical matter.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
But what is love?
Seen scientifically, love is a product of two similarly organized telelogically-focused minds, experiencing one another in a sympathetic way.

Surely you jest, or have never actually experienced true unconditional Love.
"Scientifically!"
Hahahahahaha!
"According to scientific theory, and a definition from Miriam Webster, Love is....!"

Knowledge = experience!

It is impossible to form any (vain) imaginary 'concept' of 'unconditional' Love, to 'define' the ineffable, as all 'concepts', all 'thought/imagination/ego' is 'conditional'!
Thus, whatever you 'think/imagine' unconditional Love to be, in ignorance, it ain't!
Teenagers mistake a 'crushes' and 'hormones' for Love (what's the difference, it 'feels' great' nonetheless, right, and what you don't know won't hurt you)!
Many never Know unconditional Love/Enlightenment!

But the real love, and not some philosophical confabulation, is a product of a brain.

Nah, you be completely clueless...

The brain doesn't even manufacture 'thoughts' or 'Consciousness, and you imagine that it manufactures unconditional Love?
'Materialism' is a long obsolete theory.

There are many points in your OP that I would love to respond to but I simply do not have the time right now... and it has taken a few reads for it to soak in sufficiently which has eaten up more time. Some quite brilliantly explained points, I do envy your capability for succinctness.

Anyway, this...

originally posted by: Astrocyte
What about our hands? The smartest creatures, us, and elephants, we have this capacity to interface with our own body, but not just any part, but the part we use to manipulate external objects. The part of us we call a tool, our hands, an instrument for manipulation. Elephants too use their trunk to manipulate objects, with the center of their consciousness - their head and eyes - interfacing with their trunk/tool. But the elephants trunk is nevertheless far less nimble than our 5 digit hands, which we have only because we evolved as "brachiators", or animals who swing around in trees.

You must have been reading my mind, or perhaps I yours, as this very thing was preoccupying me all of yesterday.

I watched a lecture by Peter Levenda in the morning, or part of it at least, and by late afternoon I realised that...

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

www.brainyquote.com...

Fantastical beings indeed!

Many thanks for such a wonderfully considered post and apologies that I cannot do better justice to it in reply.

Very best.

a reply to: Anaana

Hello, I'm extremely curious to know about "Peter Levenda" the lecture you mention in your post...

...Specifically what it had to do with the portion of the OP's post that you quoted -

- and how it led you to your 'realization' re: the Arthur Conan Doyle quote.

If you don't wish to post the details, feel free to PM me.

Also, I know you have an incredibly busy life, so if you can't get around to it anytime soon, that's okay -

- but, I hope you will keep the request in mind for future posting, as you have really peaked my curiosity as to the above.

Thanks so much and hope you are well.

a reply to: Anaana

Thank you again for a very kind response! I absolutely love when someone understands me!

I was just thinking now how this dynamic could be best described.

The human-brain has been fundamentally coopted for cooperation. This is what the archeological record supports. This, of course, doesn't mean that humans interacting with humans from another tribe didn't result in violence. This possibility seems likely given our historical evolution from apes. However, it must be emphasized - and unfortunately it has not been sufficiently noticed - sympathetic emotions i.e. these "reciprocal communicative acts" in which one persons phenomenological sense of being positively judged excites their own "take" on whatever subject matter is being discussed - is physically causative. Mind, in this sense, is being elaborated, albeit, enormously slowly (since it took millions of years to go from apes to hominids) through countless iterations of these "relational knowings". It's implicit, and acting as an outside 'spur' to whatever enters their focal awareness. So bear in mind that all these ideas I'm talking about aren't about concepts or ideas, but about feelings and background motivations, that, when reflected upon introspectively, indicate themselves by their forcefulness in organizing states changes in our mind. What I mean is obvious: we want to be liked. Therefore, the 'basis' of the elaboration of mind and brain (I am basically saying neurogenesis is stimulated by these instances of positive evaluation) is the craving for positive evaluation, and thus our intense willingness to cooperate towards a state of 'shared-intentionality'. This term, by the way, is the idea emphasized by the psychologist Michael Tomasello as the organizing vector behind the evolution of the human mind, and the implicit fact that we can only share ideas if we come to orient to one another with certain assumptions about one anothers knowledge. These assumptions, which I regard to be affective processes that contain certain implicit cognitive structures (self-other equivalence, which leads to identicatory processes, as well as a strong tendency in competitive atmospheres to form thought in the background of unconscious comparative processes pertinent to a culturally imposed standard) are now built into our neural hardware. Mind is "in" us, but its source is in the spaces between us - when we communicate, the cues, signs and ways we imply our self into the other.

