Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.
Best quote. It reminds me of the poem read at my wedding ceremony.
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
"I love her for her smile —her look —her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day" -
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.
Have I mentioned I've been in a committed relationship longer than anyone else I know under the age of 40-ish?... with someone who is my opposite in almost every way, even. I firmly believe it's because we made a decided commitment, rather than declaring "This person is the one, because they have the qualities I'm looking for." People blame high divorce rates on a lot of things, but I don't hear mention of that mistake as often as I should...
Not that our relationship is ideal. In some ways we're even harmful to each other... but through each other we've also grown immensely as human beings, and of all the people we know with children, ours are the only ones who enjoy a stable home...
This thread has been pretty great. Most mature, thoughtful, and diversified discussion of the topic I've ever seen.
For my part, I'll just say that I'm 28 and have only been intimate with one person in my entire life. I have never even kissed anyone other than my spouse. I recognize that this may work out great for some people, but I can not personally recommend it. All the reasons have already been mentioned. I'm not going to get into any more details, or I'll be tempted to tell embarrassing stories about myself that might get me in trouble.
On the religion vs science thing:
Science gives us information. It doesn't give that information meaning or use. That takes subjective interpretation and creativity. That's where spirituality comes on. I personally disfavor the term religion, because I equate that with worship of/subservience to a supposedly higher being... which I find to be an overly simplified and psychologically unhealthy approach to spirituality, but that's just my personal belief.
The thing is, everything can be interpreted in so many ways. Let me just share some of my own musings.
I'm sure many are aware of the concept that a whole is great than the sum of its parts. For instance, a car is just a bunch of materials shaped and put together in a certain way, but that's what makes it what it more than just those materials. It has capabilities that a collection of those exact same materials in a random pile would not have.
The idea that we are just a collection of chemical reactions has been mentioned a lot in this thread. We are the most powerful example of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. My question is
why do we not apply this concept on a tier higher than ourselves. Many of the chemical reactions we are made of are living beings unto themselves, after all. We're full of cells and microscopic organisms that have their own cycles of life and death. Imagine, just for thought experiment, that all of those cells that make up our body have a sense of individuality the same as we do. They're just living their lives doing what cells do, aware of their own impending mortality as they go about interacting with other cells. What could they think of us? Would it be possible for them to be aware of their participation in a consciousness independent of their own?
So what about us? Is it possible for us to be one component of another consciousness, that is too abstract for us to conceive? What about multiples, even? Think of all the systems in which you could be defined as one particle; all these groupings that have their own dynamics. Your family/city/county/state/nation/planet. How about the internet? Could our activities here be comparable in some way to the synapses of a brain interacting to process information? That's all we're doing, right? Interacting with each other to compile and process information. Our interactions are burned into this non-space like a memory, for other synapses to stumble across and consider as they process their own problems that are interconnected with the problems of every other synapse that differ only in slight shifts of context. Does this have implications as to the possible nature of something like a higher being?
And what of this whole idea of various things being definable as separate from other things? My
favorite TED talk is on exactly this subject. This neurochemist had a stroke where the entire logic side of her brain shut down, and she survived to tell of the experience of being suddenly unable to process language or distinguish her own body from its surroundings. Her description of that was incredibly powerful to me... to imagine looking at my own arm, and then finding not an arm but a continuous field of stuff. The whole universe is a swirling expanse of particle systems made of particle systems made of particle systems, without any indication that there is an upper or lower limit to the tiers of scale. It seems to me that the way we perceive objects (including ourselves) as being separate from one another is completely an incidental feature of our perspective from a single tier of scale, and if this were altered somehow we may end up with completely different definitions of where things begin and end, including our own consciousness.
These are questions that I can't imagine science being able to answer, because they're a product of the subjective nature of our being. I see these as spiritual questions, or religious if you prefer.
And then there's the issue of the origin of the universe. I personally cannot conceive of infinite, but I also cannot conceive of an original cause or effect. I think the answer is likely a notion abstract enough that empirical observation can never approach an answer, and it will always be the subject of conjecture between self-contained systems of definitions such as math, which I see as purely logical but also not exactly a science.
And yeah, you can say that this is all naval-gazing rubbish with no purpose, but that's also a subjective value assessment. To me, it's of fundamental importance to understanding the nature of my own being and its part in the broader scope of existence.
Edit: And as I was typing this, it looks like Bauglir started heading in roughly the same direction