Is love just a physiological state?  – A Case of Confused Reductionism

 

            Recently an intelligent student wondered in class whether love just is a particular physiological state.  So I take it she was asking us to seriously consider whether Romeo's love of Juliet was just a particular physiological state in Romeo.  Theoretically then, if we wanted to know whether one might apply to concept love to Romeo and Juliet, we could just look and see whether the particular physiological state which science has identified as love is present, similar to a diagnosis like cancer, which just is the presence of cancerous cells in the body. The implied argument is that immaterial souls don’t exist and physiological states accompany all our mental states; thus the physiological states and the mental states are reducible to one another. But this notion is not so much false as interestingly confused, revealing that not every grammatically well-formed question is an intelligible question.         

             The question Is love nothing but a physiological state? runs together a question about the meaning of love with a question about what physiological events may accompany certain experiences of love.  One sees this in the answer proposed by the intelligent student: “Love is a physiological state that can be investigated by science.” The concept of love is being classified as, or even identified with, a physiological event – in principle observable and measurable. But questions about using concepts involve meaning and whether particular uses of the concepts make sense – not observing and measuring. These questions are logically quite distinct from finding out about particular empirical states like hormone levels or brain maps. 

            Some examples should make the distinction clearer.  Questions about the meaning of love might be: Does Romeo really love Juliet? Is he perhaps only infatuated, as he was with Rosalind? To answer one must already understand the meaning of love and whether it can be applied to Romeo.  Scientific questions about love might be: What physiological state occurs (if any) in Romeo when he is love with Rosalind? With Juliet? Are they the same? Do these physiological states occur in all people who may be described as 'being in love’?  These two sets of questions both make sense; one knows in principle about how to go about looking for answers in each case.

            But the reductionist’s question wanted to dissolve the former kind of question into the latter, implying that we could find out the meaning of any concept by empirical investigation into body states turns out to be perfectly unintelligible.  Indeed, how would one go about finding answers to Is love just a physiological state? Certainly not by investigating Romeo's body states, for that would only answer the scientific questions such as Romeo’s hormone levels when what we want to know is whether love is just these hormone levels.  And the question in fact presuppose that we have already identified Romeo as being in love – that we already know how to apply the concept meaningfully.  Thus the scientific investigation cannot tell us how to apply the concept for the simple reason that no scientific investigation into love is even conceivable unless we already know how to use language – already know what it is to be in love.  How can MRI graphics (or blood tests) tell me anything about Romeo's love when I would already have to understand what this was before I could measure his hormone levels and mapping his brain states?

           To take another example: the confusion would be like trying to find the meaning of beauty by studying the atomic structure of trees.  The atomic structure of a beautiful tree would be indistinguishable from atomic structures of other things unless one was already able to distinguish trees from other objects as well as the beautiful from the non-beautiful; this in turn presupposes prior knowledge of how to apply the concept of beauty (and tree).  How can an empirical investigation tell me that the tree is beautiful if I already have to understand beauty (and tree) before I can even begin to investigate beautiful objects scientifically?     

            The – as it turns out rather odd – idea that love just is a physiological state reveals a confusion made possible because of the gap between the surface grammar of the language and the actual meaningful use of the language. Is love just a physiological state? is a well-formed grammatical question that is no real question because it doesn't make sense – we don't really have an idea of how to even begin to go about answering it, no more than we know how to find the chemical formula for beauty or how to locate Gödel's proof or Bach's Goldberg variations on a MRI of the brain.  No measurable data “out there” can determine the meaning of a concept. 

 

Is Love the Shadow of Physiological Events? 

         Recently one of my students wondered in class whether love was just a physiological state, and I argued that nothing empirical like a brain state could determine the meaning and proper application of a concept. I suppose the serious asker of the question might think my response in terms of logical analysis ignores the metaphysical thrust of the student's question, and thus begs it. To avoid confusion: the Matrix argument is not a possible scientific hypothesis. It is true that properly scientific investigation of love presupposes a view from the outside of the immediate lived experience.  But to ask whether the view from the outside (science) is the only valid view of Reality or, even more counter-intuitively, whether the view from the inside (experience) is necessarily unreal already goes beyond science.  No scientist worth the name would ever investigate such a question. How could one test it? What scientific experiment could possibly provide evidence for or against any possible answer to speculations about lived experience being necessarily illusory?  Mapping brain states implies nothing about experience except that one must (apparently) have a living brain to have it, and perhaps certain physical events in the brain correspond to certain mental activities and are a necessary condition for them to take place. 

A metaphysical question is not about this or that particular aspect of reality, but about Reality as such. We constantly make assumptions about ultimate Reality. One might believe, for example, that Reality excludes the possibility that lived experience can be real, that our experience is similar to the slaves of the popular film The Matrix; or, like most people, one can believe that our experience is of Reality. Metaphysical assumptions – in contrast to scientific hypotheses – can't be empirically tested.  But they can be analyzed to determine whether they are using language in a nonsensical way or guilty of logical fallacies – and in the problem of reducing love to physiological states, the escape from logical confusion by a leap onto the metaphysical plane simply magnifies the confusion.

            The question-hypothesis that love is just a body-brain state asks us to take seriously the possibility that the meanings of words and the experiences they are rooted in – in fact our whole inner life – are nothing but observable bodily events in space and time, or rather a kind of shadow of these events. Thus we are asked to take seriously the belief that only physical events which can in principle be studied by science are to count as “Real.”  If we could imagine this, then our use of the concept “love” and its various meanings would belong to this shadow of reality.  Thus to argue, as I have done, that determining what a concept means from how it is meaningfully used logically differs from investigating physical states of affairs would be to assume that something in the shadow world of language and conscious experience is real – and this is perhaps what the serious asker of the question “Is love just a physiological state?” wants to doubt.  In other words, we can't rely on language (and thus meanings, concepts, applications) because language is rooted in experience, and our experience is precisely what is said to distort what is really Real – the physical events. This, in effect, is to seriously consider the possibility that our inner life corresponds to something like the Matrix, with nature rather than a computer as program designer.  Let me call this the Matrix argument.          

