Surely you’ve heard the old axiom that romantic love is nothing more than a series of chemical reactions that take place in our brains. While that’s technically true — humans are made of matter, just about everything we do involves a chemical reaction — there’s a lot more to it than just dopamine and oxytocin release.
Here, I argue that love could be a quantum state with observable features. Much like spacetime, which some experts believe exists in discrete chunks, love may very well be scientifically tangible.
First things first, we need to define “love.” According to Harvard:
“Love can be distilled into three categories: lust, attraction, and attachment. Though there are overlaps and subtleties to each, each type is characterized by its own set of hormones. Testosterone and estrogen drive lust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin create attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin mediate attachment.”
Again, that much is likely true. But such a description serves only to examine how our brains respond to love. We’re still left wondering what it is.
An argument for the tangible
The chemistry/biology view is that “love” isn’t a thing. It is neither hand nor foot, as Shakespeare’s Juliet might say. You can’t hold an ounce of it in your hand or sell it on the street. Despite what your local bar or chain restaurant’s lobby might have you believe, there’s no such thing as a love detector.
But what if we’re looking in the wrong places? There are certain concepts in science that some disciplines take for granted and others have no use for. Spacetime is a great example. Physicists take it for granted, mathematicians consider it self-referential, and most other scientists have no use for it outside of personal timekeeping.
To the chemist, biologist, psychologist, and layperson, the only interest that the concept of love holds is in our experiences living with or without it. Most folks don’t care what love is or why it works the way it does because humans are too busy dealing with the species-wide ramifications of its existence.
But, to the physicist, love could be examined with the same vigor as the study of gravity. Both are invisible forces of nature.
Clearly, however, there is universal evidence for gravity. Love appears to be more of an experiential endeavor. Amo, ergo amor est — I love, therefore love is.
The quantum answer
Let’s ponder this quote from a Nature article discussing how spacetime (time itself) could actually exist as discrete chunks of bedrock in the universe:
“People have always taken space for granted. It is just emptiness, after all—a backdrop to everything else. Time, likewise, simply ticks on incessantly. But if physicists have learned anything from the long slog to unify their theories, it is that space and time form a system of such staggering complexity that it may defy our most ardent efforts to understand.”
Much the same could be said for love. People have always taken it for granted. It’s just attachment, after all. Love keeps on happening incessantly.
Perhaps it too is a system of such staggering complexity to defy our cursory efforts at relegating it to evolutionary side-effects.
Love is entanglement
It’s difficult to make an argument for love as a physical substance. We use atomic clocks and the natural composition of the universe to inform our observations on the nature of spacetime, so it works there. But love, as we understand it so far, is little more than a self-reported condition.
However, if we choose instead to view the concept of love as a quantum state where two consciousnesses become entangled, the argument becomes clearer. Love isn’t a thing, it’s a quantum state. In this case, our consciousness is the “thing.”
When two or more photons, for example, are entangled, their quantum state cannot be described independently. That which changes one of them changes all of them.
That’s as sound a definition of what it feels like to experience love, as observed and lived, as I’ve ever read.
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