Most people do not have the analytical clarity to be able to give an explanation of love isomorphic to their implementation of love; to that extent, they are “confused about love”.
This though does not imply that their usage of the word “love” is amiss, the same way people are able to get through simple reasoning without learning logic, or walking without learning Physics.
So I’ll assume that people are wielding “love” meaningfully, and try to infer what the word means.
It seems to indicate prolonged positive emotional involvement with an external entity. Other emotions and reactions surrounding this may be dragged in. As everything emotions, the boundaries are not clearly defined, but categories were made for man, not the reverse.
This degree of vagueness may be unnerving if you are more detail-oriented than most people. It is familiarly unnerving to me, as I am pretty detail-oriented. (To readers that are not detail-oriented, a concrete example of being so: searching for a big red thing in store shelves, you notice the big red thing, I scan sequentially the items until I hit it.)
Then the question becomes: Is the category “love” too broad?
First line of argument: if you can put 4 items in two sets of 2 items, you can also put them in a set of 4 items, even if this offends the aestethic sense of @SpectrumDT. This is not a good line of argument, as there is probably a more grounded meaning to the question; it’s here just to put it out of the way.
Second line of argument: do some inner mental representations actually match such a broad category? Is this category an unnatural herding of many internal sensations, or is there actually something going on in the mind that naturally brings everything together, leading to humans spontaneously uttering a “love” token in response?
I’ll attack this question from the front and from behind.
From the front, humans in general tend naturally to quash things into low-precision numbers in their head, because Von Neumann was right. I know how many favors and tricks you have played on me, and feel if you come out positive. I meet a girl, and as I get to know her, how nice she looks changes based on how intelligent she looks. So it’s reasonable that the brain tends to summarize a lot of stuff into a level for “I’m emotionally attached in some positive way to that external entity”.
From behind, if humans empirically insist on using this concept, it’s probably there for a reason. There must be some naturalness to it.
Third line of argument: would people be better of if, by default, they outclassed their monkey brain in the degree of accuracy they use to think about love? Here I think the answer depends on the intellectual abilities of a person. If you are intelligent enough, at some point it’s advantageous to make more complex categories and models. Below some level of intelligence, though, the result of trying to install into someone a more complex love model may not be worth the effort. That person may be better off with a long list of proverbs and heuristics that involve less things at a time, and more broad things, such that pattern matching is easier. Detailed discernment is reached by majority/importance vote over multiple loose patterns.
Conclusion: I overall think love is an adequate abstraction for most people, but not for a minority of detail-oriented and intelligent ones.
(Note: I have the impression the writing style I just used gives a vibe of “I know what I am saying, I’m a PhD in love analysis”. I am not.)
Most people do not have the analytical clarity to be able to give an explanation of love isomorphic to their implementation of love; to that extent, they are “confused about love”.
This though does not imply that their usage of the word “love” is amiss, the same way people are able to get through simple reasoning without learning logic, or walking without learning Physics.
So I’ll assume that people are wielding “love” meaningfully, and try to infer what the word means.
It seems to indicate prolonged positive emotional involvement with an external entity. Other emotions and reactions surrounding this may be dragged in. As everything emotions, the boundaries are not clearly defined, but categories were made for man, not the reverse.
This degree of vagueness may be unnerving if you are more detail-oriented than most people. It is familiarly unnerving to me, as I am pretty detail-oriented. (To readers that are not detail-oriented, a concrete example of being so: searching for a big red thing in store shelves, you notice the big red thing, I scan sequentially the items until I hit it.)
Then the question becomes: Is the category “love” too broad?
First line of argument: if you can put 4 items in two sets of 2 items, you can also put them in a set of 4 items, even if this offends the aestethic sense of @SpectrumDT. This is not a good line of argument, as there is probably a more grounded meaning to the question; it’s here just to put it out of the way.
Second line of argument: do some inner mental representations actually match such a broad category? Is this category an unnatural herding of many internal sensations, or is there actually something going on in the mind that naturally brings everything together, leading to humans spontaneously uttering a “love” token in response?
I’ll attack this question from the front and from behind.
From the front, humans in general tend naturally to quash things into low-precision numbers in their head, because Von Neumann was right. I know how many favors and tricks you have played on me, and feel if you come out positive. I meet a girl, and as I get to know her, how nice she looks changes based on how intelligent she looks. So it’s reasonable that the brain tends to summarize a lot of stuff into a level for “I’m emotionally attached in some positive way to that external entity”.
From behind, if humans empirically insist on using this concept, it’s probably there for a reason. There must be some naturalness to it.
Third line of argument: would people be better of if, by default, they outclassed their monkey brain in the degree of accuracy they use to think about love? Here I think the answer depends on the intellectual abilities of a person. If you are intelligent enough, at some point it’s advantageous to make more complex categories and models. Below some level of intelligence, though, the result of trying to install into someone a more complex love model may not be worth the effort. That person may be better off with a long list of proverbs and heuristics that involve less things at a time, and more broad things, such that pattern matching is easier. Detailed discernment is reached by majority/importance vote over multiple loose patterns.
Conclusion: I overall think love is an adequate abstraction for most people, but not for a minority of detail-oriented and intelligent ones.
(Note: I have the impression the writing style I just used gives a vibe of “I know what I am saying, I’m a PhD in love analysis”. I am not.)