If ontology is the study of being or existence. It seeks to describe
or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence
to define entities and types of entities within its framework.
Ontology can be said to study conceptions of reality, and your
explaining the ontology of your love, wouldn't it be more like the
descriptions below, descriptions which might explain the "be-ing"
behind the 7 commands you noted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
-------------------------
THE CHEMISTRY OF LOVE
Sleeplessness, poor appetite, excitement, cravings, and euphoria are
classic symptoms of the romantic conception of being in love, and
people in most societies interpret them in this way. They are also
classic effects of stimulant drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines.
The similarity can be explained in terms of the chemical effects of
falling in love.
Is lovesickness a physiological state analogous to drug intoxication?
Researchers have discovered a stimulant neurotransmitter,
phenylethylanine (PEA), that is elevated in people who are in love.
This is apparently released from the moment of contact with the object
of one's affection, which might help to explain the frequently
reported phenomenon of love at first sight. Cupid's arrow flies and a
whistle blows in the PEA factory. The results are goo-goo eyes and
silly smiles flashed at the attractive member of the opposite sex.
PEA stays high for the first two or three years in most relationships.
As the Cole Porter song says, the "kick" is from the loved one, not
from cocaine. The high does not last, however. Many people who fall in
love and marry can't sustain that high. According to anthropologist
Helen Fisher, there is a peak in the divorce rate in the fourth year
of marriage throughout different countries around the world.
Fisher claims that the chemistry of relationships arises from an
ancestral past in which marriages lasted only long enough to raise a
child through the most difficult period of dependency, i.e., the first
few years during which the child is breast-fed and must be carried
around by parents, but this is controversial.
In our own society and in many others, however, marriages can be
lifelong. Some people are as monogamous as swans. The early excitement
is replaced by calmness, intimacy, and a sense of well-being.
Psychologists refer to this as companionate love, distinct from the
passionate love of newlyweds.
At the risk of misunderstanding, romantic relationships can be
compared to drug habits. In the early days, they are like amphetamines
or cocaine, producing an intense feeling of euphoria that is
celebrated in song and verse. The stimulant rush makes us excited and
happy, which motivates us to be around the other person as much as
possible. Yet this euphoria, as already pointed out, is not to last.
One of the great ironies of drug addictions is that some drugs that
produce an intense pleasurable rush, like amphetamines, are not very
addictive. The most addictive class of drugs is the opiates that
produce feelings of euphoria and calmness, rather than euphoria and
excitement. Recent research has demonstrated that all kinds of
affectionate relationships increase the supply of oxytocin in the
blood for men and women. Oxytocin is an opiumlike hormone (strictly
speaking, a polypeptide) produced by the posterior pituitary gland at
the base of the brain. It has come to be called the cuddling hormone
because it is produced when people cuddle. Oxytocin is produced in
mothers when they are breast-feeding and plays an important role in
the milk letdown response. It is also released during sexual behavior
and evidently plays a role in sexual pleasure.
Oxytocin has the ideal chemical properties for getting people hooked
on each other, just as heroin addicts get hooked on opiate drugs. Long-
term relationships may not be at a high pitch of excitement for most
of the time, but it would be a mistake to underestimate their chemical
strength. Husbands and wives may not realize how much they love and
rely on each other until they are separated for a prolonged period of
time. Then they become moody, restless, and irritable, like opium
addicts denied a fix. This fix has nothing to do with sexual behavior
as such, but comes from the quiet pleasure of being in each other's
company, just as might be true of a pair of pigeons cooing together
beside their nest in the evening. Oxytocin casts its soothing spell to
keep romantic partners together over the long haul. It is probably
helped by a class of brain neuro-transmitters, known as the
endorphins, or natural opiates, that relieve pain and promote
calmness.
What has been said above implies that men and women are similar in
their vulnerability to the chemical addictions of love, and this is
largely true. When you look beneath the surface, nature is
surprisingly androgynous but there are some differences. Men-and male
organisms, more generally-are quicker to become infatuated than women
are. They are more drawn to the sheer excitement of sexual behavior.
The same is true of monogamous prairie voles, according to an amusing
experiment by University of Maryland zoologist Sue Carter and her
colleagues. Carter had the voles engage in the stressful experience of
swimming for three minutes before encountering a member of the
opposite sex. Once the female voles had been liberated from their
bath, they lost interest in mating and scurried away. For the males,
on the other hand, the females were unusually attractive and they
bonded more rapidly with them than would have happened in the normal
course of events.
