Thursday, February 4, 2010

Love As Efficient Organ

The formation of a living body is the miraculous un-miracle of billions of years of millisecond dice rolls. There is a certain genius, to anthropomorphize, about the incessant onslaught of variation and time. Fewer resources in an environment will facilitate an eventual, accidental exploitation of such a situation by the decrease of overall body size of a species; there is a latent efficiency in evolution, and an animal, which can develop as many functions as possible into one organ is going to be the more successful than an animal that develops two -- on sheer fact that two organs will most likely necessitate greater body mass and greater need for sustaining resources. The human sex organ is a very simple example of this efficiency and utility. Many of the parts of the organ used for the purposes of reproduction are also used in the excretion of waste in a relatively harmonious way; there are a thousand other examples of this and all have intimate knowledge of it upon reflection. But why stop at the body, why not include the mind if we are to be good physicalists, good scientists and decent thinkers?

If the mind is the end product of the operations of the brain, which if we are to comfortably side ourselves with any contemporary scientific thought we must simply accept regardless of convoluted philosophical difficulties the body-mind connections create, then how can we not look for the efficiencies of our own brain. The phenomenon of love, as discussed previously, is the sort of dream-work of the brain that our consciousness perceives as real and essential. Most likely though, this is just a projection that we can ascertain, understand, explain, use and manipulate accordingly like a mask. The hard ground, the blood and guts behind the mask is nothing like this phenomenon of love, but is most likely hard-wired, relatively unalterable biological drives. From that, do we not find further evidence in the ambiguity of love how it is the same feeling, same word, same comprehension that exists between parent and child as two sexual partners?

Now of course there are some differences here, and I am not saying that anybody who loves their child actually wants to have sex with the child and vice-versa, but rather, we can all access how closely related these love emotions are between partners, parent and child, and a plethora of other relationships that use the word love. Is the brain not developed by the same principles that evolution develops the body? Then perhaps, very likely, the feeling of love and its ability to be used between a host of different relationships for different gains is an efficient use an aspect of the brain. It is not the failure of language to correctly distinguish the various types of love that exist towards various objects, but actually, language is often correct in its large, generalized groupings of the feeling love, as it is a dream-like projection of an emotion that stems from an efficient use of one aspect of the brain repeatedly in different situation. A single organ, the penis, urinates and ejaculates as much as a brain, and its various developed, specialized areas, most likely uses the stimulation of neural pathways again and again for what, on a phenomenological level seems like very disparate mental events.

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