simont | Love at first sight

It's not generally my practice to propagate LJ memes in this diary just for the sake of saying something, but on the rare occasion when someone posts one which includes a question I actually find interesting, I don't let the fact that it came from an LJ meme stop me from answering it.

So naath posted a relationships questionnaire [friends-locked, but a public copy of the questions is here] recently, which contained a lot of questions which I don't feel like answering because they're (variously) inherently uninteresting, badly specified, oxymoronic or simply wouldn't elicit any particularly interesting answers from me; but in among them was the old chestnut ‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’, which reminded me that I relatively recently acquired a definite opinion on that question and it isn't as simple as a yes or a no.

My view of the human mind – or at least my view of my mind, which could for all I know be significantly different from the average one – has always tended to be that it has an emotional side and a reasoning side. In correct operation, the emotional side sets long-term goals and policy, which the reasoning side then tries to find the best ways to achieve. My usual analogy [link friends-locked, sorry] for this is that the emotional side is the Minister, while the reasoning side is the Civil Service doing the detailed work to implement the Minister's policy decisions. However, the usual failure mode of this architecture is that the emotional side often ends up trying to micro-manage, generally in pursuit of some short-term goal which is long-term disadvantageous, and often with disastrous results. Almost exactly analogous, in fact, to a typical Yes Minister episode.

(I've been told several times that this is very similar to Hume's view. I've never read Hume, though; I came up with that model independently as far as I know, simply by watching the inside of my own brain. Perhaps at some point perhaps I should read Hume and see how much of him I agree with.)

So, the relevance of this to love at first sight is that there are two parts to the mental state which I would usually mean when I talk about ‘being in love’. One is on the emotional side, and is composed of all the obvious sorts of feelings: pleasure at being in her presence, desire for good things to happen to her, pain when bad things happen to her, desire for her to like me, etc. A sort of ‘wow’ factor, if you like. The other is on the reasonable side, and drives things like long-term commitment: essentially, it's a judgment that the emotional wow factor I get from her is likely to persist in the long term and to outweigh any reasonably foreseeable downsides, and hence – if you'll forgive the mathematical terminology – that my optimal strategy for maximising the integral of my happiness over time is to stick with her through thick and thin. (Of course, even that decision can be subject to later review if something seriously unforeseen happens. I've heard the opinion expressed that love is by definition forever, and hence that anything that turns out not to be forever can't ‘really’ have been love; but I don't subscribe to that myself.)

Neither component on its own suffices, IMO, to be described as love. The reasoning aspect without the emotional one is just going through the motions with your heart not really in it (perhaps, for example, because you consider yourself bound by a previous promise which you'd feel guilty if you broke), whereas the emotional side without the reasoning part could for all you know just be transitory infatuation. (Though it's noticeable that the emotional part on its own is still clearly distinct from lust, which is also a basically emotional condition but composed of different desires and feelings. The two are correlated, of course, but not 100%.)

So, do I believe in love at first sight? My considered answer is ‘half of it’. I think that the reasoning side does take time to make its mind up, or at least should do; if it decides too quickly then it isn't doing its job with due care and attention and is liable to regret it later. But the emotional side, I know from specific experience, is perfectly capable of falling in its idea of love pretty much instantly, given good enough cause. So if that happens, and then the reasoning side subsequently decides that it agrees, then that's probably easy to mistake for love at first sight if you aren't paying close attention; but if you look a little more closely, you find that only half of it was actually at first sight, and the other half followed along in its own time.

Of course, as I mention above, other people's minds might turn out to work entirely differently from mine. But for the moment, that's my opinion.

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There's also the other failure mode, perhaps less common but just as problematic, where the Civil Service get so good at making sure the Minister doesn't get his way that they even block policy initiatives that are the right thing but which don't accord with the Civil Service view on How Things Are Meant To Be Done.

... almost exactly analogously, in fact, to most of the Yes Minister episodes which don't fall into my previous characterisation :-)

This seems to be a reformulation of dualism; and, like all such attempts to define human consciousness in terms of two separate natures (emotion and intellect, mind and body, spiritual and physical) it fails to account for the degree of blurring - or interpenetration - between any two identifiable mental states and functions.