            The advocate of the Matrix argument might thus claim that to distinguish between concepts and physical events as I did is to beg the question of whether concepts are real or rather only shadows of the physical, which was the way the original question about love should be understood. But this view is squarely – and fallaciously – based on how a metaphysical concept is (im-)properly used: Real, Reality. The argument might only make sense by applying a conceptual distinction between the Real and the Unreal (shadow): the set of possible physical events being assigned axiomatically to the set of the Real; the complex of concept-and-lived-experience (like love) to the Unreal. But obviously the meaning of the concepts Real / Unreal cannot itself be determined by referring to brain states depicted on a brain scan, since one could only call the scan graph a picture of the Real by applying the very concept in question – without that the graph couldn't tell us anything.  In other words, physical events without concepts are deaf and blind.

Furthermore, questions involving the meaning of the concept “real” are logically no different from the sort “What is the meaning of love?”  The entire Matrix argument in presuming to point to an ultimate reality beyond language thus presupposes the very language activity it is supposed to explain away – determining the meaning and proper application of a concept.  So if there is any question-begging going on, it is the advocate of the Matrix argument who is doing it.

            The desire to leap to a reality outside of language and experience is the attempt to see the world as if from no place within it – as we perhaps imagine God sees it, infallibly. Wittgenstein compared it to the attempt of the fly to get out of the bottle. But what comes clear from my argument is that the whole idea of getting out of the bottle seems unintelligible, since without the bottle of language and consciousness there would be no intellectual space at all.

 

The Neutral Observer – A Confused Epistemological Ideal

What gives the Matrix hypothesis – the notion that our experience of meaning is nothing but a shadow of a physical reality – its logical force for a not inconsiderable number of members of western scientific culture?  What underwrites the leap from doing science (investigating brain physiology) to believing in a particular metaphysical picture (only physical events like brain physiology are real)?  The force seems to come from a certain epistemological ideal – the Neutral Observer – which is in itself seems unproblematic for many kinds of activity like science and auto mechanics, but which becomes quite confused when elevated metaphysically to a perspective which transcends experience altogether such that it can legislate a priori which experiences are real and which aren't. 

            For the Neutral Observer, our experience of meaning structured by language is the enemy of truth.  The question of how many moons Jupiter has or whether the sun orbits around the earth has an answer which is in a sense “out there,” independently of whether particular human beings or groups' languages and cultures, independently of the varied interpretations of Jupiter altogether (e. g. as a god, a ball of gas, etc.).  Whether one is Lutheran, Catholic, or Atheist; whether one shares the cosmology of the cavemen, people living during the medieval period, or Newton, the answer is the same: only the subjective frameworks of the concrete human being get in the way, preventing some from seeing it. And indeed, for certain kinds of factual states of affairs, the neutral observer ideal seems to work; certain sorts of facts seem true independently of particular subjective frameworks. From this model with its limited applications, the advocate of the Matrix argument makes a metaphysical leap to get at the Truth. To know the Truth about Reality, one need only to assume the position of the Neutral Observer and observe Reality as a whole, bracketing out all subjective experience and relying on the impersonal methods of science.

            Trying to picture the Neutral Observer, we can do no better perhaps than to turn to AI (Artificial Intelligence), the designer of the Matrix.  AI is certainly outside experience as we know it.  Interestingly, AI does science: it knows human biology and something about human psychology.   Here in AI we seem indeed to have found what modernity has striven for – the metaphysical Neutral Observer, uninfluenced by the subjective life of everyday language users, emotional response, and all of the inner life.  AI as a Neutral Observer can see things as they really are, having no “veil of Maya” that has been cast over the phenomenal world by human experience, standing in the presence of the “things in themselves” as they are apart from the shadows of language and experience.

            But without language rooted in experience (the inside view), one can't even speak of knowledge at all, much less metaphysical knowledge of ultimate Reality.  Take the example of pain. AI of course is a bodiless machine. Assuming AI could recognize behavior and physiological states it could connect with the human word “pain” at all, and thus could observe pain behaviors in humans, map particular brain states, and so on: Has AI thereby understood pain in any meaningful sense? Explained it? Does AI know pain at all, much less what it can come to mean in the lives of human beings?  Having never experienced pain, how could AI even pick out “pain behavior” without error from the nearly endless other purely physical movements of human bodies?  A grimace wouldn't be in any way expressive to AI, no more than a caress.  To understand pain, an intelligent alien must understand the painfulness of pain. 

            What is true of pain is much truer of more complex meanings like love.  But without experience from the inside, AI would not have a clue what it was it was trying to understand – less so than we have of the strangest practice of the most (for us) exotic culture that has ever existed on earth:  we at least can begin knowing what it is to meaningfully experience.  AI could not recognize the difference between real suffering and an MRI of the brain.  The notion that our linguistically mediated experiential life is Plato's cave; that chemistry is the Real outside the cave; and that knowledge requires leaving this cave to see Reality as a machine intelligence – this is a reductio ad absurdum of the Matrix hypothesis and the Neutral Observer.  AI would have less chance to understand the human than the deaf would have to understand Bach's music or the blind Rembrandt's painting.

   Suppose a dimension of reality is not reducible to scientific categories as currently understood. In that case, we may hope that the life of the spirit and mind is part of the universe after all – that there are more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by analytical philosophy and natural science.