Monday 4 April 2011

What is Love? (Part One)

    
         I first started thinking seriously about this question after watching the 2001 Stephen Spielberg/Stanley Kubrik movie AI. In this movie a young couple, struggling to cope with the fact their son was in what appeared to be an irreversible coma, decides to adopt a robot boy, who possessed the capability by virtue of future advances in the field of AI research to flawlessly simulate the behaviour of a human child.
          As time progresses the mother is depicted in the movie as starting to develop a maternal bond towards the robot child, in much the same way she would towards a real human child. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact the mother jeopardizes her real son’s life (who by this stage had unexpectedly awoken from his coma and returned home), at least from their point of view at the time, so that she could continue to play the role of mother to the robot boy. Eventually the mother is forced into the agonizing dillemma of choosing between her real son and her adopted robot son, leading ultimately to a harrowing scene showing her abandoning the robot boy in the middle of nowhere to fend for himself.
            To me one of the more intriguing questions raised by the film was how real the love was between the mother and robot boy. The movie (as expected) was deliberately ambiguous to the question of whether the robot boy was actually conscious or not, leaving the viewer to make up their own mind on the matter. But the real question is this; did the legitimacy of the mother’s love solely depend on whether the robot boy was conscious or not?
Of course it is perfectly possible to love an inanimate object. I love my car. But that is an entirely different kind of love. There should ideally be an entirely different word to describe that kind of love in order to distinguish it from the word we commonly use to describe the love humans feel towards each other. Interestingly the Ancient Greeks had five different words for love in their vocabulary (although they were perhaps getting a bit carried away with this).
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the robot boy was in fact a brilliant simulation of human child behaviour, and as a consequence was able to convincingly create the impression of consciousness.  The underlying reality however was essentially all smoke and mirrors. The lights were on so to speak but no-one was home. So in this case was the experience of the mother that of genuine maternal love or was it more like some kind of pseudo-love? Could true love, the type of love we experience and give to other fellow humans, ever be legitimately directed onto to a bunch of wires and well programmed sillicon chips? The key question being asked here is this; is the fact that the mother experienced what we would typically regard as the emotion of love sufficient reason in itself to qualify this as a genuine case of maternal motherly love irrespective of any other facts?
           We can make further probes into the meaning of love by considering the phenomena of people falling in love without ever having met each other. We have all heard stories of two people falling in love on the internet, meeting in real life, getting married, and living happily ever after. Some people may scoff at the idea of people who have never met falling in love. You might decide instead that what really happens in such cases is that the people concerned fall in love only after they have met each other in person. If you do however happen to be one of those people who believe genuine love can happen prior to meeting up then consider instances where various levels of deception are involved. We might imagine for example that one of the people lied about their age. Does this change things in any crucial way? What if even more deception was involved, maybe dishonesty regarding level of education, occupation, airbrushed photographs etc. We could even suppose that one of the people, perhaps being socially awkward, resorted to the occasional use of a friend as a mediator whom he employed whenever speaking person to person using skype for instance. At what stage in this steadily increasing line of deception can we be confident that the emotion of love has been effectively directed at a fictitious person, so has therefore become completely meaningless?