Surprising though it may seem, many conceptually similar experiments
have been performed on human beings, almost all unfortunately using
just male participants. Social psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur
Aron initiated this sequence of human experiments in the early 1970s
by arranging an ingenious test of the hypothesis that excitement gets
people's romantic juices flowing, so to speak. Their study was
conducted on two pedestrian bridges at a tourist destination in
British Columbia. One bridge was stable and close to the ground. The
other, the Capilano Suspension Bridge, was hung 250 feet above a rocky
gorge. Extending for 450 feet and swaying perilously in the breeze, it
was quite an ordeal to cross, particularly if you happened to be
afraid of heights. Either a male or a female researcher met
unaccompanied males whenever they crossed either of the two bridges.
The researchers asked them to participate in an experiment and
obtained answers to a few questions. Participants were then given the
researcher's phone number so that they could ask for more information
about the study. Men who had been met by female researchers on the
swaying bridge were more likely to call than men who had met the same
women on the stable bridge. Evidently for them, as for the male voles,
the stress of crossing the frightening bridge had made them more
excited by the female researcher they had encountered. Despite many
subsequent studies designed to challenge this interpretation, the
original study and its interpretations have held up.
It is interesting that homosexuals fall in love in much the same way
as heterosexuals. There is no denying that gay men and lesbian women
can be just as romantic and just as obsessed with each other as
heterosexual couples. Even though homosexuals are excited by members
of their own sex, the brain chemistry that sets their heart racing and
makes their knees go weak is evidently the same.
While some people may be offended by the notion that our romantic
lives can be reduced to chemistry, it is really no more offensive than
the uncontroversial notion that our bodies are composed of atoms.
Chemical reduction is a scientific method of explaining psychology and
behavior. Knowing that our romantic feelings are predicated on
chemistry subtracts nothing from our experience of them any more than
knowing that sexual intercourse is a question of physics, and that
gravitation detracts from connubial bliss.
Falling in love may be a very complex phenomenon for human beings
compared to other species. When a female gypsy moth is ready to mate,
she releases a sex-attractant pheromone. Males are fantastically
sensitive to this substance, responding to a single molecule and being
able to detect a female from a distance of more than a mile if the
wind is blowing in the right direction. Recently, scientists have
suggested that human pheromones could provide a direct route by which
men and women may affect the chemistry of each other's brains.
The Science of Romance: Secrets of the Sexual Brain
page 37 by Nigel Barber
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/1573929700/
How about the ontology of even that? (we may be using ontology wrongly
here and are dealing with metaphysics)
NATURE VIA NURTURE - genes, experience, and what makes us human
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060006781/
...A working hypothesis is that oxytocin released during mating
activates those limbic sites rich in oxytocin receptors to confer some
lasting and selective reinforcement value on the mate.
Or, to put it more poetically, you fall in love.
What is this oxytocin and why does Insel make such an extravagant
claim for it? The story starts with an almost ridiculously unromantic
process: urination. Some 400 million years ago, when the ancestors of
our species first left the water, they were equipped with a tidy
little hormone called vasotocin, a miniature protein made out of a
chain of just nine amino acids formed into a ring. Its job was to
regulate the balance of salt and water in the body, and it performed
this job by rushing about switching on cells in the kidney or other
organs. Fish still use two different versions of vasotocin for this
purpose today, and so do frogs. In the descendants of reptiles-and
that includes human beings-there are two slightly different copies of
the relevant gene lying next to each other, facing different ways (in
human beings on chromosome 20). The result today is that all mammals
have two such hormones, called vasopressin and oxytocin, that differ
at two of the links in the chain.
These hormones still do their old job. Vasopressin tells the kidney to
conserve water; oxytocin tells it to excrete salt. But, like vasotocin
in modern fish, they also have a role in the regulation of
reproductive physiology. Oxytocin stimulates the contraction of
muscles in the womb during birth; it also causes milk to be expelled
from the ducts in the breast. The GOD is an economizer: having
invented a switch for one purpose, he readapts it for other purposes,
by expressing the oxytocin receptor in a different organ.
An even greater surprise came in the early 1980s, when scientists
suddenly realized that vasopressin and oxytocin had a job to do inside
the brain as well as being secreted from the pituitary gland into the
bloodstream.
