Love

Love is just chemicals

The claim sometimes made by theological apologists that atheists regard love as “merely chemicals in the brain” is philosophically superficial.

It can on occasion cause confusion, since most atheists, or at least many of them, hold to one extent or another a fundamentally physicalist position, and so in some sense love is indeed "mainly chemicals in the brain". But the moment this concession is made we have conceded too much ground. This is because the word "love" does not refer only to the experience, or the nature of the feeling, that we call love.

It conflates the physical basis of an experience with the meaning and significance of the concept used to describe it.

As a physicalist, I reject mind–body dualism: the notion that the mind exists as a fundamentally separate, non-physical substance. Consequently, I hold that our subjective experiences, including love, are ultimately grounded in physical processes. These are often dismissively characterised as “chemicals in the brain”, although the underlying neuroscience is considerably more complex.

However, physicalism does not entail that every meaningful account of a phenomenon must be reducible to the language of physics or neuroscience. To accept that an experience has a physical basis is not to suggest that describing this basis exhausts everything we can meaningfully say about it.

This is where Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and especially Language Games becomes particularly illuminating.

Wittgenstein challenges the assumption that the meaning of psychological concepts is determined exclusively by private, internal experiences. The meaning of a word is intimately connected with how it is used within the shared practices of human life.

Love, therefore, is not simply the subjective sensation we happen to experience when we say we love someone. It is also expressed through patterns of behaviour, affection, commitment, concern, sacrifice and the relationships we establish with others. Moreover, our understanding of love exists within a broader linguistic, cultural and historical context that gives the concept its significance.

We can love someone without consciously experiencing a particular emotion at every moment. We can recognise expressions of love in others, distinguish love from infatuation, and question whether someone’s actions are consistent with their professed feelings. None of these judgements requires access to another person’s private brain states.

This does not mean that love is reducible to observable behaviour, nor that its subjective dimension is unimportant. Rather, the concept of love encompasses more than the internal experience associated with it.

The theological argument trades on an equivocation between what love is physically constituted by and what love means within human life. These are different questions, requiring different kinds of explanation.

A neuroscientific account may explain the mechanisms underlying our experience of love. A psychological account may explain attachment and emotional development. A philosophical account may examine its conceptual and ethical dimensions. A cultural or historical account may explain how our understanding of love has developed. These explanations are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

To describe love as “merely chemicals” is therefore no more philosophically illuminating than describing music as “merely vibrations in the air”. The description identifies something physically fundamental while overlooking the organisation, relationships and significance that make the phenomenon intelligible to us.

The absence of a supernatural explanation does not diminish love. It simply removes an unnecessary metaphysical assumption from our understanding of it.

The fundamental mistake is to confuse explaining the physical basis of something with explaining away its meaning or value.