Thursday, May 27, 2004

Love - nature's best red-herring

I wonder if the universe is a conscious entity... no, not the individual consciousness that characterises life forms, but rather a form of collective consciousness - the consciousness that emerges out of the cumulative awareness of the conscious entities it holds within itself....

And why is it that evolution proceeds with an increase in intelligence? Is the universe trying to know more about itself through the intelligence of its inhabitants? most impossible conjecture, but no harm in thinking about interesting things, in an interesting way, what do u say?

Whatever be the case, one has to appreciate nature for making a fool of humanity at large with the concept of love... Man has over-hyped the four odd chemicals that it invented in the form of hormones for propogation of species. How much ever you exemplify it, it boils down to one simple reason - multiplication and survival. why then all this hype?

and worse, it doenst even follow the laws of nature - choose the fittest partner to make the best gene pool - most humans fail there miserably... i wonder what will happen to humanity...

4 comments:

sanjeeth said...

Ammaam ..Enna AAchu unakku..Thiruppi thiruppi idhaiye sollittu alaiyara?Any problem?

Ambar said...

Ishwar,
Failed love story or what?

Sundar said...

Even though I agree with you on many issues, I differ on certain issues. First among them relates to your comments on Love.

Agreed that hormones are the modus operandi for all love related syndromes. Just because somebody knows the immediate cause of something, why should we discredit the event? If someone doesn't agree to the 'hormone effect', you can chide them, but remember that Love is as real as pain is. We all know that pain is a syndrome caused in order to inform the system about some undesired event(s). We also know that the very 'knowledge' of pain is caused by a set of chemicals called neurotransmitters. Does this knowledge make pain trivial and make you not aware of pain? Of course, at a higher level you can point me to the likes of Ramana Maharishi. But, let's talk at the level of average human beings like us.

If you want a more 'logical' substantiation, let me give you this. Do you agree in the truth of Godel's incompleteness? If so, can't you realise the limitation of 'logic' as a method of reasoning? The basic fallacy is not in logic itself, but in the premise that our initial set of premises is accurate and complete, which is far from true. Biological systems are far more complex to be simplified to whatever we know of them today. Even though, we should continue moving in the quest, we should acknowledge the incompleteness. Going by this, I would say, a near random 'gut feeling' view of such phenomena is as good as logical reasoning based on incomplete set of premises.

One last shot as I think the comment is growing bigger than the blog itself. Did you notice that almost all our 'supposedly' logical arguments boil down to a set of fallacies? My second paragraph in this comment is fallacious in that, I've tried to prove a fact by analogy! Given this extent of fallacies, it doesn't make much sense to discredit other point of views. Also read about Monty Hall problem in Wikipedia to know how 'supposedly' proven methods of reasoning can be counter-intuitive.

Sundar said...

By the above comment, I didn't intend to counter the fact that many relationships like Love, friendship etc are facilitated by hormones i.e. some favourable enablers like proximity, promiscuity, moral support during difficult times etc alter hormone levels to result in a set of symptoms. Here hormones act as intermediaries and not causes. The causes are the favourable enablers I mentioned above. These enablers are Nature's mechanism to enforce social life and reproduction. May be as man has evolved into such a complex animal, even courtship has had to evolve from simple dancing, growling, singing etc to such complex acts.

I don't think it's against the Laws of Nature as these are happening naturally. Survival of the fittest doesn't always mean that only fit individuals are born by Eugenics. Rather the selection happens at many levels, viz social(during courtship), precoital(before sex), post coital, pre-natal(before birth) and post-natal. The reason why we perceive these things as unnatural is because we somehow tend to think that anything human is not natural.