Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host, Massimo Luchi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we talking about today?

Well, Massimo, this episode will be airing the week of Valentine's Day. So our topic is the skeptics guide to love when people talk about what love is.

They often talk about in metaphysical terms, like it's some sort of immaterial essence that either presence or absence like the soul. And the implication is that like other metaphysical things, it's outside the domain of science. Of course, as good skeptics, we know that when we're faced with a mysterious and unexplained phenomenon, we look for explanations. So today we're asking, is it even possible to understand what love is through science or through philosophy? And even if we can't understand it?

Do we want to?

Well, that's good question. Right. So there clearly a lot of science that is pertinent to love. I think I think the real question is whether the science is telling us all we want to know about love, but it certainly tells us something.

Well, let me give you an example of the kind of metaphysical talk that I'm referring to. There was a TIME magazine cover story a few years back about the science behind love, and they go through all these scientific explanations of love. And then at the end of the story, they conclude by saying romance may be nothing more than reproductive filigree, a bit of decoration that makes us want to perpetuate the species and ensures that we do it right.

But nothing could convince a person in love that there isn't something more at work. And the fact is, none of us would want to be convinced that's a science may never fully crack. And then there's another quote from a psychologist, David Buss, who in 2005, The Edge published a book of essays in which they asked people, What do you believe is true, even though you can't prove it? And he said, True love. It takes its own course through uncharted territory.

It knows no fences, has no boundaries, boundaries or barriers. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it. This is exactly how people talk about things like the soul. You can't define it. Science can't measure it. You can't make any testable predictions about it. But still, we're convinced that it exists.

Yes, there seems to be the bit that you just read. It seems like the classic example of psychobabble. And it also seems to me that there is an attitude a lot of people have that somehow this is sort of a perverse pleasure in the fact that science cannot explain.

Oh, absolutely. Wrex could be love. It could be, you know, whatever else.

Now, the question I think is, Will, what do we mean by explain? And and even when we do have an explanation, is that all there is to it? And of course, as you know, I'm not going to suggest that there is some metaphysical essence out there, that it's escapes us and is bound to escape us forever. But I think that there may be something a little more than just what biology tells us. So why don't we go through briefly what biology actually does tell us?

Great. All right. So it seems to me that there are two major areas of research in biology that are pertinent to to the question of love. The first one is evolutionary biology that is clearly love.

Whatever it is, it's certainly something that aims at reproduction and therefore it is of evolutionary biological import. I mean, people after all, you can do aldermen's you want and in fact other species engage in what we would call romance. The bowerbird, for instance, is famous for because the male gathers all these little bits and pieces of materials, shiny Mathilde's, which builds these really elaborate nests, which is not in fact, even going to be used as a nest, as a functional nest, is just to attract the female.

So clearly, it's not just humans that engage in this kind of display and that we elaborate culturally as as romantic love.

But the bottom line is sex and therefore offspring. So certainly that's part of the equation. I mean, anybody who says that love doesn't have anything to do with sex and reproduction is off the mark. It clearly that's where it comes from, evolutionarily speaking. Right. So we can agree on that.

The second part that is pertinent is the modern neurobiology of the other issue.

So we now begin to know a little bit about what happens inside our brains, what kind of hormones are either directly functional, responsible, causally responsible for certain emotions and certain reactions or at any at any rate are part of of the picture. All right. So there is a very influential book that came out a few years ago by Ellen Fisher, who is an anthropologist and a cognitive scientist at Rutgers University. And she collected a lot of research on on the neurobiology of love and basically came up with this classification of the three stages of falling in love.

The three stages will be familiar to our listeners. What might not. So for me is the hormonal profile that corresponds to those stages. So the first stage is infatuation.

The second one is romantic love that there was no attachment. If you actually get to that point, the process can stop at any point. All right. So in terms of infatuation, you know, scientists have found that, well, that's driven by high levels of androgens and particularly testosterone. And contrary to what most people think, actually women do have high levels of testosterone as well, just not as high as males. So basically, what causes the fact that we get infatuated with somebody is at least in part the fact that we have these rush of androgens in in our bloodstream.