The guy who trolls my threads (the person who posted first) for example, is hyper focusing on my evolutionary account - that is, in regarding love as an EMERGENT phenomena dependent, at least in the universe we inhabit, on a continuous process of physical and biological evolution. All I have really done, and what I think every rational human being should also recognize the significance of, is that all things have an origin, and in studying the origin, we can better understand our selves and the meaning of our existence. For instance, I find the causal necessity of "moments of sympathy" as dazzling evidence of the influence of an attractive force that cannot be explained in normal physicalist terms. I am not advocating physicalism, obviously (although he seems to think so), but that doesn't mean that I don't wonder how humans evolved this mind we have, or don't recognize the necessity of acknowledging evolution and thinking in terms of recognized physical laws (thermodynamics, natural selection).

Anyways, I think we need to be more subtle, and help one another achieve greater depths of understanding. But the paradox is, this greater depth entails 'going smaller'. Quieting our minds, and noticing the subtle things. Recognizing our habits of defense, and recognizing how this can be a detriment to the pursuit of scientific truth. This, surprisingly, is not something many scientists take account of, even though all the evidence indicates that we are emotional creatures that are psychodynamically strung to images, concepts, names. What prevents this, ultimately, may be enforced by the culture of individualism that exists around us, that makes the "needs of the individual" to take priority to everything else. The comfortable ordering of the world around the centralization of the individuals wants really helps to defocus and disconnect from the older psychoanalytic notion of unconscious motivation. But, Freud really screwed up by getting away from dissociation - the only authentic phenomenologically accessible evidence for self-deception - and so left 20th century mankind with a totally unreal concept of motivation (drive), one that was utterly disconnected from the biological and anthropological realities of human evolution.

Anyways, whats called "psychotherapy", should really be conventionalized. It is too insane that we settle for a world where only some people have been properly scaffolded by their environments to think rationally.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I'm so sorry - I wrote posted that reply to Anaana without even acknowledging you! How rude of me!

I do think your OP is fascinating, and I like what you say in the post I've replied to here as well...

And I agree that people these days are very much in need of taking time for introspection and self analyzation, as I think that the better we understand ourselves, the better we can extend understanding to others and society as a whole..

a reply to: Astrocyte

Happy to give you a flag and star . You seem to have done some reverse engineering ; taking some occult and qaballistic concepts and expressing them in layman's or mundane terms.

A small part of your post does contain infinite wisdom. If I were you, I would trim the OP to that one sentence.

If love is a product of the brain, then these words I am typing are a product of my computer. It somewhat makes sense, but it makes more sense when you realize there is a conscious user behind it all.

Love is the force pulling us back to a unified state. In my humble opinion.

originally posted by: cooperton

Love is the force pulling us back to a unified state. In my humble opinion.

I would put it in a different way. It is the force pushing and reaching out from within.

Yes, it reaches out to unite but it reaches out from within us as opposed to us being pulled by it. I think this is a very important distinction.

One often hears Love being described as many things such as "Creative force of the universe"; "Archetypal energy"; "God's presence"; "Forcd behind manifestation"; etc. For me , it all means the same thing. We have within us that primordial energy reaching out. The same energy that permeates everything and is behind every manifestation.

Reference to Love as source of power is often misunderstood and the notion that "love is everything" never really sinks in with most people although it gets lip service.

The Love that we generally experience is primordial energy running through us at emotional and physical level (lower down the tree ). At the other end of its polarity , we are in the realm of the mental and spiritual levels (higher up the tree). There, you would probably never think of calling it Love; you would be looking at pure unrestrained power.

It is possible that there exist a perspective where what we generally define as objective is what is subjective.

Such an orientation would relate to energy and in respect to even that of consciousness, as pervasive.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Hi astrocyte. I loved your OP(as I love all your OP's.) However I'm curious about at least two things.

1.What is your definition of "love?"
2."But the real love, and not some philosophical confabulation, is a product of a brain." How do you know that this statement is true?

originally posted by: crowdedskies

I would put it in a different way. It is the force pushing and reaching out from within.

Yes, it reaches out to unite but it reaches out from within us as opposed to us being pulled by it. I think this is a very important distinction.

I would compare it to magnetism between positive and negative. Intrinsic, yes. Partially dormant for now... although, maybe todays the day for Love's revelation.

