Love's a State of Mind

Love is one of the things that make life worth living. As such, it is of particular interest to me. I’ve written about the account of love we find in Plato before. But while I think there is much wisdom to be found in those ideas, sometimes I wonder whether there are other, perhaps simpler and more common, ways to think about and make sense of love. Don’t get me wrong, I love sophisticated, methodological philosophy. Yet, I often find myself playing around with simpler and more prima facie common-sensical explanations for the kinds of things that demand explanation and understanding. With that being said, I would like to share a few simple and crude thoughts I have recently been having about love.

We know from experimental psychology that framing has a huge influence on our decisions. The state of mind you’re in has a tremendous influence on your thoughts, reaction, and decision in response to new cognitive inputs. For example, when people were shown a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker (or in French, Le Penseur) before having to make a given choice, they were generally more careful and deliberate in making their choice than those who didn’t see the statue beforehand. These kinds of insights come from the work of psychologist Robert Cialdini, who has written extensively and persuasively on the topic—I highly recommend his book on what he calls pre-suasion. It’s quite clear, then, that our psychological state at the time of any given mental process has a tremendous influence on our subsequent cognition.

With this in mind, I find the idea of love being a state of mind worth exploring. Perhaps there is nothing more to falling in love than being in a certain psychological state—independent of the particular person or thing one falls in love with—at any given time. In Plato’s Symposium, it becomes quite clear that love is not an emotion, but a certain kind of relational state. With respect to the idea of framing, as discussed above, this would suggest that the lover’s psychological state plays a far greater role in her experience of love than we commonly think. And perhaps it even plays a greater role than the loved one or object of love does. This would seem to have deep consequences for how we think about loving. Rather than being dependent on one particular beloved to elicit our love, loving would turn out to be something primarily projected by the lover onto the beloved, without any necessary reliance on the beloved. In this way, a picture of love as a mere state of mind would seem to liberate us, as lovers, from dependence on some particular continually changing person or some external object or project. I think that while this picture of love might initially strike some as less romantic than the “two lovers seeking their other halves” story, we have reason to welcome this kind of story as it would seem to make for a more fulfilling love-life. A loving relation between two lovers on this account would be something at least partially controlled by each lover’s ability to manage their own psychological state and, moreover, would give a picture of a lover who is not at the mercy of another person who will invariably change over time in ways beyond the lover’s ability to predict. This strikes me as an attractive and liberating picture of love.

Life as a Puzzle

Growing up, I loved to puzzle. Make no mistake about it, I still do. I just rarely find the time anymore. I think what makes puzzles so fascinating to me is knowing I have all the pieces and all that remains to be done is assembling them in the right way. Sounds easy, right? Well, as it turns out completing the puzzle becomes quite hard once the puzzle becomes more complex and monotone. The smaller puzzles take but a few minutes. Puzzles with thousands of pieces can take weeks, if not months to complete. Although puzzling initially lured me in with its apparent simplicity and completeness in options (every single piece has one single right place), I quickly realized that even when you have all the right pieces, putting them together in the right way can be tricky and disheartening. For this reason, I found that completing a difficult puzzle builds at least as much character as completed picture along the way.

These were the thoughts going through my mind as I was taking the long way home the other night. And then an interesting idea popped into my mind. Isn’t life a puzzle? Isn’t a fulfilling life the biggest puzzle we each are given all the right pieces for? We are given all the pieces yet often get frightened by its sheer size and complexity.

See, we are all born with certain innate properties and predispositions. We are born into different circumstances with certain hardships or privileges. We are born to a certain set of parents, who are hopefully still around to see us grow into men, women, or whatever we may see as the primary role of our existence. Along the way, we build on our innate properties and predispositions. We grow stronger, wiser, and more experienced. We pick certain projects which we deem worth pursuing and spend most of our lives doing so—the lucky ones among us do this deliberately, the less lucky ones subconsciously. Ultimately, we all have a set of pieces which potentiates a completed puzzle. Some of us may have more pieces than others, some may have smaller and harder to place pieces than others, but in the end we all have a complete set—a set that when arranged in the right way yields a unique picture of a fulfilling life—our very own picture of a life well lived.