            We can start stretching this kind of idea further still. Let’s imagine a science fiction type scenario where an alien from an advanced alien civilization comes down in the middle of the night and abducts one person from a married couple whilst they are asleep. Let's suppose this fiendish alien nicks the husband. So as to ensure the wife doesn’t suspect any foul play this alien craftily replaces the abducted hostage with an exact physical replica. Let’s suppose this alien possesses advanced technology which allows it to scan the human and produce a convincing facsimile that is completely indistinguishable from the original being. This replica has advanced inbuilt sensor technology that continuously monitors the immediate environment in a way that perfectly mimics the manner in which the human senses absorb data from the outside world. This data is continuously streamed to the orbiting alien spacecraft above via a radio link where it is fed into a supercomputer. The alien uses these signals as a basis for creating a simulated Earth environment that is convincing enough to fool it’s hostage into believing it is real and he is still back on Earth with his wife. We could for ease of imagination assume that the alien has extracted the brain from the husband’s skull and placed it within a vat of nutrients to keep the brain alive. The supercomputer is wired to the brain in such a way that the sensor data being streamed from the doppelganger back on Earth enters the appropriate sensory regions of the brain. Providing the brain is receiving the equivalent electrical signals normally received from the optic, olfactory, auditory nerves etc the brain won’t be able to tell the difference, so will create the usual mental representations as per normal. To the brain it is simply business as usual. Each time the brain in the vat forms the intention to move a body part the relevant signals are extracted from the motor cortex regions and transmitted back to Earth in order for the doppelganger masquerading as the husband to make the corresponding movements. The signals are also fed into the supercomputer which makes the appropriate adjustments to the simulated reality.
By doing all this the alien is now in a position to deceive both marriage partners into believing they are both still together on Earth. The only difference of course is there is no direct physical connection between the married couple. All interactions are mediated via a two way radio link between Earth and the orbiting alien spacecraft (ignoring propagation delay).
             After twenty years or so of this the alien gets a bit bored and decides to indulge in a bit of sadistic fun by revealing to the poor woman all that has been going on. As soon as the woman recovers from her nervous breakdown the alien proceeds to ask the woman if she feels she is still in love with her husband despite there being no direct physical contact between them for the last twenty years. If she were to claim that she was in fact still in love with her husband would she be correct in stating this? You might  perhaps think so but we can start tweaking with the parameters of the original experiment in ways that makes it increasingly difficult to answer this question. For instance perhaps after a short time of the brain being hooked up to this alien supercomputer, this computer, being advanced as it is, is able to use the accumulated data  to provide a very accurate simulation of the behaviour of the brain in the vat, to such a degree it is able to reliably predict probable responses to a whole range of various social and interpersonal relationship situations. This enables the possibility of intermittent transmission of signals to the doppelganger back on Earth alternating between the brain in the vat and the simulated human behaviour generated by the alien supercomputer. In this way the alien can make the connection between the wife and former husband increasingly more tenuous. We might imagine that the switching takes place on alternate days. Or perhaps as the supercomputer accumulates more and more data within it's memory banks and becomes ever more accurate at predicting  typical behavour and responses is used to incrementally over time take over from the brain in the vat. Therefore even if we decided with the original experiment that genuine love was sustained for the duration of the experiment we are now facing the same question under more tightly controlled conditions. We could picture to ourselves the increasing dominance of the supercomputer in the experiment and ask the question at what point does the love the woman feels towards what she believes to be her husband become meaningless? Does her emotion of 'love' gradually become diverted from her former husband onto the supercomputer in a piecemeal fashion? Or does genuine love simply cease to exist at some point?            
We would (in my view) actually be justified in asserting that the woman still loved her husband in the original experiment. This is because it doesn't differ in any crucial way from how things work in reality – at least not according to the story told by neuroscience regarding how we experience the external world. Our apprehension of the external world is always mediated through our senses. Our sense organs are merely transducers, converting one form of energy into another – in this case electrical energy. As a consequence the only thing the brain is aware of is the electrical signals being fed to it by all the different nerves connecting it to the sense organs, the olfactory, auditory, optic nerves etc. The brain uses these signals to generate an internal representation of the external world, using the information embedded within these electrical signals as a basis for doing so. It is this internal mental representation that we are aware of, nothing else. So we don’t ever directly experience the external world anyway. And once we have acknowledged this key fact it is easy to see that the original experiment doesn’t actually change things in any crucial way relevant to the question we are asking. But things do however get somewhat more perplexing in the latter case of the fine tuning experiment. Here we are able to imagine a progressive tweaking taking place controlling precisely the degree to which the married couple interact. The connection between the two people becomes increasingly more tenuous as the duration of the experiment proceeds. In this case there must come some point where everyone would agree that the connection has become so tenuous that it is no longer tenable to consider there existing meaningful love between the wife and former husband.