Further, it fails on the fallacy of 'cause and effect', a philosophical abstraction used in mathematics and science which is, at best, applied with caution in systems dominated by feedback loops and characterised by chaotic sensitivity. Often, the best we can say is that A influences B, or that they are correlated but not known to share a causal link.

Can you point out more specifically where I'm applying this fallacy and what I'm erroneously arguing from it? It's not clear to me that I've actually argued anything very much in this post, in any sense which involves proceeding from premises to a conclusion.

And yes, there is certainly blurring and interpenetration at the boundary, and in some situations that's important; but in this case I don't think it invalidates my basic point.

I view the concept of an emotional side and a reasoning side as just another form of dualism.

As for where you're applying causation: "In correct operation, the emotional side sets long-term goals and policy, which the reasoning side then tries to find the best ways to achieve." As if detailed actions are 'caused' or initiated by the reasoning side, in pursuit of goals 'set' by the emotions; in practice, all decisions and actions have interacting contributions of logic and 'gut feeling', and all attempts to separate and categorize the two are misguided.

Particularly so, when there is so much looping and recursion (and often, internal contradition) in the decision, within and between the 'logic' and 'emotion', that the concept of a causal chain is meaningless.

I doubt we're going to manage to reach any kind of synthesis here; "all attempts [...] are misguided" suggests to me that you won't be satisfied until I retract this entire post and recant my viewpoint completely. Which I won't do, because although your points about overlap and interaction are entirely reasonable I don't think they invalidate the entire approach. The dividing line is certainly pretty fuzzy, but that doesn't stop it from being a meaningful concept: many concepts without a sharply defined boundary are useful concepts nonetheless.

In particular, I disagree that in practice most or all decisions have so much intermingling of both sides that it's impossible to tell where any given impulse came from. I think in many entirely practical cases, it can be pretty clear one way or the other.

I thought that

simont was just describing how his brain works, not actually arguing that the brain is divided into a reasoning sphere and an emotional sphere.

It's (something with the potential to develop into love) at first sight?

Absolutely.

So naath posted a relationships questionnaire (http://naath.livejournal.com/378938.html) recently

I can't see that entry.

Would you consider adding something like "(friends-locked)" in front or "(

)" behind such a link for the benefits of those who read your journal but who are not on the friends list of the person you link to, in such cases?

(Assuming such people are part of your target audience. I typically rather enjoy reading your journal but I'm not sure whether I'm one of the people you are writing for -- if most of the people to whom you want to point out such links tend to be friends of yours and the other person's, this may not be relevant to you.)

Sorry about that; I linked to it so that those who could see it would know which entry I was talking about (and, in particular, so I could find it again easily myself if I came back later and was curious), not because it was vital background reading in order to understand this post. I did notice it was friends-locked, so I took care that nothing I said was dependent on knowing anything in the locked post. Perhaps I should have made it clearer that it wasn't necessary to be able to read it.

Likewise the other link further down this post, which is a link to a comment I made on someone else's LJ containing a prior use of the same analogy. Again, it's there for the handy reference of those who can see it, but its unavailability to those who can't shouldn't cause difficulty.

FWIW,

naath said the questionnaire was acquired from

weebleflip, whose copy of it is publicly readable. I've added that link to the main post too.

I've never thought particularly carefully about who my target audience is. I suppose "anyone who's interested" comes close enough, subject to the constraint that there's a limited distance I'm prepared to go out of my way to ensure readability. (I'd be unwilling, for example, to tone down my use of complex grammar for the sake of ESL speakers, because it would hamper me expressing myself in the way I feel comfortable.) So if you like reading my diary, then that makes you part of it :-)

not because it was vital background reading in order to understand this post.

*nod*

I just thought that having a brief note next to the link would have saved me from clicking on the link only to be greeted with a friendly "Forbidden"; it would have been easier to see at a glance that it is what you described it as (something you could find later on; something that those who could see it would know which entry you meant; but not something that's vital to the understanding).

my optimal strategy for maximising the integral of my happiness over time is to stick with her through thick and thin

You incurable romantic you.

I've heard the opinion expressed that love is by definition forever, and hence that anything that turns out not to be forever can't ‘really’ have been love

*snort* bollocks. You can be very profoundly in love and still find someone just Is Not Right for you.

How might this work in a Groundhog Day scenario?

Love at first sight

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