I think this way of thinking about living a fulfilling life is at least useful fiction—i.e., even if we may never know whether life truly is analogous to a puzzle, thinking that it is should help us live a more fulfilling life nonetheless.

Take a look at the pieces you are given. How may your various passions fit together? Where can you generate synthetic unities that allow for synergy? What’s the best way to integrate the various roles (such as girlfriend, best friend, daughter, mother, wife, grandmother, and so forth) you want to fill in your life? 

I found the best puzzling strategy is to first concern yourself with the individual pieces. Analyze and group the pieces before you start putting them together. I think living a fulfilling life is easiest when following the same strategy.

What Technology Is Missing

Technology has an unmatched potential to fundamentally change our world and ourselves. Nothing, so it seems, will be spared from a digital make-over. Whether it be algorithmic optimization or complete deference to thinking things that are thought to be better at something than us fallible humans, experts on technology and all its related fields are growing increasingly confident that there is little, if anything, that will be spared a digital makeover within the next few decades. 

One of the most enthusiastic proponents of such an ideology is Ray Kurzweil—a fascinating mind I’ve been following for a few years now. Kurzweil seems to understand technology and its potential better than any other expert on the topic. He has consistently predicted technological advances with amazing and somewhat frightening accuracy. His most radical prediction is that of an ensuing Singularity—a point where humans will merge with digital machines and the whole universe will return to a state of hyper-intelligent unity. How’s that for a science-fiction thriller? Kurzweil is currently the Director of Engineering at Google and shouldn’t be hard to find more information on. I highly recommend all of his books, ideally read in chronological order. But be warned, you will likely be so persuaded by his intelligence, wit, and ability to make highly scientific arguments sound commonsensical that any opponent to his position will easily slip into seeming like a lunatic. So be critical and don’t get over-enthusiastic. (Of course, part of the reason I mention this is that I am about to challenge some of his ideas.)

Though I admire Kurzweil’s intelligence and unbelievable breadth and depth in thought and intuition, I think we should be more careful and reluctant. I don’t think we should so easily give up on the idea that there are some things outside the reach of technology—some things that are uniquely human. Kurzweil argues that all the things we think are uniquely human are really just products of intelligence—which would necessarily surrender the position that there are things, some of the most valuable things known to humans, outside the reach of artificial intelligence and thus a technological make-over. 

I, for one, don’t think intelligence, by itself, is sufficient for the creation of the most valuable things we have: art, literature, poetry, philosophy, and so forth. In fact, it seems that all the things that make a human life worth living are outside the reach of technology, in the sense that authentic experience by biological human beings is necessary. That is to say, as long as technology is unable to have access to the energetic and emotional experiences that make a human being human, artificial intelligence will lack the raw material for the creation of transcendental and meaningful things--the things that make life worth living. 

To clarify, I think that there are two components to art: one can be thought of as the raw material of everything transcendental like art and philosophy and the other as the means for communicating that raw material. The first is the energetic and emotional experience that running on biological hardware entails. This direct and necessary relation to the physical worlds effectively ties us to nature and thus gives us access to all its sublime. Without this raw material, songwriters would have nothing meaningful to write about, painters nothing meaningful to paint, writers nothing meaningful to write about. In short, there would be no art or other forms of transcendental creativity.

The second part of the equation is intelligence. Human intelligence is in some important way disconnected from the physical world despite being grounded in biology. Artificial intelligence, however, does not have this direct biological grounding. Kurzweil seems to think that intelligence does not require any direct biological relation (i.e., grounding in the physical world) with the physical world to create art and other manifestations of the sublime. In other words, Kurzweil does not think that what humans perceive as meaning has a necessary connection to our biological roots. I, however, disagree. I think that intelligence without any necessary biological relation to the physical world and thus nature is missing the raw materials for creating transcendental artifacts and can thus only create things void of meaning—precisely the meaning which the intelligent part of our being, namely the mind, then communicates to other minds through packaging these energetic and emotional states in shells we call art, literature, philosophy, and so forth. 

