I take issue with the claims made by Peter Blair '12 in his most recent column ("Love Beyond the Brain," Jan. 28) that recent scientific studies' reduction of love to physical processes "seems tenuous" and that such reduction "degrades" and deprives love of "all its beauty and meaning."
To start, Blair's argument that chemicals, like oxytocin and vasopressin, cannot "fully account for the experience of love" (and that love, therefore, cannot be reduced to physical processes) is non-sensical and a misrepresentation of the data.
Just because hormones like these "are also triggered by sex" does not leave us hard-pressed, as Blair argues, to explain "loving engaged couples who have not yet had sex" or "couples who have had a lot of sex with each other but don't have a very loving or lasting relationship."
Perhaps the loving abstinent couple receives these hormones through other physical means, such as kissing or touching. And maybe the loveless couple that has consistent sex cannot sustain these levels through other emotional means, like trust or respect within a relationship.
Even if the same exact hormone levels are present both in feelings of love and in sexual encounters, it would be a logical misstep to assume that these hormones exist in a vacuum. Keeping in mind that love comes in different forms for different people, perhaps each of Blair's situations can be reduced to many other different chemical reactions, varied in level, intensity and individual perception of their effects.
Ironically and hilariously, Blair oversimplifies the experience of love to prove a "logical" point that love cannot be oversimplified by science.
Furthermore, the studies that Blair references do not suggest that these physical processes can account for all of human experience. Scientists' attempts to understand and isolate the complex chemical reactions involved in "love" (as stated, a word carrying different meanings for different people) are made in an ongoing effort to better understand, as objectively as possible, physical patterns of human experience through observable data -- not to impose upon us a be-all and end-all treatise on the meaning of life. Though science has discovered that levels of oxytocin and vasopressin somehow influence an individual's experience of love, they have not yet fully explained the experience of love, as Blair claims.
At the same time, this does not mean that
it will always be impossible to reduce a person's experience of love to a series of physical chemicals reacting in the brain -- complex as these reactions might be.
While it might be unsettling, and even frightening, that human experience can be reduced to physical processes, such a reduction would not leave the world deprived of meaning and beauty -- at least in the subjective sense of the terms.
Humans can still experience beauty in, and apply meaning to, their lives, while understanding that these abstract concepts have a purely physical basis.
There are many atheists in this world who are skeptical of anything outside of the empirical, but who can still find meaning and beauty in art, social progress, personal legacy, etc. As such, reductionism does not cheapen the complexity and intensity of emotions like love, happiness, heartbreak or pain. In fact, the ability for such complexity and abstraction to be reached through billions of chemical reactions can even be seen as beautiful in itself.
Blair's "logical conclusion" that a reduction of love to its physical processes necessitates a rejection of meaning and beauty not only abuses logic, but is also a misguided assumption about science and materialism. Science's attempt to reduce the human experience to neural activity merely helps us to understand who we are and why we are here -- it doesn't impose substitutes for the real deal, and it certainly doesn't render our actual human experiences meaningless, or any less beautiful.
In fact, I believe the marvel of experience intensifies as we gain increased awareness about ourselves and our world.