                One possible response to the above scenario could be that the wife's love was made real by virtue of the time she had spent with her husband prior to him being abducted by the alien. After all if her husband had simply died instead of being abducted by an alien she could still quite reasonably claim to love the husband she had lost 20 years ago. However we could simply change the above scenario by imagining that the alien abducted the man at the same time or even prior to meeting his wife. Also we could imagine that right from the outset the behavour of the doppleganger masquerading as this woman's  husband was partly being controlled by a computer simulation of his behavour. In this case the woman has never strictly speaking met the man she believes she loves and potentially has all along been exposed to two sets of behavour coming from two different sources - one set of behavour from the brain in the vat and the other set of behavour from the alien supercomputer! 
So is love simply an emotion or is there more to it? The problem in my view in defining love simply as emotion is that it starts to come dangerously close to the philosophical materialist definition of love; that is of being purely a response created in the mind by chemical reactions in the brain. It doesn't of course strictly commit one to this view but it doesn't seem too far off either. Also it seems to leave open the possibility of  the claim that love exists in situations where it would be clear to most of us that it doesn't. For instance if a person continuously abuses their partner but claims at the same time to love them would it not be fair to conclude that this wasn’t a legitimate case of love? It doesn’t appear to be strictly impossible for such a person to genuinely experience emotions towards the person they are abusing. I am not asserting this to actually be the case very often, if at all. I am simply claiming that even if we were to believe the person in this regards would this not legitamately drop out of consideration upon making any decision as to whether this was a genuine example of love. We could alternatively adopt the weaker position that despite the emotion of love being felt by the abuser love was not being shown to the abused, however this still appears to attribute unfair credit on the abuser by claiming that at the very least he felt love towards the person he was abusing.
            Of course there is a sense in which all the above discussion could be construed as a purely semantic argument. What the word love means is simply what we define it to mean, as with all words of course. (How many TV debates have you seen which appeared to be fuelled primarily by a lack of agreement over definitions of key words being used in the arguments. There have certainly been some debates I have watched where this seems to have been the case. A consensus to agree to precise definitions beforehand would  have shortened if not pretty much resolved some debates before they had even begun. Instead they spend an hour or so unwittingly engaging in what amounts to not much more than a semantic argument!) But the issue being raised here has more to do with the concern of what the most appropriate way is to define love which most efficiently captures our intuitions about what love should really mean. Spirituality has a quite intriguing answer to this question which appears to resolve the non-clarity of the term love highlighted by the aforementioned examples.
It is very difficult to read the words ‘near death experience’ in a sentence without seeing the words ‘unconditional love’ somewhere nearby. Also statements such as 'love is all there is', 'love is the only real emotion' and 'we are love' are often used by people who have had some kind of spiritual experience. The meaning of the words unconditional love are sometimes elaborated on by people who have had near death experiences. The claim seems to be that in our natural spiritual state we have unconditional love as an innate character trait, to the degree that we can’t help but always act out of unconditional love. In other words there is no situation we would encounter in our true spiritual state where we wouldn’t act out of unconditional love. This is a very strong claim to make in as far as it is radically different from our typical behaviour as humans.  To get a sense of perspective on this imagine that someone comes along, burns down your house, totals your car, and then chops off your arms and legs, after which they say 'sorry about that, I was just having a bad day'. If we were to act out of the unconditional love described above you would accept their apology and probably state something along the lines of  'that's all right, it could happen to anyone.' It deviates sharply from anything remotely resembling typical human behaviour doesn' t it?