Though I am quite certain I am at least picking up on a chunk of truth here, what if I am mistaken? What if there really is nothing more to things like art, literature, and philosophy than plain and potentially artificial intelligence? Look, even if that turns out to be true, I think we should still be reluctant to surrender the idea that being human is nothing other than being intelligent. Moreover, I think we have reason to hold on, as tightly as we can, to the idea that we, as human beings with all our transcendental creations like art, literature, and philosophy are at least partially outside the reach of the complete digitization of our world and ourselves.

Why Sh*tting in Public Restrooms Sucks -- A Commons Tragedy

I hate taking a sh*t in public restrooms. Granted, I can only speak for men’s restrooms and assume (or perhaps rather hope) that women don’t run into the same problem. But anyway, I think the problem with men and public restrooms is a commons tragedy—everyone acting momentarily rational brings about a sub-optimal collective outcome. Let me briefly explain what a commons tragedy is and show why I think public men’s restrooms fit the bill.

Classic examples of commons tragedies are fishing and farming in communal contexts. Here, the population of fish and the farmland are held “in common” and individual use of them is unregulated. This means individuals are allowed to fish and farm however they please. What usually happens in such scenarios is simple. Because it’s in the private interest of each individual fisherman and farmer to fish and farm as much as possible, without making sure the fish aren’t overfished and the land isn’t destroyed by lack of maintenance, a group of rational, and economically thus profit-seeking, fishermen and farmers will eventually overfish and destroy the farmland. Thus, by rationally responding to short-term incentives, the fishermen and farmers will effectuate a collectively bad outcome—they’ll be forced to go out of business or move to another place because there aren’t enough fish and the farmland has become infertile. That is the classic picture of a commons tragedy—simple and compelling.

Defecating in public men’s restrooms can be construed in the same way. For a variety of reasons, some men decide to use the stalls with seated toilets, as opposed to urinals, to urinate. Out of sheer laziness or else, they often don’t lift up the toilet seat before going about their business. More often than not, this will result in liberal amounts of their urine being distributed on the toilet seat. The civil bathroom visitor would, recognizing he is harming the common good, wipe the seat clean and flush the toilet. More commonly, however, visitors will not wipe the seat (and sometimes even fail to flush the toilet…gross!). In effect, the toilet looks disgusting and has been turned into a serious biochemical weapon against any potential defecator—the commonly held resource of clean toilet seats has been degenerated. The next determined, or perhaps option-less, defecator must then clean the seat covered in some stranger’s urine—a serious cost that some may not be willing to incur at all. We thus get a commonly held and unregulated resource being tragically degenerated by the seemingly rational pursuit of private interest—urinating with the least amount of energy expended.

In this way, public men’s restrooms in absence of strong social norms, or other forms of regulation, are a commons tragedy—a scenario where a commonly held resource is degenerated by the rational pursuit of private interest.

Spirituality and Philosophy

Being fascinated is one of the most profound psychological states I have come across. In fact, there are few things that fascinate me as much as fascination itself. I can’t help but wonder what gives rise to fascination? What is it about things that makes them fascinating?           

With a nod to Kant, what seems to fascinate us is the sublime—things with a certain property of greatness. The sublime may present itself to us as spiritual, aesthetic, artistic, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, and so forth. But ultimately, there seem to be two sources of the sublime: one deep within us and the other entirely outside the world of sense experience. I think that if this is right, then spirituality seems to have a central place and role to play in philosophy. Let me show how and why.     

Let's go back to the two sources of the sublime. On the one hand, we have the depths of the human mind—most prominently our faculty of reason and the responsibilities that may come with this capacity. On the other hand, we have the transcendental realm—that which transcends or is beyond the world of sense experience. While the first is concerned with questions of ethics, psychology, and cognitive science, the latter is concerned with questions of astrophysics, cosmology, and ultimately any questions concerning the laws governing nature, which would seem to include the natural sciences. 