So they tried injecting oxytocin and vasopressin into the brains of
rats to see what the effect would be. Bizarrely, a male rat injected
with intracerebral oxytocin immediately begins yawning and
simultaneously gets an erection. So long as the dose is low, the rat
also becomes more highly sexed: it ejaculates sooner and more
frequently. In female rats, intracerebral oxytocin induces the animal
to adopt a mating posture. In human beings, meanwhile, masturbation
increases oxytocin levels in both sexes. All in all, oxytocin and
vasopressin in the brain seem to be connected to mating behavior.
All this sounds rather unromantic: urine, masturbation, breast feeding-
hardly the essence of love. Be patient. In the late 1980s, Tom Insel
was working on the effect of oxytocin on maternal behavior in rats.
Brain oxytocin seemed to help the mother rat form a bond with her
young, and Insel identified the parts of the rat brain that were
sensitive to the hormone. He switched his attention to the pair bond,
wondering if there were parallels between a female's bond to her young
and the bond to her mate. At this point he met Sue Carter, who had
begun to study prairie voles in the laboratory. She told him that the
prairie vole is a rarity among mice for its faithful marriages.
Prairie voles live in couples, and both father and mother care for the
young for many weeks. Montane voles, on the other hand, are more
typical of mammals: the female mates with a passing polygamist,
separates quickly from him, bears young alone, and abandons them after
a few weeks to fend for themselves. Even in the laboratory, this
difference is clear: mated prairie voles stare into each other's eyes
and bathe the babies; mated montane voles treat their spouses like
strangers.
Insel examined the brains of the two species. He found no difference
in the expression of the two hormones themselves, but a big difference
in the distribution of molecular receptors for them-the molecules that
fire up neurons in response to the hormones. The monogamous prairie
voles had far more oxytocin receptors in several parts of the brain
than the polygamous montane voles. Moreover, by injecting oxytocin or
vasopressin into the brains of prairie voles, Insel and his colleagues
could elicit all the characteristic symptoms of monogamy, such as a
strong preference for one partner and aggression toward other voles.
The same injections had little effect on montane voles, and the
injection of chemicals that block the oxytocin receptors prevented the
monogamous behavior. The conclusion was clear: prairie voles are
monogamous because they respond more to oxytocin and vasopressin.
In a virtuoso display of scientific ingenuity, Insel's team has gone
on to dissect this effect in convincing detail. They knock the
oxytocin gene out of a mouse before birth. This leads to social
amnesia: the mouse can remember some things, but it has no memory of
mice it has already met and will not recognize them. Lacking oxytocin
in its brain, a mouse cannot recognize mice it met 10 minutes before-
unless those mice were "badged" with a nonsocial cue such as a
distinctive lemon or almond scent (Insel compares this situation to
that of an absent-minded professor at a conference who recognizes
friends by their name tags, not their faces). Then by injecting the
hormone into just one part of the animal's brain-the medial amygdala-
in later life the scientists can restore social memory to the mouse
completely.
In another experiment, using a specially adapted virus, they turn up
the expression of the vasopressin receptor gene in the ventral
pallidum, a part of a vole's brain important for reward. (Pause here
to roll that idea around your mind a few times to appreciate just what
science can do these days: scientists use viruses to turn up the
volumes of genes in one part of the brain of a rodent. Even 10 years
ago such an experiment was unimaginable.) The result of turning up the
gene's expression is to "facilitate partner preference formation,"
which is geekspeak for "make them fall in love." They conclude that
for a male vole to pair-bond, it must have both vasopressin and
vasopressin receptors in its ventral pallidum. Since mating causes a
release of oxytocin and vasopressin, the prairie vole will pair-bond
with whatever animal it has just mated with; the oxytocin helps in
memory, the vasopressin in reward. The montane vole, by contrast, will
not react in the same way, because it lacks receptors in that area.
Female montane voles express these receptors only after giving birth,
so they can be nice to their babies, briefly.
So far I have talked of oxytocin and vasopressin as if they were the
same thing, and they are so similar that they probably stimulate each
other's receptors somewhat. But it appears that to the extent that
they do differ, oxytocin makes female voles choose a partner;
vasopressin makes males choose a partner. When vasopressin is injected
into the brain of a male prairie vole, he becomes aggressive toward
all voles except his mate. Attacking other voles is a (rather male)
way of expressing love.
