Comments on Thought Bubbles: John Pearson thinks about... Love

Dear John,It’s really simple: your wife is right a...

2007-08-31T17:52:00.000Z

Dear John,
It’s really simple: your wife is right and you are wrong.
The trouble you ran into is the effect of complex systems.
When a system gets very, very complex and I guess we could call human behaviour, all stupidity aside, very complex, so, when a system like that becomes very complex it becomes impossible to retract every thing that happens inside that system to a simple cause. ( look also at meteorology, informatics, chaos theory)
It is possible to make a list of connected parts of the system or a list of the things you expect to happen. It is possible to look at isolated processes and try to understand them. But that is something different than understanding the system entirely.
This is not the same thing as ‘anything can happen – nothing can be said about it’ but it feels a little like it.
Maybe I can put it this way: all laws are semi-liquid, but when we talk about them we treat them as if the were written in stone and coming fresh from Moe’s last debate with the big boss.
And then I haven’t even started about cultural paradigms and perspective.
To take a rather nebulous thing as love, make a pseudo-objective declaration about it and present it to a member of the opposite sex shows a degree of naiveness that makes one wonder how you managed to get married in the first place. You might not think so, but it was probably her doing.
When you have something complex as love, it really makes no big difference whether you call it ‘bio-chemistry’ or ‘divine’. They are just different words for ‘complex’.
Traditionally men and women have different approaches towards coping with the frustrations that complex systems give us. Women as a clichee try it with feelings, intuition, things like that. Men throw it on science, law, things with a clean structure. In other words: if you as a man try to rationalise and tell that to a woman who happens to be as traditional as you are yourself and who emotionalises it, you have a culture clash. Unless of course she thinks you are wisdom incarnate – which is unlikely because women like that need no doghouse.
You are betrayed by science. Science cuts everything in little pieces, analyses them and neglects telling us (most of the time) that the whole beast is a little different from the tip of its tail or the curves of its intestines.
The stupid thing with science is that you have to be a bio-chemist to know how much is not yet known or a psychologist to know how much can still surprise you. As a non-bio-chemist I can keep up the illusion that, although I might not know how bio-chemistry does it, the real people do know or will find out any day now.
This form of positivism keeps us from getting too frustrated and most of the time it works ok. Until you mix it with love. Then it gets you in the doghouse.

I hope the nights are mild and dry,

Michael

Don't we have a false dilemma here? John says lov...

2007-07-17T15:00:00.000Z

Don't we have a false dilemma here? John says love is either "some supernatural force between one person to another...that we cannot truly understand or explain" or else it's "chemical, mechanical and electrical responses". His pairing of terms such as "mysterious or other-worldly" or "supernatural or incomprehensible" suggests that all natural things are quite comprehensible; it is only other-worldly things that are mysterious and incomprehensible.

I don't find the world like that at all. Things that have nothing supernatural about them still seem mysterious and incomprehensible. Their emotional impact seems quite out of proportion to the "chemical responses" that I'm sure are taking place at one level. I've argued elsewhere that music is this way; and love is probably the same. So I still hold out for the idea that things can be completely natural and this-worldly, and still astonishingly mysterious. If that's me being "silly and weak-kneed", well, so be it.

A pennyworth on the piece:What a delight to read s...

2007-07-10T10:01:00.000Z

A pennyworth on the piece:

What a delight to read such a sparky and well-crafted contribution! This is a thoughtful, honest attempt to look at Love Actually and to de-mystify it. To acknowledge that it is thoroughly incarnational - the result of highly complex interaction between body and brain doesn't make the experience of of its various manifestations (eros, agape etc.) any less AWESOME or WONDERFUL - surely?

"anonymous" ( who calls himself smitch, by the way...

2007-07-08T22:36:00.000Z

"anonymous" ( who calls himself smitch, by the way ) says that love is "born in language" - and goes on to repremand me rather high-handedly I feel. Love is expressed (as are all things) using language, but that should not preclude us from asking WHAT love actually is.. Some might say the same of God, and WHAT he/she/it actually is.

Any other takers ?

John Pearson

John says love "is born of chemical, mechanical an...

2007-07-06T09:52:00.000Z

John says love "is born of chemical, mechanical and electrical responses and operations". No John, love is born in language. And that of course is why your wife is rightly hurt by what you say.

Smitch