The romantic love, which which follows a few weeks to a few months later, depending on the situation, on the other hand, tends to have a different hormone profile. It's high dopamine level and low serotonin level. And that combination is seems to be giving that kind of less less urgent reaction. But but something that is moving toward the next phase, which would be the phase of attachment. And if people do get to the point of attachment, that's where high level levels of oxytocin and suppressing come in.

Those are things that the hormones that tend to bounce the couple together. And we know that this works not just in human beings works, but other mammals. In fact, we can do experiments. We can inject, say, a rodent with androgens. And we'll know what you'll see as an immediate reaction that the female immediately go for whatever male happens to be around at that point, even minute before, she was absolutely not interested.

Not only that, but if we give a female, for instance, of a lot of mammalian species, a chemical that balances out the oxytocin and vasopressin, she loses almost immediately interest in her offspring. Hmm.

So all of these things are very you know, they're beginning to be well understood and they clearly are part of the biology of love if and to deny that these things explain anything at all about love.

It seems to me is rather peculiar.

Would be rather peculiar. Right.

Right. Although that still doesn't explain why those hormones are produced when we meet a person and not person be right. And that's right. That's a large part of the mystery.

That is a part of the mystery. Now there is another little interesting experiment that goes some way to work were unraveling that kind of mystery. And this is certainly not the whole story, but it is a famous experiment. And this had to do this was done several years ago. It had to do with the major histocompatibility complex, which is a set of genes that are responsible for our immune response, which, of course, is crucial for survival and therefore also for the survival of the offspring.

Now, it turns out that the genes that of the major is the compatibility complex are correlated with particular smells that we emit normally, naturally as as animals. And so the experiment was was done in this way. The experimenters asked a number of males to wear the same T-shirt for a number of days until the T-shirt had a significant amount of the smell and captured. Yes, that sounds and that's a lovely image, isn't it?

And then they had women smell the conditions and and they asked which smell felt attractive, you know, kind of which kind of which which T-shirt was the most promising in terms of if it were worn by an individual that would actually be interested in going out with that person.

And what they found very interesting that there was a clear pattern that is women tend to be attracted to a smell that is correlated with a different set of genes for the histocompatibility complex compared to the ones that they themselves carry. And the reason it is this is relevant is because, in fact, the best way, the best combination for an offspring, the best immune response system does come out when when it emerges, when the two parents have different sets of genes for the extra compatibility complex.

So that's not that's not to say that that's all there is to why you've been in love with somebody rather than somebody else, but certainly is something that is really interesting and again, pertinent observation.

OK, so maybe science can tell us something about why we happened to fall in love with this person or that person and what processes are going on in the brain that are correlated with love. But what would you say to someone who who objected that love is an example of qualia, of a subjective first person experience so we can never really measure it the way we could measure like a a physical phenomenon in the world? I mean, the best we can do is have people describe what the feeling is like, but people's descriptions are going to be wildly different, even if they're feeling the same thing or maybe they're going to sound the same, even if they're feeling something different.

So doesn't that seem whole? Let's to you, if anyone, experimenter only has, you know, a sample size of his own now that's true.

So first of all, I have to confess that every time that I hear the word qualia, I reach for my metaphorical gun because unfortunately, it is an interesting concept and it is actually important in philosophy mind, but is so badly used by so many people, just in the way you explained it, that it gets really irritating.

So I think that that's at this point, we're getting at what I meant early on by when I asked, you know, when we say that science can or cannot explain, love it. The question that we really should be paying attention is, what do you mean by explanation? Right. Right. So if by explanation one means that science can actually somehow reproduce in a third person fashion, the first person experience of love. No, it cannot, but it cannot by definition.