All this is astonishing enough, but perhaps the most exciting result
to emerge from Insel's laboratory concerns the genes for the
receptors. Remember that the difference between the prairie vole and
the montane vole lies not in the expression of the hormone but in the
pattern of expression of the hormone's receptors. These receptors are
themselves products of genes. The receptor genes are essentially
identical in the two species, but the promoter regions, upstream of
the genes, are very different. Now recall the lesson of chapter 1:
that the difference between closely related species lies not in the
text of genes themselves but in their promoters. In the prairie vole,
there is an extra chunk of DNA text, on average about 460 letters
long, in the middle of the promoter. Insel's team made a transgenic
mouse with this expanded promoter, and it grew up with a brain like a
prairie vole's, expressing vasopressin receptors in all the same
places, though it did not form a pair bond. Steven Phelps then caught
43 wild prairie voles in Indiana and sequenced their promoters: some
had longer insertions than others. The insertions varied from 350 to
550 letters in length. Are the long ones in more faithful husbands
than the short ones? Not yet known.
The conclusion to which Insel's work is leading is devastating in its
simplicity. The ability of a rodent to form a long-term attachment its
sexual partner may depend on the length of a piece of DNA text in the
promoter switch at the front of a certain receptor gene. That in turn
decides precisely which parts of the brain will express the gene, Of
course, like all good science, this discovery raises more questions
than it settles. Why should feeding oxytocin receptors in that part of
the brain make the mouse feel well-disposed toward its partner? It is
possible that the receptors induce a state a bit like addiction, and
in this respect it is noticeable that they seem to link with the D2
dopamine receptors, which are closely involved in various kinds of
drug addiction. On the other hand, without oxytocin, mice cannot form
social memories, so perhaps they simply keep forgetting what their
spouse looks like.
Mice are not men. You know by now that I am about to start
extrapolating anthropomorphically from pair-bonding in voles to love
in people, and you probably do not like my drift. It sounds
reductionist and simplistic. Romantic love, you say, is a cultural
phenomenon, overlaid with centuries of tradition and teaching. It was
invented at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, or some such place, by
a bunch of oversexed poets called troubadours; before that there was
just sex.
Even though in 1992 William Jankowiak surveyed 168 different
ethnographic cultures and found none that did not recognize romantic
love, you may be right. I certainly cannot prove to you-yet-that
people fall in love when their oxytocin and vasopressin receptors get
tingled in the right places in their brains. Yet. And there are
cautionary hints about the dangers of extrapolating from one species
to another: sheep seem to need oxytocin to form maternal attachment to
their young; mice apparently do not. Human brains are undoubtedly more
complicated than mouse brains.
But I can draw your attention to some curious coincidences. A mouse
shares much of its. genetic code with a human being. Oxytocin and
vasopressin are identical in the two species and are produced in the
equivalent parts of the brain. Sex causes them to be produced in the
brain in both human beings and rodents. Receptors for the two hormones
are virtually identical and are expressed in equivalent parts of the
brain. Like those of the prairie vole, the human receptor genes (on
chromosome 3) have a-smaller-insertion in their promoter regions. As
with the prairie voles of Indiana, the lengths of those promoter
insertions vary from individual to individual: in the first 150 people
examined, Insel found 17 different lengths. And when a person who says
she (or he) is in love contemplates a picture of her loved one while
sitting in a brain scanner, certain parts of her brain light up that
do not light up when she looks at a picture of a mere acquaintance.
Those brain parts overlap with the ones stimulated by cocaine. All
this could be a complete coincidence, and human love may be entirely
different from rodent pair bonding, but given how conservative the GOD
is and how much continuity there is between human beings and other
animals, you would be unwise to bet on it.
Shakespeare was ahead of us, as usual. In A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Oberon tells Puck how Cupid's arrow fell upon a white flower (the
pansy), turning it purple, and that now the juice of this flower
... on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Puck duly fetches a pansy, and Oberon wreaks havoc with the lives of
those sleeping in the forest, causing Lysander to fall in love with
Helena, whom he has previously scorned; and causing Titania to fall in
love with Bottom the weaver wearing the head of an ass.