One often hears Love being described as many things such as "Creative force of the universe"; "Archetypal energy"; "God's presence"; "Forcd behind manifestation"; etc. For me , it all means the same thing. We have within us that primordial energy reaching out. The same energy that permeates everything and is behind every manifestation.

Reference to Love as source of power is often misunderstood and the notion that "love is everything" never really sinks in with most people although it gets lip service.

The Love that we generally experience is primordial energy running through us at emotional and physical level (lower down the tree ). At the other end of its polarity , we are in the realm of the mental and spiritual levels (higher up the tree). There, you would probably never think of calling it Love; you would be looking at pure unrestrained power.

"Wherefore, if we would praise him who has given to us the benefit, we must praise the god Love, who is our greatest benefactor, both leading us in this life back to our own nature, and giving us high hopes for the future, for he promises that if we are pious, he will restore us to our original state, and heal us and make us happy and blessed." -Aristophanes

a reply to: lostgirl

I'm sorry lostgirl, I've been away on holiday...not busy at all, well not busy in the same way. Furthermore, my laptop didn't take to travelling very well and had a complete breakdown...such fun!

That said, not sure I can explain my train of thought now. I had a sudden slotting into place of a number of previously stuck pegs. On such occasions Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes always comes to mind as my inner voice speaks to me in a similar fashion...



...I have, thankfully, learnt to resist the urge to punch myself in the face.

But, the Peter Levenda lecture went into the Oliver Stone JFK film, and all those fringe characters that aren't fully explained contextually...I'd have to look up the details, but Jack Lemmon's character for instance. It made me aware, on a different level, of some conversations on here too that went over my head...but at the centre of that there is Levenda himself, and others like him, who give out really good coherent satisfying explanations and yet, are up to their necks in obfuscation activities too, like the Necronomicon (not sure of spelling, too lazy to check). He's both deflecting attention and directing experience. He appears to be helping clear things up, opening up as it were, but at the same time he is placing limitations on the scope of the clarity on offer. One hand giveth, the other taketh away...as it were.

Anyway, not wanting to cast too many aspersions, I am engaged in the process of fact checking, and I wouldn't want to muddy the waters further by going off half cocked about what it is, or why it is, that Levenda, and others, are doing what they are doing...or indeed whether, in the general scheme of my own "work", it is entirely relevant.

The hands though are. Have you ever read "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" by Roald Dahl? I read it when I was about 12 or 13 and it had a profound impact on me. One of those stories that stay with you, become a part of how you see and feel the world. I've just come back from Madrid, we visited the Del Prado art museum and I spent a lot of time looking at hands. I particularly fell for this painting.



The above doesn't really do it justice. The hand shielding the flame in "real life" is luminous with such subtlety and so connective, I was transported. We have all, at some point, put a light to our hands and studied the structure of our bones, marvelled at the strength and dexterity that is supported by such seemingly complex fragility. I had a couple of instances of feverish illness when I was a teenager and, hallucinating, I consistently would feel removed from my hands, not necessarily that they were disattached but I was unable to recognise them visually, they appeared "alien" to me. And, useless...club or wood-like...woolly...difficult to explain that one but I have a whole thing for hands in general.



More than that and I am going to have to be cagey, I'm in the process of consolidating my ideas from the walk around the Victoria Memorial...and that led to very big changes for me, revelations wise, this all ties into that...and it is taking time and I am in the process learning the virtues of patience.

Sorry, it's not so much that I don't want to explain, more that I don't really yet know how to as yet. I lack Astrocyte's eloquence which is why I so appreciated his OP.

I'm fine, thank you for asking, better for having got away for a while. I hope that you and your's are well too.

All the best

a reply to: Astrocyte

I've run out of time for now, but many thanks for the reply...and apologies for my tardiness...I will reply later.

Love is gravity

originally posted by: Astrocyte
The human-brain has been fundamentally coopted for cooperation. This is what the archeological record supports.

The archaeological record represents too small a proportion of our species existence to be sufficiently supportive of any theory, in my opinion. That we reproduce sexually, and that both the reproductive and raising process, without assistance, has a low success rate, demands that we cooperate as a species. Given these difficulties with human reproduction, cooperation must have been in place prior to the development of bipedalism.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
This, of course, doesn't mean that humans interacting with humans from another tribe didn't result in violence. This possibility seems likely given our historical evolution from apes.

