Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest. But wherefore says my love that she is young? And wherefore say not I that I am old? O, love’s best habit is a soothing tongue, And age, in love, loves not to have years told. Therefore I’ll lie with love, and love with me, Since that our faults in love thus smother’d be.” We are equally apt to deceive ourselves, not only in our personal lives but also when dealing with abstract ideas. There, too, we frequently find ways to keep inconsistent or discordant beliefs. Listen to Richard Feynman’s words:
“That was the beginning and the idea seemed so obvious to me that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you don’t know too much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, I was held to this theory, in spite of all the difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm.”
— 1966 Nobel Prize lecture. What does a lover actually love? That word ought to cover the one you adore—but if your goal is just to extend the pleasure that comes when doubts get suppressed, then you’re only in love with Love itself.
???????????????????? Citizen: Your description of ‘love’ in the section above spoke only of transient infatuation—of sexual lust and extravagant passion. It left out most of what we usually mean by that word—such as loyalty and tenderness, or attachment, trust, and companionship.
Indeed, once those short-lived attractions fade, they sometimes go on to be replaced by more enduring relationships, in which we exchange our own interests for those of the persons to whom we’re attached:
Love, n. That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person which (arising from recognition of attractive qualities, from instincts of natural relationship, or from sympathy) manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment.
—Oxford English Dictionary Yet even this conception of love is too narrow to cover enough, because Love is a kind of suitcase-like word, which includes other kinds of attachments like these:
The love of a parent for a child.
A child’s affection for parents and friends.
The bonds that make lifelong companionships.
Attachments of members to groups or their leaders.
We also apply that same word ‘love’ to our fondness for objects, events, and beliefs.
A convert’s adherence to doctrine or scripture.
A patriot’s allegiance to country or nation.
A scientist’s passion for finding new truths.
A mathematician’s devotion to proofs.
We thus apply ‘love’ to our likings for things that we treasure, desire, or fill us with pleasure. We apply it to bonds that are sudden and brief, but also to those that increase through the years. Some occupy just small parts of our minds, while others pervade our entire lives.
But why do we pack such dissimilar things into a single suitcase-like word? It’s the same for our other ‘emotional’ terms; each of them abbreviates a diverse collection of mental states. Thus Anger may change our ways to perceive, so that innocent gestures get turned into threats, and it alters the ways that we react, to lead us to face the dangers we sense. Fear too affects the ways we react, but makes us retreat from dangerous things (as well as from ones that might please us too much).
Returning to the meanings of ‘Love’, one thing seems common to all those conditions: each leads us to think in different ways:
When a person you know has fallen in love, it’s almost as though someone new has emerged—a person who thinks in other ways, with altered goals and priorities. It’s almost as though a switch had been thrown, and a different program has started to run.
This book is mainly filled with ideas about what could happen inside our brains to cause such changes in how we think.
???????????????????? §1-2. The Sea Of Mental Mysteries
Every now and then we dwell on questions about how we manage ourselves.
Why do I waste so much of my time?
What determines whom I’m attracted to?
Why do I have such strange fantasies?
Why do I find mathematics so hard?
Why am I afraid of heights and crowds?
What makes me addicted to exercise?
But we can’t hope to understand such things without adequate answers to questions like these:
How do our minds build new ideas?
What are the bases for our beliefs?
How do we learn from experience?
How do we manage to reason and think?
In short, we’ll need to get better ideas about the processes that we call thinking. But whenever we start to think about this, we encounter yet more mysteries.
What is the nature of Consciousness?
What are feelings and how do they work? How do our brains Imagine things?
How do our bodies relate to our minds?
What forms our values, goals, and ideals?
