In my previous essays I examined the idea that love is mechanical and its ethical implications. In this essay, I will focus on the eternal truth that love hurts.
While there are exceptions, the end of a romantic relationship involves pain. As noted in my l essay on voles and love, Young found that the loss of a partner depresses a prairie vole. This was tested by dropping voles into beakers of water to determine how much they would struggle. Prairie voles who had just lost a partner struggled less that those who were not bereft. The depressed voles differed chemically from the non-depressed voles. When a depressed vole was “treated” for this depression, the vole struggled as strongly as the non-bereft vole.
Human beings also suffer from the hurt of love. For example, a human who has ended a relationship often falls into a vole-like depression and struggles less against the tests of life (though dropping humans into beakers to test this would presumably be unethical).
While some might derive pleasure from stewing in a state of post-love depression, this feeling is something most would want to end. The usual treatment, other than self-medication, is time: people usually tend to recover and seek out a new opportunity for love. And depression.
Given that voles can be treated for this depression, humans could also be treated as well. After all, if love is essentially a chemical romance grounded in strict materialism, then tweaking the brain just so would fix that depression. Interestingly enough, the philosopher Spinoza offered an account of love (and emotions in general) that match up with the mechanistic model being examined.
As Spinoza saw it, people are slaves to their affections and chained by who and what they love. This is an unwise approach to life because, as the voles in the experiment found, the object of one’s love can die (or leave). This view of Spinoza matches this as voles that bond with a partner become depressed when that partner is lost. In contrast, voles that do not form such bonds do not suffer this depression.
While Spinoza was a pantheist, his view of human beings is similar to that of the mechanist: he regarded humans as within the laws of nature and was a determinist. He believed that all that occurs does so from necessity—there is no chance or choice. This view guided him to the notion that human behavior and motivations can be examined as one might examine “lines, planes or bodies.” He held that emotions follow the same necessity as all other things, thus making the effects of the emotions predictable. In short, Spinoza engaged in what can be regarded as a scientific examination of the emotions—although he did so without the technology available today and from a more metaphysical standpoint. However, the core idea that the emotions can be analyzed in terms of definitive laws is the same idea that is being followed currently in regards to the mechanics of emotion.
Getting back to the matter of the negative impact of lost love, Spinoza offered his own solution. As he saw it, all emotions are responses to what is in the past, present or future. For example, a person might feel regret because she believes she could have done something different in the past. As another example, a person might worry because he thinks that what he is doing now might not bear fruit in the future. These negative feelings rest, as Spinoza sees it, on the false belief that the past and present could be different and that the future is not set. Once a person realizes that all that happens occurs of necessity (that is, nothing could have been any different and the future cannot be anything other than what it will be), then that person will suffer less from the emotions. Thus, for Spinoza, freedom from the enslaving chains of love would be the recognition and acceptance that what occurs is determined.
Putting this in the mechanistic terms of modern neuroscience, a Spinoza-like approach would be to realize that love is purely mechanical and that the pain and depression that comes from the loss of love are also purely mechanical. That is, the terrible, empty darkness that seems to devour the soul at the end of love is merely chemical and electrical events in the brain. Once a person recognizes and accepts this, if Spinoza is right, the pain should be reduced. With modern technology it is possible to do even more: whereas Spinoza could merely provide advice, modern science can eventually provide us with the means to simply adjust the brain and set things right—just as one would fix a malfunctioning car or PC.
One problem is, of course, that if everything is necessary and determined, then Spinoza’s advice makes no sense: what is, must be and cannot be otherwise. To use an analogy, it would be like shouting advice at someone watching a cut scene in a video game. This is pointless, since the person cannot do anything to change what is occurring. For Spinoza, while we might think life is a like a game, it is like that cut scene: we are spectators and not players. So, if one is determined to wallow like a sad beast in the mud of depression, that is how it will be.
In terms of the mechanistic mind, advice would seem equally absurd because to say what a person should do implies that a person has a choice. However, the mechanistic mind presumably just ticks away doing what it does, creating the illusion of choice. So, one brain might tick away and end up being treated while another brain might tick away in the chemical state of depression. They both eventually die and it matters not which is which. This is another reason why I choose free will; if I am right, then maybe I can do something about my life. If I am wrong, I am determined to be wrong and hence can neither be blamed nor choose to be any different.