Who would now wager against me that I could not soon do something like
this to a modern Titania? Admittedly, a drop on the eyelids would not
suffice. I would have to give her a general anesthetic while I
cannulated her medial amygdala and injected oxytocin into it. I doubt
even then that I could make her love a donkey. But I might stand a
fair chance of making her feel attracted to the first man she sees
upon waking. Would you bet against me? (I hasten to add that ethics
committees will-or should-prevent anybody taking up my challenge.)
I am assuming that, unlike most mammals, human beings are basically
monogamous like prairie voles, and not promiscuous like montane voles.
I base this assumption on the argument enunciated in chapter 1
concerning the size of testicles; on the ample evidence from
ethnography that, though most human societies allow polygamy, most
human societies are still dominated by monogamous relationships; and
on the fact that human beings usually practice some paternal care-a
characteristic feature of the few mammal species that live as social
monogamists. Furthermore, as we have liberated human life from
economic and cultural straitjackets, such as arranged marriage, we
have found monogamy growing more dominant, not less. In 1998 the most
powerful man in the world, far from treating himself to a gigantic
harem, got into trouble for having an affair with one intern. The
evidence is all around you for long-term and exclusive (but sometimes
cheated-on) pair bonds as the commonest pattern in human
relationships.
Chimpanzees are different. Long-term pair bonds are unknown among
them, and I predict that they have fewer oxytocin receptors in the
relevant parts of their brains than human beings, probably as a result
of having shorter gene promoters.
The story of oxytocin lends at least tentative support to William
James's notion that love is an instinct, evolved by natural selection,
and is part of our mammal heritage, just like four limbs and 10
fingers. Blindly, automatically, and untaught, we bond with whoever is
standing nearest when the oxytocin receptors in the medial amygdala
get tingled. One sure way to tingle them is to have sex, although
presumably chaste attraction can also do the trick. Is this why
breaking up is hard to do?
Having oxytocin receptors does not make it inevitable that somebody
will fall in love during his life, nor predictable when it will
happen, or with whom. As Niko Tinbergen, the great Dutch ethologist,
demonstrated in his studies of instincts, the expression of a fixed,
innate instinct must often be triggered by an external stimulus. One
of Tinbergen's favorite species was the stickleback, a tiny fish. Male
sticklebacks become red on the belly in the breeding season, when they
defend small territories in which they build nests, which attract
females. Tinbergen made little models of fish and caused them to
"invade" the territory of a male fish. A model of a female elicited
the courtship dance of the male, even if the model was astonishingly
crude; so long as it had a "pregnant" belly, it excited the male. But
if the model had a red belly, it would trigger an attack. It could be
just an oval blob with a crudely drawn eye but no fins or tail: still
it was attacked just as vigorously as if it were a real male rival-so
long as it was red. One of the legends of Leiden, where Tinbergen
first worked, is that he noticed his sticklebacks would threaten the
red post-office vans that drove past the window.
Tinbergen went on to demonstrate the power of these "innate releasing
mechanisms" to provoke the expression of an instinct in other species,
notably the herring gull. Herring gulls have a yellow beak with a
bright red spot near the tip. The chicks peck at this spot when
begging for food. By presenting newborn chicks with a series of
models, Tinbergen demonstrated that the spot was a powerful releaser
for the begging action, and the redder it was the more powerful it
was. The color of the beak or the head of the bird mattered not at
all. So long as there was a contrasting spot near the tip of the bill,
preferably in red, it would elicit pecking. In modern jargon,
scientists would say that the chick's instinct and the adult's beak
spot had "coevolved." An instinct is designed to be triggered by an
external object or event. Nature plus nurture.
The significance of Tinbergen's experiments was that they revealed
just how complex instincts could be, and yet how simply triggered. The
digger wasp Tinbergen studied would dig a burrow, go and catch a
caterpillar, paralyze it with a sting, bring it back to the burrow,
and deposit it with an egg on top, so that the baby wasp could feed on
the caterpillar while growing. All this complex behavior, including
the ability to navigate back to the burrow, was achieved with almost
no learning, let alone parental teaching. A digger wasp never meets
its parents. A cuckoo migrates to Africa and back, sings its song, and
mates with one of its own species without, as a chick having ever seen
either a parent or a sibling.
The notion that animal behavior is in the genes once troubled
biologists as much as it now troubles social scientists...
NATURE VIA NURTURE - genes, experience, and what makes us human
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060006781/
