What is Love?
Reply #54 - February 02, 2014, 03:58 PM
this is not directly answering the question 'what is live', but i think it gives some insight.
it's an essay i'm working on.
Love at first sight
'Love at first sight' is an interesting phenomenon. One thing that’s interesting about it is that some people believe it’s possible to experience it — to have it happen to them — while other people don’t believe that it’s possible. And for the people that do believe it, that is part of the causal chain that causes them to experience it. And for the people that don’t believe that it’s possible, they can’t experience it — it just doesn’t happen to them.
These people that don’t believe in ‘love at first sight,’ either believed the tradition and then changed their mind, or they never bought into it in the first place because they already had reason to believe that it doesn’t make sense. But most people who don’t believe in ‘love at first sight’ still have basically the same mistake. It’s true that they don’t believe the idea that loving a person at first sight is possible, but they still think in a way that is consistent with ‘love at first sight’ for other things, like ideas.
So somebody could realize that loving a person at first sight doesn’t make sense, but he still treats other ideas this way. So he might have an intuition, or gut feeling, and immediately believe it to be true, without checking it for error. This is fundamentally the same as a person who gets a sensation upon the first sight of someone and then interpreting that sensation to mean that he loves that person, all without checking the idea (that he’s in love) for error.
'Love at first sight,' for a person or for an idea, doesn’t make sense. No matter what sensation one has, that sensation doesn’t mean that the idea is true. Treating the sensation this way is a form of justificationism. It’s a way to give status to an idea in order to ignore criticism of the idea. To be clear, a criticism is an explanation of a flaw in an idea. Now some people think that criticism means personal attacks, but that's not true. A criticism of an idea does not constitute a criticism of the holder of the idea. The holder of the idea can change his mind about the idea. It's not part of his identify. There's no law of nature preventing him from changing it. The idea itself is not something that must stay part of him.
Justifying an idea by it’s sensation means having no means of finding out that you’re wrong, in the case that you're are actually wrong. It means treating the sensation as an authority. It means treating the sensation as an infallible source of knowledge. Justificationism doesn’t account for the fact that people are fallible, that all ideas people come up with are subject to error. Love at first sight for a person, is just a special case of the more general error known as justificationism.
'Love at first sight' is fundamentally the same as getting angry after jumping to conclusions in response to somebody saying something to you. Whatever the intent of the person, you could be wrong about your interpretation of his intent. Your sensation of anger is not justification that your interpretation of his intent is correct. Maybe the person had no malicious intent. Maybe he wanted to help you as opposed to wanting to hurt you. No matter how strong your sensation is, that doesn’t make your interpretation true. Your sensation doesn’t give extra status to your interpretation. You do not have any infallible sources of knowledge. All your ideas are subject to error, even the ones that you get strong sensations about.
This is about first impressions. If your first impression comes with a strong emotional/intuitional sensation, that doesn’t mean that it’s correct. Your first impression could be wrong. And if you act on your first impression before checking it for error, then you are ignoring that you might be wrong. In the case of love at first sight for an idea, it’s important to check for criticisms of the idea as a means of accounting for the possibility of it being wrong.
First impressions, like all other ideas, are fallible, so one shouldn’t act on them without first checking for criticism. One type of criticism of a first impression is another explanation that fits the evidence, an explanation that rivals the first impression. It’s a criticism because if both the first impression and the second explanation fit all the existing evidence, then that means both explanations are wrong since neither of them is better than its rival since both of them equally fit the evidence. In order to rule one of them out, you’d have to find another piece of evidence that contradicts one of them but not the other.
Conventional advice on second-guessing
Another interesting thing about 'love at first sight,' or rather, the boiled down version of it, 'first impressions,' is that there is conventional knowledge that says that second-guessing yourself is bad. An internet search turns up lots of articles about how to stop second-guessing yourself. This seems to say that acting on an idea while still not being sure about it, is a good idea. But I think this is a misguided way of dealing with uncertainty. It's like saying: Since I can't be certain about my idea, I need a way to act without feeling uncertain. I think this is a bad idea because it's not giving any method for dealing with the uncertainty, and instead it's only giving advice on how to feel in spite of the uncertainty. The problem I see with this is that following this advice means ignoring criticism of the first guess. It means blocking out of your mind that a second guess could be better than your first guess.
To clarify the issue, let's consider what it means to stop second-guessing in the context of a murder case. The first guess is the accusation that someone committed a murder. Second-guessing means looking for other people that could have committed the murder instead, and looking for other theories like maybe it was a suicide, or maybe it was an accident caused by one or more mistakes made by the accused person and/or other people. Now if the judge followed the conventional advice, then murder cases would always end with the same theory that started the murder case, which would raise the question: Then what's the point of the murder case if you're never going to even consider changing your mind about your first guess?
My analysis might not be giving the conventional advice a fair analysis. I imagine that the conventional advise about this issue says that you should second-guess a little bit, and then at some point, to stop second-guessing and decide on your best knowledge. But the problem with this conventional knowledge is that it's not clear about how to arrive at an idea that can be considered 'the best knowledge.' Consider the context of a murder case again. The court system is designed so that any conviction can be appealed. This is because we know that we could have been wrong about the conviction. Our best knowledge to date, at the time of the conviction, was good enough to convict, but we know that it's possible that a new piece of evidence, or a new analysis, could change the dynamics of the case such that the the previous theory is now refuted, in favor for a new theory. This shows that our judicial system is designed to account for uncertainty. And this is a way of thinking, an attitude, that individuals can have to.
So the conventional advice is about how to feel better about possibly being wrong. It doesn't address the underlying issue, that it's ok to be wrong since that's part of the human condition. Being wrong is normal. It's common. The important thing isn't that you're wrong, or that you could be wrong. The important thing is that you change your mind about your idea when you do find out that you're wrong. And more importantly, finding out that you're wrong shouldn't be seen as a bad thing because it's actually good -- you went from being wrong to being right about that one thing.
First impressions need second guesses!
Topic: What is Love?