dogs vs. babies

[zial]

Babies smell bad. They're irrational, loud, extremly needy, awkward to handle, absolutely useless, frighteningly fragile, whiny and demanding and the only reason my heart "melts" when I see one squirming around is a biochemical reaction programmed into my brain for archaic proliferation-of-the-species reasons. Relationship=parasitic

Comments

[inverted_man]

Haha!
I totally understand your position. I am, for the most part, the same way, except that I wouldn't presume that the reduction of love or adoration to a chemical process in the brain makes them somehow indefensible or less reasonable than the alternative.

But on a humorous note, I am sure this intellection (at least for me) would eventually eat itself when I admitted to myself that the reason I am predisposed to reduction, scientism and empiricism could be isolated to a series of meaningless chemical reactions in my brain, and that being the case, why do it at all?

In fact, the entire gamut of my behavioral regimen is governed by a series of chemical reactions in my brain which evolution made possible and which in some sense are the bi-product of systems set in place to ensure the proliferation of my species, why the heck do I even get out of bed in the morning?

Love too is a viable domain of knowledge and experience. I wouldn't discriminate against modes of knowing.

I imagine you like dogs for the same reason that other people like their babies. Most of us respond to juvenility in animals in the same way that we respond to it in human beings. Gould has a great essay to this effect.