       The maternal love of a mother to a child is probably the closest most of us see of unconditional love in human life. And I'm not entirely convinced this is exactly the same thing. I think all of us, myself included, would find it very difficult to express unconditional love in all possible situations. I consider myself as being a fairly decent person as far as people go. However if someone hurts me I tend to feel the impulse to hurt them back in return, and often to a higher degree than they hurt me. I don't often act on this, at least  in any significant way, but I do nonetheless have this impulse. It seems to be inbuilt into my very nature as a human to the degree where I can't imagine not being that way. So unconditional love to me is quite an alien concept. It is certainly not something I personally experience or exhibit in all possible situations.
So does this explain the archetypal spiritual statement ‘we are love’. In a slightly metaphoric sense it appears to, and I use the word metaphoric because it doesn’t seem to quite make sense that we could in a literal way be an emotion or be a behaviour characteristic. Both are adjectival words, and as such are characteristics of people and not something you could literally be a physical instantiation of. How can you  literally be an emotion or be a behaviour characteristic?
             The spiritual notion of love actually appears to extend beyond this however. What we  would normally identify as energy is apparently the very thing that people who experience unconditional love are experiencing. They seem almost to be interchangeable terms, at least on the basis of what is sometimes stated by NDEers. This doesn’t mean however that what we typically identify as love in human form is interchangeable with what we call energy. It appears to specifically refer to what NDEers choose to call unconditional love. What we would identify as the emotional aspect of this is actually only a part of what we would  identify as energy, but the striking and almost incomprehensible feature of this explanation to me is that one particular aspect of what we would commonly regard as energy is actually unconditional love.
              One could at this stage almost be justified in believing this to be one of those category mistakes philosophers often talk about. But this conclusion I think would be premature and unwarranted, coming from an assumption that the human perspective ought be the basis for making a judgement on this. People who experience NDEs appear to be quite definite about this claim of what unconditional love is. So this in my view should deter a casual disregard of the spiritual definition of unconditional love. Also we have already seen we are on somewhat shaky grounds with our current understanding of what love is. We have been able to  analyse a  range of real life examples and construct various hypothetical ones to tease out our fairly indeterminate and vague ideas as to what really constitutes love. In these examples the emotion of love, what we generally would consider as reasonable to identify as the very essense of love itself, becomes detached from anything resembling what could sensibly be regarded as really being love, at least in any meaningful sense, thus exposing our incomplete concept or grasp of what love should mean.
             These have clearly been very contrived examples used for the purpose of making a point, so might seem quite unrelated to typical everyday relationship situations. However the issue of how integral or incidental the emotion we identify as love is to what are genuine cases of love has been successfully highlighted. Is the emotion just part of the story? (Or any of the story?)
            The real force of the argument can be seen by being aware of the suggestion being made by these examples, that if the emotion of love becomes meaningless when directed at non-conscious or fictitious characters, or unwittingly directed at someone or something other than what was intended by the person believing they were in love, then it seems the entire legitimacy of love in ordinary everyday cases hinges solely on the degree there exists a correspondance between the perceived facts and the actual facts. This seems to be an unacceptably artificial and arbitrary criteria to use as a means to cross the huge chasm between  the mere presence of a subjective feeling and something as powerful and real as we consider true love to be. The subjective feeling of love, if not directed at a meaningful recipient, seems no more significant than the subjective feeling of an itch. This suggests to me there is something slighly fishy about our current conception of what love really is.
            This analysis should at least provide us with reasonable grounds to consider the spiritual definition of what constitutes love claimed by people who have had extensive near death experiences. Unconditional love is not afflicted with these same philosophical problems. Unconditional love is indiscriminant. Everything and everyone is loved equally irrespective of whoever or whatever it is and whatever the facts are. It contrasts sharply, qualitatively and quantitively, with the fleeting contingent modes of love we  normally experience in human life. Unconditional love is a baseline characteristic of our true spiritual state. It is the very nature of what we are as spiritual beings. Near death experience accounts shift us sharply away from the notion that love is purely an emotion, or a conditional reaction, and more towards the fact it is the very essence of what we are as spriritual beings. We don't pick and choose which occasions we apply unconditional love. It persists no matter what.    
  

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