nemesis_juggernaut
This got me thinking about an old argument I had with a true skeptic who simply had to rationalize everything with biology. The argument was about love. I asked him what love was. He proceeded to give me some canned, unemotional response about areas of the brain light up under an MRI when shown pictures of loved ones. This, apparently, was tantamount to love to him-- firing synapses.
I countered that what was detected surely was not itself love, only evidence of the brain reacting to love. Sure, the pictures likely gave him pleasant thoughts which released endorphins, thus culminating in an ultimate happy and euphoric state. But that explained nothing about love itself, and moreover, what exactly it is.
I think perhaps you have misunderstood your friend the skeptic{ I could be wrong of course} since all he did was answer your question on what love is by giving you a physical picture of the biological activity underlying the emotion.
You say he gave a canned unemotional response yet what biological explanation would
you give for love?
Indeed I will ask you the same question.
What is love?
Is it the giddy feeling you get when a friend whom you know well says something to you that hints at or reveals a deep caring,even love, for you?
Is it the action of caring for people who are down on their luck and are helped by your efforts and who, without the efforts you make, would be lost to despair and loneliness?
Is it the bond felt by soldiers who ,under the terror of battle,
feel intensely how completely dependent they are one upon one another and find themselves in love with those members who risk everything and stand their ground?
Is it the tenderness of being close to another as you relax after a hard day of caring for your young family and snuggle in one anothers arms to stare out the living room window at a thickening snow storm as a fire crackles in the fireplace while reflecting on how life could not be any better than the moment you now share?
Is it the physical intimacy you have with another human being and the pleasures that such relations produce?
If the physical firing of synapses accounts for these does that make the explanation invalid or just shallow? Or does it reflect that the firing of synapses entails such complex interactions of biology that the mind is staggered by the results? The explanation your friend gives is only dry and shallow if you look at it out of context with what it means in the real world.
Thoughts... What are they, really?
That would depend on what you consider thoughts {and love} to be.
If you consider that thoughts can be derailed by the application of chemicals or by physical trauma then the explanation that they are the result of electrochemical activity of the brain tissue in our skulls takes on meaning.
This is not to say that they are just electrochemical activity
separate from the context of life but just the underlying structure that allows for the phenomena to occur.
In the same way that the alphabet and rules of grammar are not the same as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream but only the explanation of that which allows for the story to be told in a physical sense so,too, is the explanation your skeptic offered you.
That you chose to view it out of context means that you have made it dry and shallow not him.
But there is still so much about thoughts that seem almost transcendent-- separate from the brain.
Ar you referring to the impression that our ideas and thoughts seem to float free in our skulls ,disconnected to our bodies? If so, a possible explanation would be that the brain has no nervous system within its tissues. Since we cannot get feedback from the brain through such a system it does not seem odd that the mind gives us the impression of being separate does it?
God does not exist until there is proof he does.
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