So why does this mean spirituality has a place in philosophy? I came to think this by reflecting on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich W. J. Schelling. Kant’s approach to philosophy was roughly to inquire what the mind must be like for the world to appear to us in the way that it does. Schelling, on the other hand, thought it should be the other way around: we should be asking what nature must be like for the human mind to be the way that it is. Kant gave us his transcendental idealism and Schelling gave us his Naturphilosophie—a philosophy of nature. I think that each got at least one thing right: there is a profound connection between nature (including that which is beyond the physical realm) and the human mind. However, I think the idea of the relationship being a one-way street—where one comes before the other, or where one explains the other, is mistaken. Rather, it seems that the human mind and nature are in some profound way two sides of the same coin. There seems to be a deeply rooted connection between the two—a bilateral relation. I think we can say that they are in some way cut from the same cloth. This makes sense, considering reflecting on the sources of fascination led us to the sublime and the sublime led us to ask questions about whether there is some connection between the different kinds of sublime. If this is so, then it seems there may very well be something outside the reach of the human mind and its faculty of reason to make sense of that in some sense “holds everything together”. And because of this, I think that philosophy, at least conceived of in the way Kant and Schelling (among many others of course) did, may have a place for spirituality.

Plato's Phaedrus: To Love Well

In what follows, I will show that the Phaedrus teaches us a profound lesson about what being a good lover requires. Specifically, the Phaedrus shows us that being a good lover requires love to be absorbed into our motivational set in a way that is tightly squired by knowledge of our own psychology and knowledge of how rhetoric works to influence that psychology. I will argue for the importance of this lesson and its constituent ideas by showing the truth in them and ultimately drawing on their ability to explain the attractiveness of genuine, authentic charm.  

After emerging from the Symposium with a clear and broadly interpreted picture of love as giving birth in beauty, the Phaedrus introduces an important distinction: a distinction between good and bad loving. The former is an enriching and healthy relation, the latter a toxic and unhealthy relation between a lover and her beloved. Though both kinds of love are a form of madness, the nature of this madness could not be more different; bad loving is a destructive kind of madness and good loving is a divinely inspired madness.  

More specifically, the distinction between good and bad loving can be traced back to the different distribution of power between the three parts of the human soul in the good and the bad lover, respectively. Here, Plato gives us the same picture of the human soul as in the Republic. However, instead of simply calling the three parts rational, spirited, and appetitive, Plato gives us a lively analogy. He allegorizes the human soul and its three constituents as a charioteer with two winged horses; one black and one white. The charioteer represents the rational part of the soul, the black horse the appetitive part, and the white horse the spirited part. He uses this analogy to give us a first, very colorful, picture of his distinction between good and bad loving. In the bad lover, and thus in the destructive kind of madness that can be love, this harnessed team is in constant conflict with one another. This ultimately leads the bad lover to sink into a state of utter unhappiness and destruction—a state below that of the average human state. In the good lover, on the other hand, the harnessed team is in perfect harmony, each part doing what it is properly suited to do and not interfering with the other parts. This in effect lifts the good lover up towards a fulfilling, happy, and divinely inspired life—one that is above the average human state. Though this is a very figurative and colorful picture, the thought seems quite convincing. The way in which we talk about love strikes some of the same cords. Things like “you fell in love with the wrong person”, “they have a very toxic relationship”, and even “his love for her drove him insane, but not in a good way” sound very familiar, after all. It is even quite reasonable to assume that a fair amount of crimes can be attributed to love—the bad kind of love of course. After all, a strong hate towards another often only arises after one has fallen in deep, but destructive and thus bad, love with that person. At the same time, we often find ourselves in awe at the way in which the good kind of loving, the kind of loving we, although we might not quite understand what it entails, want for ourselves, has the potential to transform our lives into something far more fulfilling, purposeful, and meaningful than we ever thought possible—something many seem to deem worthy of being called divine. When we’re in love, it seems that the whole world suddenly becomes brighter, starts to glow, and is filled with a sizzling aliveness. In this way, there is a very stark difference between good and bad loving.  

Having laid down the basic distinction between good and bad loving, I would now like to turn to the way in which the Phaedrus is structured. Here, I think we get a more elaborate account of what good loving requires. Towards the beginning, Socrates hints at how important it is for the lover to understand the workings of human psychology, including that of herself. Then, after we get the speeches about love, we get a rather elaborate examination of rhetoric. Though at first this discussion of rhetoric strikes many as unexpected, I think it has something important to say about good loving. Moreover, the structure of the Phaedrus seems to contain a clear point in itself: for loving to be the good kind of loving, it needs to be absorbed into our psychology in a way that is tightly squired by understanding of the workings of human psychology and how good rhetoric needs to be tailored to the structure of our psychology to be effective. I will now clarify how exactly these ideas fit together to give us an important lesson about love.  