And it's in fact, not what science needs to do. This is not the point of science. Right. I mean, if somebody has to tell me we were talking earlier before the podcast about, you know, the tasting a particular food, let's say I like dark chocolate, for instance. Now, if I were to say, well, science cannot explain my tasting of dark or dark chocolate, well, it cannot explain, as, in fact, has nothing to do.

Science has nothing to do with the fact that I have a particular sensation in my mouth. But it certainly can give me a very good explanation of where that sensation comes from, because we know a lot about the chemicals there in chocolate. We know all about our, you know, the way our cells work inside the mouth and so on and so forth.

So that to me sounds as an explanation, of course, is not the sensation, but the sensation doesn't require it to be explained since it needs to be experienced. Right.

OK, so we started to venture into the territory of philosophy here. So it's probably a good time to talk about whether philosophy has anything to say about love, because I personally, I think it doesn't.

I think if you want. Why does it not surprise me?

Oh, you know me so well. I think if you want to have any hope of explaining love, you need to collect some kind of data, some kind of information about the world, whether that's neuroscientific data or whether it's even just the informal collecting descriptions of experiences from a large sample of people. But that's not I mean, philosophers have they don't go out and do that. That's not what philosophy is. The only data they have access to is their own personal experience and anecdotes from their particular circle of friends and family.

So they don't have any more information than the rest of us do. And maybe they can think more clearly about it, about that data than your typical person on the street. But without a large sample of of actual data about the world, how could they possibly address this question?

But good philosophy is actually informed by science. I mean, it really is a better philosopher, the one that says I don't really care about what science tells me about a particular topic. I think, again, the difference between our positions, I guess might go back to the to what we mean by explaining. I don't think philosophy is in the business of explaining things, not in terms not in the same sense at the least, in which science is in the business of explaining things.

I mean, science works very well to explain the mechanical, the mechanics of of natural processes. Right. And the causality of those natural processes. That's not what philosophy does. What philosophy does is it addresses a different question, which is address is a set of questions that are more along the lines of how should we think about this thing?

OK, now I know that say let's go back to Alan Fisher, saying there are three three major phases of falling in love, which are somehow mechanistically connected with certain patterns of hormones. And we also have some ideas about the fact that this whole thing comes out of evolutionary our evolutionary past.

Right. Still, how do I am I supposed to think about this as a human phenomenon, as a human experience, as a cultural experience? Because, you know, biology doesn't really eliminate the fact that it's complementary and certainly doesn't explain away the role of culture. So let me take a different example. Let's say that we're talking about food. I mean, we all know that biology has a very simple explanation for why people crave sugar. Most people crave sugars and fat.

Right, because presumably we lived in an evolutionary past where sugars and fats were not available every day and every minute. There was no 24 hour McDonald, thank God. And therefore, we have these sort of instinctual craving.

Great. So biology gives you an explanation of why the basics of that sort of craving comes out.

Biologies, I'm going to tell you anything at all about why so many people in New York spend so much money going to gourmet restaurants. It's got nothing to do with it. That's a cultural experience. That's a much more complicated.

So then this is a this is something that need to be studied by sociologists or by psychologists or by, I don't know, historians or by philosophers.

All of the above. All of you. But at least because the philosophy why people go to gourmet restaurants.

You do. Sort of a sociological sociological information, you don't figure it out by sitting in your armchair and thinking about it.

It's not that you need to figure out why they do it. You need to think about what it is that they're doing. And that isn't fair to an armchair economist of experience. I mean, again, philosophy is about meaning. It's not about why people do things. Yes, you're right. Social scientists are much more likely to tell you why people do things in a certain way or another, although their explanations tend to be proximate. They tend to be talking about patterns more than more than actual explanation, really most of the times.

All right. But what philosophy does is it forces you to think about the whole the same exact issue at a very different level as in what does that mean to you?

What you when you do certain things, when you engage in certain relations? How is what is it that you value about it? And why and should you be valued this or should you be, in fact, thinking about the experience in a different way? OK, well, let's say that we could achieve a really complete, rational, scientific understanding of love. I think it's really important to decide ahead of time, is there something that's even desirable?

