Itooh wrote:"Clear, demonstrable answer" is a bit of a quick jumping.
Yes, we essentially do. Let's say love isn't a chemical reaction - we would not be able to induce or modify the way someone feels it with drugs, and certain instances of people receiving brain damage wouldn't be able to cause someone to lose that feeling towards someone. It clearly is rendered on the same plane as all other emotion with zero observed variance. This is essentially irrefutable proof towards it being a chemical reaction.Itooh wrote:Soul or not, we don't have the knowledge yet to claim that a full materialist answer is a "neutral" or "logical" answer.
That in no way supports the idea that it isn't a chemical reaction. We know the core physics behind how water currents function, but just because some water currents move in seemingly bizarre (but obviously not-random) pattern doesn't mean it might not function according to the laws of water current flow. It just means there is a physical phenomenon occurring that is definitely discoverable (it may be doing something odd, but nowhere near impossible), and will likely be discovered eventually.Itooh wrote:After all, love at first sight is still kind of a mystery.
I never said there was no soul, I only said that love is 99.999... percent certainly a chemical reaction. Not being able to disprove an abstract concept someone made up has infinitely small pertinence to determining that it is indeed a chemical reaction. Infinitely small, because while an abstract concept holds water, it holds the same water to all other abstract concepts, and there are an infinite amount of abstract concepts.Itooh wrote:We still know so little about the human brain, and what makes the "identity", we can't pretend that there is any proofs of the absence of soul, or love or whatever.
And yes, when asking scientific questions ("Is love a chemical reaction?"), we can pretend there is no soul. It isn't worth taking into account because it effects the equation to an infinitely small degree.
This is an absurd and hilarious false dichotomy; it works in my favor. The idea that the Earth is round is as clear as emotion being a conglomerate of chemical reactions. You being skeptical of love as a chemical reaction is like you being skeptical that the Earth isn't round because, for some reason, you don't think we have enough proof that the Earth is round.Itooh wrote:It would be like refuting the roundness of the earth because we haven't seen any proof.
Maybe you are just trying to promote open-mindedness, but the Carl Sagan quote "Do not be so open-minded that your brain falls out" works well here.
incognito asked whether love is just a chemical reaction, to which the only sane or meaningful answer is "yes". I find it especially immoral to muddy-up someone's already confused mind with even more confused/vague/baseless answers. You are correct, I was wrong in saying that. I was skeptical of my own thoughts when I wrote, even though being aware of the evidence to support the idea. I don't know why I clung on.Itooh wrote:And by the way, there is indeed a distinction between asexual and aromantic!
While "just going with it" is a good way to view sexuality, many people have a desire to conform to something in some fashion. Asexuality can often be seen as rebellious ("breaking free" of human instinct - "unique" identities can also approach under the guise of being more truthful, which they aren't), and so there sometimes is a desire to be a part of it, and that can cause someone to suppress a true sexuality. This, to me, is not good, because it goes without saying that suppressing sexuality is very mentally damaging. The amount of self-identified asexuals on RPC is disproportionately large, and cannot possibly be accurate; if they don't seem mentally stable or mature enough to understand themselves properly, to me it isn't right to simply ignore this and tell everyone they're doing fine, because something is clearly wrong. Maybe they will figure it out themselves, but not everyone can do that without experiencing mental torture for a long time. I may have been wrong in saying exactly what I said before, but to me, incognito seems very unstable and without good agency, and asexuality is a very common, damaging go-to for people like him. To me it seems as if it could even propagate his depression, which could in turn propagate his lacking feelings of attraction (depression can severely impede or entirely incapacitate attraction), which could in turn propagate his depression again.
This is not directed specifically to incognito, as it happens with many people. Statistically speaking, it must be happening to at least a couple of people on RPC.
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