On The Love Bug

Ten thousands years ago, our ancestors looked to the skies and saw magic lights dance across the blackness. They revered or feared these lights, and to explain them, they created stories and myths, which made them do things like carving hearts out in appeasement to a sun gods. The more they payed attention to these lights, the less they feared them, and began to use their movement to coordinate travel and to schedule the planting of crops. Now, as we have found through advances in science and technology, we know the stars for what they are. Their movements are still the foundation of our agriculture, though the magic is gone.

Three hundred years ago, if someone became ill, the causes were essentially unknown. They blamed spirits, bad blood, sin. Once we discovered bacteria and viruses, we were able to treat sickness. Both instances are real things that are much better dealt with after we accepted their non magical nature. Out minds are capable of creating very unusual connections and illusions as we as a species need to explain our surroundings, and often convince ourselves that things have more mystery than they actually do.

I'm sure most people will flat out think I'm crazy when I suggest that we take a similar approach to love. I know, I know. Hear me out.

Now, I'm not saying we ignore what we feel as love. There is already extensive research into the hormone oxytocin which appears to be the cause of the intense emotions we all know and feel. But these feelings are immensely important. They cause us to bond with one another, to form closeness. Our nurturing abilities are rooted in this hormone, which is unique to mammals; they are closely associated with birth and nursing. The usefulness of this hormone is evident, and I'm in no way saying we should ignore or right off these feelings.

What I propose is that we simply handle them a little better. Much like the stars, germs, and many other previously mysterious phenomenon, the causes of love are very certainly caused by natural things. When we view something as magical, we are unable to properly deal it's effects. If we view love as something magic, we think that it comes and goes for no reason, or we place blame on inconsequential things when that feeling fades away. 

Yes, those feelings are there to bring you closer to someone, and are signs that a person could be a partner in raising children and continuing our humanity. But when someone can't let go of a failed relationship because it was something "special" is not handling those feeling properly. There is nothing healthy about obsessive predatory relationships borne in the mind of someone who believes these feelings to be something out of the ordinary. People submit themselves to all kinds of emotional and physical anguish because they believe what they are feeling to be supernatural, and therefore something that can't be truly "explained." I'm sorry to break it to you all, but there is no such thing as meant to be. There is no "one". Fighting to save something that you believe to be destiny will cause nothing but pain.

It's obvious why these feelings are there and make us feel like they do. It is the imperative of life to reproduce, and anything that expedites that process is surely a positive thing. Not to mention the added benefits that these same feelings are the roots of our social nature, and therefore our culture and humanity. 

This is why I also think it imperative to treat these feelings for what they are. Yes, it's painful if these feelings go away, and yes, it's absolutely amazing when those feelings are there. That doesn't change if we also realize that it is not magic, but the same amazing chemical architecture that gave the bounty of wondrous beauty that is the life all around us. Isn't that magical enough?

On ideas

Easily one of the most elegant and powerful memes I have encountered is that of the meme itself.

The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, though the concept was around before that. Memetics is the theory that, like genes, our ideas and cultural concepts replicate and evolve. So, basically, a quantifiable unit of ideas. The metaphor is not entirely accurate, as there are minute chemical processes involved in both that do not necessarily translate, at least not in terms that are widely accepted. But memetics seems to have some philosophic validity, at least for me.

One of the main criticisms against memetics is quite literally that we are still not entirely certain how our brain remembers things. We have no physical evidence of the processes involved when a thought or a memory happens. I, of course, am no expert in neurobiology or anything like that, so all I can come up with is optimistic speculation. 

 

We have found through extensive testing and experimentation, that what we internally experience as "life" is the sum total and collective webbing of neurons that makes up our brain. Each neuron has hundreds of connections to other neurons, allowing for this vast matrix of links. A neuron on it's own is essentially worthless. 

What makes the system work is the comparative and cooperative nature of these neurons. There is no "red apple" neuron. However, there are neurons that are fired when your eyes experience the color red. There are also neurons that fire when your olfactory glands detect the scent of an apple, when your taste buds are washed with an apples' sweet juices. So, when you experience an apple, what you are really experiencing is the collected data from your various senses, each neuron being a part of the jigsaw puzzle that becomes the experience, or "memory" of the apple. So, similar to muscle memory, the more exposure to the stimuli, the stronger those connection between neurons become, the stronger the "memory". This learning is universal, and is why the mouse stops eating the electrically charged cheese.

But what if your culture decided that apples were bad, for whatever reason. There would be another set of neurons that would become associated with apples: those that deal with feelings of disgust. Just in the same way someone with strict halal or kosher diets would find pork disgusting. There is no direct physical reason to not "enjoy" an apple, but the feelings of enjoyment or disgust can be linked with the base set of neural associations. 

So what I propose is that the "meme" is this very association. It is the set of neurons linked when experiencing an object. Humans all feel the same pain, the same internal chemical responses of pleasure, the same set of reactions.  The vast differences in our culture lay in the complex set of these connections.

It may seem unlikely that our brains are really processing this much information at any given time. But, of course, keep in mind that there are around one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) neurons in the average brain, making the web vast and expansive. And because of the expansive nature of our brains, there are nigh infinite possibilities within the framework.

This idea follows into evolutionary psychology. The better your body is at making those new connections between neurons, the more flexible you become, and therefore making it just ever so slightly easier to survive. So while there is no neuron for "fire making", the set of connections: that wood can burn, that sparks are made if two rocks are hit together, are a set of memes that can be passed on. The easier it is for you to learn these things, the more energy can be spent eating, reproducing, et cetera.

So what does this tell us? It mean that culture, while important to our social interactions, is very flexible. Each learned response is a thread in the tapestry of culture.  We bond with people who have similar connections because we have the same learned responses of fear, pleasure, pain, or joy as they do, and are essentially using the same set of comparative lenses with which to view the world. It also means that, logically, no one is "right" when it comes to these memes. Someone eating gǒu ròu in China feels no pangs of disgust, nor does a westerner eating hamburger, though if those meals were served elsewhere, you'd have some unhappy costumers.

But that's just they way I've put it together...

On blogging

The only people who blog are people so obsessed with their own recursive incestuous thoughts  that they feel the need to met out their batshit insane ideas on the poor undeserved masses. 

They fail to account for the reality that we all have opinions, unique to the varying billions of cultural palates of the world, making all equally valid. 

Yet they trudge on, oblivious to the futility.

I would never ever trust the words of one of these narcissistic degenerates, as they are tainted with folly and delusions of grandeur.

And if I saw one in the street, I would give him pie.