The brief survey of self-awareness towards the beginning of the Phaedrus seems to lead us down the following train of thought. Given Plato’s picture of the human soul, or rather psychology, as having at least three constituents, there seem to be at least three different fundamental orderings of people’s motivational sets. One is primarily appetitive, another primarily spirited, and a third primarily rational. By motivational set, I mean the complete set of conative and cognitive states which constitute an individual’s motivations. To clarify, conative states are roughly desire-like states and thus world-directing states, while cognitive states are roughly belief-like states and thus world-directed states. Here, world-directing means they are aimed at changing something about the state of the world while world-directed means they are concerned with representing how the world is. It is important to note that cognitive states at least to some degree influence our conative states—the kind of person I believe to be good, worthy of being, and want to be will largely influence the kind of conative states I will endorse in my motivational set. In this way, the conative and cognitive part are in some important sense intertwined—we cannot make a clear split down the middle, as there are conative aspects to cognitive states and vice versa. It should, however, have become quite clear why understanding how our own motivational set is ordered and the distinction between the conative and cognitive part is necessary to love well. This is because we must understand the nature and working of the psychology we want love to be absorbed into before we can figure out the right way to integrate love.  

The second idea is placed at the opposite end of the Phaedrus and is closely connected to the first. Here, we get an examination of rhetoric. This is the second part to the lesson about the way in which loving needs to be absorbed into our psychology to be the good kind. The basic function of rhetoric is to influence our motivational set. To do this, information needs to be encoded into a rhetoric shell which will allow this information, which otherwise would likely get caught in the filter of our cognitive part of the motivational set, to bypass this filter and thus influence the motivational set in the way the rhetorician desires. To do this, however, the rhetoric shell must be of the right kind—where right is a function of the kind of ordering the person’s motivational set and her kind of soul. But why is all this rhetoric-talk important to loving well or badly? The answer is to be found in the importance of the function of rhetoric in loving. Specifically, influencing the people we love to love us back is important—provided we do so in a way that is ethically acceptable. But to do this well and effectively, we need to understand two things. For one, we need to understand what kind of soul they have, and then, secondly, be able to tailor our rhetoric to influence them in the way that caters to this soul and psychology.  In this way, both understanding human psychology and understanding rhetoric are an integral part of good loving.  

At this point the basic point of the Phaedrus should have become clear. Good loving requires us to understand the relevant human psychology and the way in which our rhetoric needs to be tailored to this psychology in order to influence it. With this in mind, I would now like to offer an idea about the explanatory potential this account of good loving has in explaining the attractiveness of genuine, authentic charm. It seems that charm is one of the most sought-after qualities in a partner—hardly anyone would deny how attractive it is for someone to be very charming, provided her charm is of genuine and authentic nature. But isn’t charming, then, exactly what Plato suggests on our interpretation of how properly tailored rhetoric is an integral part of good loving? I think it might be. After all, charm does seem to be aimed at bypassing the filter in the cognitive part of the motivational set in an effort to influence the potential partner—perhaps most importantly to love us back. For this reason, I think my interpretation of Plato gives us a reasonable explanation of how it is that charm is so effective in influencing others, namely because it is a kind of rhetoric that is specifically designed to bypass the filter in the cognitive part of our motivational set and influence. As my interpretation of the Phaedrus would suggest, doing this requires understanding of human psychology and the way in which rhetoric may influence this psychology[1].  

In this way, understanding that good loving requires love to be absorbed into our psychology in a way that is tightly squired by understanding of our psychology and of how rhetoric can influence this psychology strikes me as an important insight. As I have shown above, this insight seems to offer a plausible explanation of our attraction to genuine and authentic charm—something I have suggested to be a kind of rhetoric specifically designed to get others to love us.

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[1] This understanding often seems to be subconscious.