Will understanding love scientifically, rationally change our experience of it? One of our commenters on rationally speaking in response to the teaser about this episode said her name is Andrea. And she said the fact that love has a chemical basis doesn't make it any less special to me. Or in other words, knowing why something is beautiful doesn't make it any less beautiful. And this is a theme that was echoed by a number of other commenters. And it also is a lot like what Helen Fisher herself said.

She said, you know, you can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake and still sit down and eat it and feel the joy. What do you think about that?

Well, again, this is this is this is becoming a theme for the whole podcast, which I think makes sense. That is it. Those comments make the distinction, perhaps, perhaps unwittingly. I'm not sure that the commentator actually meant to make that distinction, but they do make the distinction between a scientific explanation of X and a personal appreciation of acts, which are, of course, very different things to those. I would add the third level, which is a reflection on X.

So for me, there are three things that are important. And when we think about love, one is where does it come from? Why don't we have these bizarre behaviors? Why do we spend so much time and energy and money and so on and so forth to do what we do? Well, a lot of that is explained by biology. The second, obviously very important component is what do we feel what we're doing? And that's entirely personal. That is a matter of qualia.

And that really doesn't require an explanation. It requires simply being felt, being experienced. And then the third level is a level of reflection. OK, now that I know all of the above.

What does that tell me about sort of more broadly about human relations and about how I should I should conduct myself within those relations?

OK, my reaction to that sentiment, that understanding love doesn't change your experience of it, is that the analogy to chocolate or to a beautiful painting or something like that isn't actually a very good analogy. I think that the experience of love, at least for many people, is more akin to a moral intuition. So, yes, it is. It is a feeling. It is it is sort of an intuition that you have and that's not going to go away.

But it's also based on on some kind of belief about the world that you think is true. So there are all these. That's a good point.

There are all these irrational beliefs about love that a scientific explanation might disabuse people of, like your the love of my life or you're my soulmate or we were meant for each other. And so a scientific understanding of love could make it harder to keep believing these things. And for some people, that might diminish the feeling. Well, that may be true.

But let me go back to what you said a minute ago. So I like your analogy, your point about ethics. I do actually think that love falls somewhere in between the aesthetic appreciation of a painting, say, or the feeling of how is you know, that it's very good to take a particular kind of food on the one end of the spectrum and what the kind of moral intuition and moral reasoning you were thinking about, because in fact, it is not just an emotion, it's not just a feeling.

It's also a relation to other people. Right. So the emotional feeling part is much more close to an aesthetic appreciation or a matter of tasting something. But but then there is the relation with and with another human being, especially if it is a long term relationship. And that does, in fact, have, of course, moral or ethical an ethical dimension to it, which again, to me is an area where philosophy comes in. But but but what you are saying about the soul mate and all that sort of stuff.

Yes, I do think that that's nonsense, for one thing, because I don't think that there is a soul. And for another thing, because it's quite clear that there are many people that are completely compatible with any one of each one of us. So I don't have any problem with that. But I doubt that we need science to disabuse of that of that notion. I think a little bit common sense will be probably enough.

Well, before we wrap up, I just want to quote one of my favorite songs by Tim Minchin, which is particularly relevant to the question of whether rational understanding of love changes love itself. This is from his song, If I Didn't Have You. He says your love is one in a million, couldn't buy it at any price. But of the nine point nine nine nine hundred thousand other loves, statistically some of them would be equally nice. It's just mathematically unlikely that at a university in Perth I happened to stumble on the one girl on earth specifically designed for me.

That's all the time we have now. We're going to move on to, rationally speaking, PEX.

Welcome back every episode and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start as usual with Julia's pick, my pick of the book.

It's called What Is This Thing? Called Science by Alan Chalmers.

