Science Cannot Measure Love | Keith Ward

Keith Ward argues that consciousness is more fundamental than material explanations of reality. Do you think consciousness reveals something basic about reality itself — or is it ultimately a byproduct of the brain?

The essence of love is the desire for all living beings to find true happiness. When we want the best for ALL creatures, then we can honestly say that we love everybody equally. One who appears to love one person more than another, in fact, loves nobody. True, unconditional love revolves around sacrificing one’s selfish desires for those of his or her SUPERIORS, whether that be one's parents, husband, employer, or spiritual master, even if they are imperfect. Should a child disobey its mother just because the mother is flawed? Of course not! This paradigm is applicable to EVERYONE, without exception. Even World Teachers and Avatars Themselves regularly worship their Masters and PAST Masters!

Why single out love? All first-person subjective experiences of thinking or qualia are private experiences, which is why, for example, we can't know what it's like to be a bat. However, in principle it may someday be possible to measure all the neural correlates of subjective experiences, and those measurements of brain activity could serve as crude proxies for "measuring" subjective states. But this assumes the correlations are consistent for all humans. If the correlations are individual, not consistent among all humans, then the reliability of the brain activity measurements as proxies would depend on the reliability of the individual's reports of his/her subjective experiences.

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Yes, perhaps the differences between people are determined by different approaches to two obvious phenomena: life and consciousness. While some view life, with its birth, experience and death, as a kind of miracle and coincidence of opposites, where we must learn to accept joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, illness and health, birth and death, and consciousness as a continuous miracle of enjoying existence rather than nonexistence, others view life and consciousness as a natural phenomenon, full of problems and unsatisfactory results.

Science can't measure "love" but science also is not a belief it's a method to understand reality. And we all know from history that all closed minded belief systems wanted to harm open minded people who tried to prove that the Earth wasn't the center of the world.

Consciousness is about intentionality, and all other human capacities such as character qualities, motivations, will, reason, thought. All these properties are self evidently non arbitrary. It's clearly a realm of existence that has no physical reference. It's a realm of non physical attributes with causes and effects of their own among the conscious.

It could, depending on how you define it.

We can measure love using WTP. While doing this experiment would indeed be "offensive" there is a difference between can't and won't.

Love, regret, ennui, creativity, inspiration, anger, revenge etc. etc., are all aspect of self-consciousness. The sense of self. What it feels like to be. The certain knowledge that I have it and by implication you have it to. Many other living things exhibit the same qualities associated with self-consciousness. These are all real things that are not a result of scientifically establish-able methodology. These are products of either another fundamental aspect of existence, a non-material aspect or an emergent property of the complexity of the living organism. I choose the former.