Why can’t science measure love?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Why can’t science measure love? Suppose we wanted to decide whether to go ahead in a relationship with someone.
With all the scientific advancement today, why don’t we have a love-o-meter? A meter that we could put on our partner’s heart or in our partner’s brain and measure the level of their love. We can’t because love is not a physical entity that is measurable. It is a real experience, but it is not physically measurable.
And science can measure the secretion of certain chemicals in certain areas of the brain when we experience certain emotions. But that is a very secondary result of the experience of love, the emotion of love or of whatever emotion that is present in our hearts that we are experiencing. If we let science morph into scientism.
Scientism is scientific imperialism. Scientism, if you combine together the four monotone. Scientific plus imperialism becomes scientism.
Where science, some people believe, has a monopoly on all knowledge. Whatever we can know about any field, we can know it only through the meaning of science. Or scientism is itself unscientific.
Because there is no scientific experiment that can ever be done to prove that all knowledge can be had only by the means of science or that science can give us all knowledge. And there are prominent scientists who have spoken against this imperialism that is perpetrated by some in the name of science. Let’s consider a quote by Erwin Schrödinger in his book Nature and the Greeks.
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is efficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order. But it is ghastly silent about all unsoundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us.
It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight. It knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains.
But the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. Unfortunately, today some people are taking these answers very seriously. So, if we take this scientific worldview, not scientific worldview, the worldview that comes from scientism as the absolute, then what does it imply? It implies that we are simply biological robots.
We are simply programmed machines who work according to the programming of our brain. And the emotions that we experience, including the emotion of love, they are nothing but the surge of certain biochemicals in certain areas of the brain. Dopamine surge is associated with certain emotions.
Serotonin surge is associated with another emotion. Now, these are associated, they are facts. Philosophers of science have pointed out the difference between correlation and identity.
The two are connected, but they are not the same. Just as when we smile or when we laugh, that is a result of happiness. Smiling or laughing is not happiness.
It is a result of happiness. If smiling or laughing alone were happiness, we all could have our own face twisting machines, which could twist our face into a smile whenever we wanted to be happy. Or if we didn’t want to be so physically literal, we could have some tickling.
When a child is tickled, the child starts laughing. That laughter is happiness. If that laughter were happiness, then all of us could have our own perpetual tickling machines.
And with those perpetual tickling machines, we all could be perpetually happy. We understand that the sensations and the responses to the sensations are not happiness. Similarly, the surge of chemicals in the brain, they are not the emotions themselves.
They are the results of the emotions. And what is the locus of the emotions? Where are we experiencing them? That is something beyond. That is essentially non-material.
So our very experience of emotions that points to a side of us, that is the experiencer. And that side is beyond matter. It is beyond the scope of material science.
But that does not mean it is unscientific. Rather, it is trans-scientific. It is a higher reality which does not contradict science, but it transcends science.
And there is a higher science, a science of consciousness. A science of spirituality that can help us to probe deeper and understand the locus of our emotions and to develop the emotions that will bring us fulfillment in our lives. What that locus of emotions is, how we can develop healthy emotions that we will discuss in our future talks.