And it's a really great overview, an introduction to the field of philosophy of science, which, if my understanding is correct, basically started as an attempt to explain, OK, how how does science work? Why does it work? How do scientists come up with theories and test them? How do they know when to keep it theory or reject it, that sort of thing? And like I said, this book is a really great overview. I also found it extremely disturbing.

Like literally since I finished it, it's been rattling around my brain and really disturbing me because the gist, what I took away from it and you can tell me if you think this is an accurate reading, is that we really don't know why science works at all.

It clearly does work. No one's disputing that. It's clearly made progress. But but we can't explain why. We can't explain we can't come up with any sort of coherent, internally consistent logic for for how scientists decide to reject theories or revise them.

So think you're onto something there. So I have to say, as you know, the book in particular had a major influence. I mean, this was the first book that I read about philosophy of science. And I had the same reaction that you're describing, except I guess in my case, I would describe it as exhilarating rather than depressing.

It was a matter of the book is structure, as you've seen with each chapter covering a major way of understanding science. Right. Get through the chapter. And, you know, the author almost convinces you that this time they got it. And then by the beginning and the following chapters and by the way, here's why. Everything I told you so far actually doesn't work. Exactly. Which is a great it encapsulates what what's good about philosophy.

You know, we got all the questions and the answers are actually less important. But I do understand your point. I think I would put it in terms of, I guess in less negative tones, which is is not a we don't have any understanding of how science works or why it works.

You know, no philosopher thinks that it's a matter of magic and certainly no scientist thinks that it's that our understanding is turns out to be much more complex. It turns out that science is a much more complex endeavor and the foundations of it are much also much more difficult to figure out in a coherent in a coherent fashion. Right.

OK, so let me give an example. Starting from towards the beginning of the book, an early description of how scientists decide whether a theory is as valid or not would be OK. You test the theory a bunch of times and with lots of different variations of situations. And if the theory still holds, then then it's valid. But of course, this doesn't work because, well, let's take the first condition of testing it in lots of different situations.

Well, OK, how about the the theory that an atomic bomb will cause immense devastation? Well, we dropped one atomic bomb and it caused immense devastation. Do we really need to a larger sample size than that? No.

OK, that's sometimes a sample size of one is enough. Right. And and when is that?

And then there's the other the case of of lots of different variations, like, say, you know, your theory is that metals expand when they're heated. Well, you should probably test that with lots of different kinds of metals. But should you also test that on lots of different days of the week? Well, OK, so maybe that variation doesn't have any relevance, but how do you decide what what variance of of context are actually relevant to testing a theory?

That's right. And so what are you talking about goes at the core of the problem of hypothesis testing and in particular or the problem of induction. When you say, you know, when a scientist says, well, we tested this theory under a certain variety of conditions. For instance, the fact that the idea that metals expand if you did well, yes.

But we haven't tested under all conditions and we certainly haven't repeated the thing millions and millions of times. So there's always the possibility that the next time around it's not going to work. And that is to some extent that's the problem. Induction, that is, in fact, philosophers ever since David Hume er figure out that induction in fact does not guarantee truth. Right.

It only it's only a probabilistic statement about what might what it's likely to happen given certain conditions. But in fact, as you know, Hume's problem induction runs even deeper than that because you showed that there really is no fundamental justification for induction itself, because the only reason, if you ask a scientist and you say, you know, assuming that scientists actually know what induction is, they use it all the time, but they might not necessarily be familiar with the jargon.

But if if you talk to a scientist about induction, you would say, well, I use it because it worked in the past, which superficially is a very good answer until you stop for a second and realize that that's actually an inductive reasoning. Right, right. And therefore is circular now circular reasoning. It's not exactly a good way to the. And an approach to things, so you're right, this book is very good because it really makes you think hard about the fact that there is so much that we don't know about how and why science works.

It works. This is not a criticism about science. It's not about all of a sudden we should stop believing what what scientists tell us within certain degrees of latitude. But it is an interesting and stimulating reading because it does go to the point of, well, yes, but we don't really have a particularly well developed idea or theory of why it works so well. And speaking of something completely different.