Violence as a consequence of competition for resources, include territorial and reproductive rights, is common across most sentient species, and can even be considered a consequence of sentience and the sense of attachment to place that that entails.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
However, it must be emphasized - and unfortunately it has not been sufficiently noticed - sympathetic emotions i.e. these "reciprocal communicative acts" in which one persons phenomenological sense of being positively judged excites their own "take" on whatever subject matter is being discussed - is physically causative. Mind, in this sense, is being elaborated, albeit, enormously slowly (since it took millions of years to go from apes to hominids) through countless iterations of these "relational knowings". It's implicit, and acting as an outside 'spur' to whatever enters their focal awareness. So bear in mind that all these ideas I'm talking about aren't about concepts or ideas, but about feelings and background motivations, that, when reflected upon introspectively, indicate themselves by their forcefulness in organizing states changes in our mind. What I mean is obvious: we want to be liked.

Certainly some people do have a “want” to be liked, but one thing that the archaeological record does support, is that the geographical spread of the human clade has over the last few millennia been led by those wishing to be liked a whole lot less than they are. We are as much driven by the need to huddle together as we are by some of our number wanting to be alone, coupled with a communal respect for the benefits that come from aloneness.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
Therefore, the 'basis' of the elaboration of mind and brain (I am basically saying neurogenesis is stimulated by these instances of positive evaluation) is the craving for positive evaluation, and thus our intense willingness to cooperate towards a state of 'shared-intentionality'. This term, by the way, is the idea emphasized by the psychologist Michael Tomasello as the organizing vector behind the evolution of the human mind, and the implicit fact that we can only share ideas if we come to orient to one another with certain assumptions about one anothers knowledge. These assumptions, which I regard to be affective processes that contain certain implicit cognitive structures (self-other equivalence, which leads to identicatory processes, as well as a strong tendency in competitive atmospheres to form thought in the background of unconscious comparative processes pertinent to a culturally imposed standard) are now built into our neural hardware. Mind is "in" us, but its source is in the spaces between us - when we communicate, the cues, signs and ways we imply our self into the other.

Definately. However, this also supports the basis of behaviouralism, that AMM is both malleable and manipulator, the consequence being our overtly destructive anthrocentricism.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
The guy who trolls my threads (the person who posted first) for example, is hyper focusing on my evolutionary account - that is, in regarding love as an EMERGENT phenomena dependent, at least in the universe we inhabit, on a continuous process of physical and biological evolution. All I have really done, and what I think every rational human being should also recognize the significance of, is that all things have an origin, and in studying the origin, we can better understand our selves and the meaning of our existence. For instance, I find the causal necessity of "moments of sympathy" as dazzling evidence of the influence of an attractive force that cannot be explained in normal physicalist terms. I am not advocating physicalism, obviously (although he seems to think so), but that doesn't mean that I don't wonder how humans evolved this mind we have, or don't recognize the necessity of acknowledging evolution and thinking in terms of recognized physical laws (thermodynamics, natural selection).

We can certainly theorise origins but there has to be a realisation of the limitations of human experience in the overall relational dynamic of existence. We certainly, collectively, are showing no signs of transcending our fundamental instinctiveness, and so despite our impressive clade dispersal, are unlikely to overcome, collectively and cooperatively, the damage we have caused to our environment. We will instead be driven, ala B F Skinner, into further devolutions as the herd animals that the behaviouralist predicted we could become, over the cliff because our behaviours are so predictable and malleable.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
Anyways, I think we need to be more subtle, and help one another achieve greater depths of understanding. But the paradox is, this greater depth entails 'going smaller'. Quieting our minds, and noticing the subtle things. Recognizing our habits of defense, and recognizing how this can be a detriment to the pursuit of scientific truth. This, surprisingly, is not something many scientists take account of, even though all the evidence indicates that we are emotional creatures that are psychodynamically strung to images, concepts, names. What prevents this, ultimately, may be enforced by the culture of individualism that exists around us, that makes the "needs of the individual" to take priority to everything else. The comfortable ordering of the world around the centralization of the individuals wants really helps to defocus and disconnect from the older psychoanalytic notion of unconscious motivation. But, Freud really screwed up by getting away from dissociation - the only authentic phenomenologically accessible evidence for self-deception - and so left 20th century mankind with a totally unreal concept of motivation (drive), one that was utterly disconnected from the biological and anthropological realities of human evolution.

Freud only really screwed up by spending too much time gazing at his own navel, rather than taking his understanding of “self”and utilising that reflexively to comprehend “other”, he simply projected his self onto the other.