love, page-28

  1. 23,443 Posts.
    I'm becoming reluctant to respond to your posts because, based on past experience, whatever I happen to say is twisted out of shape and misrepresented.

    You never ask 'what did you mean' or 'why do you say that' you just make an assumption and run with it, claiming that you are right and I am wrong regardless of your flawed interpretation.

    I'll say just one more thing, much to my impending regret: all sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts and considerations are the work of the brain.

    Whenever we feel protective towards our own, feel affection, feel enjoyment, these are an evolutionary, adaptive response, to our environment, toward our family, our friends, our tribe/town/nation state....which does not necessarily extend to the ''other' - people who we don't interact with, who live in other countries with different cultures.
    So what we call 'love' is relative to our perceptions and needs. As you pointed out, this is something that is shared by mammals in general, to some degree or other.

    Evolutionary Psychology:
    Principle 1
    .The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

    The brain is a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics. What does this mean? It means that all of your thoughts and hopes and dreams and feelings are produced by chemical reactions going on in your head (a sobering thought). The brain's function is to process information. In other words, it is a computer that is made of organic (carbon-based) compounds rather than silicon chips. The brain is comprised of cells: primarily neurons and their supporting structures. Neurons are cells that are specialized for the transmission of information. Electrochemical reactions cause neurons to fire.

    Neurons are connected to one another in a highly organized way. One can think of these connections as circuits -- just like a computer has circuits. These circuits determine how the brain processes information, just as the circuits in your computer determine how it processes information. Neural circuits in your brain are connected to sets of neurons that run throughout your body. Some of these neurons are connected to sensory receptors, such as the retina of your eye.

    Others are connected to your muscles. Sensory receptors are cells that are specialized for gathering information from the outer world and from other parts of the body. (You can feel your stomach churn because there are sensory receptors on it, but you cannot feel your spleen, which lacks them.) Sensory receptors are connected to neurons that transmit this information to your brain. Other neurons send information from your brain to motor neurons. Motor neurons are connected to your muscles; they cause your muscles to move. This movement is what we call behavior.
    In other words, the reason we have one set of circuits rather than another is that the circuits that we have were better at solving problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history than alternative circuits were.

    The brain is a naturally constructed computational system whose function is to solve adaptive information-processing problems (such as face recognition, threat interpretation, language acquisition, or navigation). Over evolutionary time, its circuits were cumulatively added because they "reasoned" or "processed information" in a way that enhanced the adaptive regulation of behavior and physiology.

    Realizing that the function of the brain is information-processing has allowed cognitive scientists to resolve (at least one version of) the mind/body problem. For cognitive scientists, brain and mind are terms that refer to the same system, which can be described in two complementary ways -- either in terms of its physical properties (the brain), or in terms of its information-processing operation (the mind). The physical organization of the brain evolved because that physical organization brought about certain information-processing relationships -- ones that were adaptive.
    It is important to realize that our circuits weren't designed to solve just any old kind of problem. They were designed to solve adaptive problems''


    http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html
 
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