Let me get to my book, which actually is connected to an article published in The New York Times on December 29, 2009, for people that actually want to go out there and check it. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because the topic is more general. And it's interesting. The article is about making college relevant and these trend trend that has been going on for several years now in universities, not just in the United States, but also in Europe, about, you know, shifting the emphasis away from the classical disciplines, from the sort of liberal arts approach to things and or more teachings that are supposed to be relevant to the job market.

So, for instance, the article mentions that the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating a philosophy major. The Michigan State University is doing away with the American studies and classics and all that sort of stuff. And the idea is, of course, that the reason that happens is because students and their parents, who, of course, especially in the United States, are paying an increasingly obscene amount of money for education because this is not a socialist country that, you know, they want a return on what they see as an investment.

It is, in fact, an investment. And, you know, what is the return?

So I found that this was interesting for for for a particular reason, which is although most of the article is, in fact, devoted to this, you know, complaining about the student by the students and parents and and the college administrators who are pushing to change the programs. There is an interesting bit of information that sort of runs immediately contrary to what I just said, which is the American Association of American Colleges and Universities regularly asks employers, and particularly those employers who hire more than 25 percent of their workforce from from universities.

What do they want? I mean, is it really true, in fact, that employers want technical specific training for for college students and don't want things like philosophy or the classics or literature and so forth?

And the astounding result is that 89 percent of employers said that they wanted more emphasis on the ability to effectively communicate orally.

And in writing, 81 percent ask for better critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills, and 70 percent ask for the ability to innovate, to innovate and be creative, which are exactly the kinds of things you do get as skills out of the liberal arts standard.

Classic education. When you go to technical two too soon, the thing that you don't get is in fact an ability for in developing your ability for critical thinking, developing your ability for writing and explain yourself orally. So I thought it was very interesting that on the one hand, we have we're seeing a trend nationally and perhaps internationally toward a direction.

It seems reasonable. It seems like students and parents are asking for the right thing. But as as it turns out, they're not. And to me, what that brings about is the idea that particularly the American way of looking at students as customers, I hear all the times. But university administrators referring to students as customers and the customer is always right and the customer is always right.

Right. Except that, first of all, the students are usually not the customers. If anything, the parents are, because usually they're the ones paying for the education.

But even so, no, this is one of those very clear cases where the customer really doesn't have any idea of what he wants and why. And that's why that customer is going to get an education.

I mean, yeah, the analogy would be something like if I go to the dentist, say, as I did recently, and I said, well, you know, the customer is always right. So I think you should really drill into, you know, tooth number twenty six, not twenty nine. Well, that would be crazy.

And I understand why people, on the other hand, use that sort of reasoning in education. I think that's a really good point.

And as a matter of fact, the school I went to had a core curriculum in which they made us take classes on all the classics of literature and art and philosophy and and music.

And and for the most part, I do agree with you that general critical thinking and writing and reasoning are really important for their own sake. But. I do think that most of the liberal arts curriculum is a pretty indirect way to get at that. I mean, how does learning about taking an entire semester on the works of Milton help you with the kind of critical thinking that you would need in the workforce? No, that's a good point. You could say it's worth learning for its own sake, but that's a different argument.

There is a different argument, and I do actually make that argument as well. But I think that an entire course in Milton Orsay, like as I did in graduate school and entire course on the cart, it's not about what you learn about Milton or Descartes unless you want to become a Milton scholar or Descartes scholar, obviously, in which case you do need that.

It is really about using that material as a gym.

Essentially, you think about it as literally as an intellectual gym, right? I mean, when you go to the gym, when I go to the gym, it's not that I go there so that I can learn to use particular machines. I use particular machines so that my general muscle tone improves and my general welfare improves. Right. And that's, I think, the same with with classics and philosophy. Well, that's all the time we have for this episode.

Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.