Question by Psychedelic Panentheist: Long question, aimed at material atheists?
I saw some geezer answer a question about love with this quote
“Love, along with all of our other emotions, is just a chemical reaction that takes place in our heads”
I do not see the rift between science and spirituality. When expressed correctly, they both are about not presupposing anything or laying reality with some metaphysical grid work, but instead just letting our experience come to us naturally, and based on that experience, then deriving provisional ideas about how best to understand and interact with phenomena.
The scientist would say spirituality is not about that; spirituality is about believing in unseen realties, forces, gods, and powers. The spiritual person would say, no….my professed sense of the reality of spiritual matters comes from my direct experience. Whether I had a near death experience, ingested an entheogenic substance, practiced deep meditation, or I just had this experience at random one day while taking a walk. It seems obvious that the brain is capable of producing a state of consciousness that many people, after they experienced it, equate with ‘god’ or this mystical state of union with all the energy in the cosmos. The scientist would say that these experiences are just mere physiological chemical reactions in the brain. I as a spiritual person, who has had experiences like this, would respond by saying, yes…that is perfectly true, but that misses the point of what the experience meant, as it was experienced. People who have had a spiritual experience, that certainly has a correlate in the brain, no longer interpret it as just a mere a physiochemical aberration or malfunction, they see it as the most meaningful experience of their entire life. Somehow eternity comes out in between time. Like, someone would have grown up normally in the world and adopted their rational outlook and common sense that everyone believes and shares with one another, then had one of these experiences, where they are completely removed from all that conditioning, language, and emotional baggage that shape them as a ‘personality’ in space and time. They are taken out of that and shown the eternal unconditioned reality.
The sense that everything reduces to matter and material is laying that metaphysical grid work over reality. The scientist has no experiential or empirical evidence for asserting. We can’t assume science is about giving us a one objective truth about the world, neither can we say this about spirituality.
So, my question is… why is love and all our emotions considered just chemical reactions that takes place in our heads’? What are we really learning by measuring brain chemistry? How are we sure that it is not the act of loving which causes the change in brain chemistry? Maybe consciousness effects matter, just as much as matter affects consciousness. Why do materialists reduce everything to mechanism and matter?
I do not need to test it, its been done, if someone if deeply depressed their brain chemisty changes
Who is to say that “each of us is born brand new without a collective memory”. Carl Jung would disagree with this and so would I. Where is the evidence that supports this?
Best answer:
Answer by Truth Chick
Dude, I am at work and I just did a big report. I aint reading all of that.
Give your answer to this question below!
You are confusing religion and spirituality. Maybe even spiritual quest may be more accurate here. I personally find what you say to be true, I also think that organized religion is for the feeble of mind who cannot make life decisions on their own. That is organized religion, mind you.
And I am not atheist, I actually think it is just too far to take the issue, in my opinion. You can have the stance of not knowing, but claiming you are right, just makes others automatically wrong. So I try and stay neutral. But I am all for the lifetime quest to be more spiritual. Just not more religious.
why is love and all our emotions considered just chemical reactions that takes place in our heads’?
-its not JUST that, but that’s the physical process of it
What are we really learning by measuring brain chemistry?
-how to cure diseases, how to fix problems with the body, an understanding of how the brain and body works, a way to design better medicine, etc etc etc
How are we sure that it is not the act of loving which causes the change in brain chemistry?
-who say’s it doesnt? I’m pretty sure being in love does alter your brain chemistry
Maybe consciousness effects matter, just as much as matter affects consciousness.
-care to share with us what makes you think that?
Why do materialists reduce everything to mechanism and matter
-because that is really the only way to describe something…but describing how it happens and not making up vague stories that are beyond evidence
I’m an atheist, and I don’t get it either. Well, I _get_ it, but I don’t think I want to get it.
Love is a chemical reaction. They’re completely right. But I honestly don’t wanna know that, because to me it’s so much more.
A star is a massive, luminous ball of plasma that is held together by its own gravity. But I really never think about all that when I lay on a roof, at night, and stare at the sky.
“Maybe consciousness effects matter”
So set up some tests and prove this… if you can.
People have an incredible, amazing ability to fool themselves, to lie to themselves, to deny reality. The reason we KNOW that all these spiritual experiences are after-the-fact wishful thinking is precisely because the IS no way to test them.
The bottom line is, even if unreal things exist, and we simply haven’t developed the means to measure or understand them, what difference does it make? Since nobody has yet proven there is a way for all people to practically apply them towards life, for all intensive purposes, they don’t exist. When you can instruct me (and everyone else) on how to have a “life changing” spiritual experience, then we have a basis for a dialogue. Until then, it’s all just fluff in your head.
What matters are the things that I can apply practically to my life, the lives of others, and the world around me, so I’ll go with empirical explanations since they make the most useful sense.
Perhaps because everything *is* mechanism and matter?
Look, you tried really hard to give greater meaning to very simple chemical processes and basic biology. Bravo for effort. In the grand scheme of things, the reality we each experience is really what matters most to each of us, so we’re free to “label” things anyway we want to, in any way that gives us pleasure or helps us get through the day. And since each of us is born brand new without a “collective memory” of all of the other humans who have come before us and loved, hated, written poetry, suffered torture, or experience all the other ranges of emotions and feelings, each of these things is new to all of us, and we have to learn to deal with it in our own way.
That subjective experience, however, doesn’t alter the *reality* that science gives us — the root causes in mechanism and matter that give us feelings and emotions and all the rest. That knowledge of fact and mechanism and matter can be our collective memory, and can help us understand why we feel the way we do, and how others may have felt when they went through their own lives. Knowing the mechanics of something doesn’t have to take away the beauty of the subjective experience — in fact, it quite often enhances it. I know which chemicals get released my my body when I’m feeling love for my wife, and I know why those feelings occur — but it doesn’t lessen my love for her one bit, or my enjoyment of the experience.
Knowledge is *good.* It helps us understand ourselves, our bodies, and our existence. It’s much better to know why and how things are based on objective fact, and use those facts to enhance the subjective experience, than to make up something “mystical” to try and explain it all away. The not-backed-by-evidence mysticism adds nothing, and only leads a person away from truly knowing themselves rather than learning.
Peace.
All emotion is connected, there are none seperate. One could even say, along your line of thinking, that we don’t exist. You have a sense about you that makes you unique. You feel it, it doesnt need proof.
who’s measuring brain chemistry?. the neurotransmitters exist in such minute levels, and we don’t even know what they all are. What is more is that it is likely that brain chemistry is as individual or even more individual than finger prints. Scientists pretend to know what they are talking about in this area. And those who prescribe do so not based on brain chemistry, but on the subjective judgment of the organism — not qualified to make the judgment — i.e., by accepting the response to the question, “How do you feel.”
Tom Cruise’s assesment is correct,psychiatryy is the great “quackery” of our time.