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Much of our discussion revolved around the feasibility of defining love. Is love something that is, in principle, definable? It seems to me that much of the answer to that question depends on how we want to define it. I can't help but feel that if we need to define love in biological terms, we're a bit screwed. By that, I don't mean the conclusion that most people jump to: that love exists as something "beyond" the realm of the physical. Rather, I mean something that closely resembles what we discussed earlier in terms of the irreducibility of patterns when thinking about the merging of biology and religion. Vidya mentioned earlier that maybe love is just a "pattern" experienced in many possible ways. The impossibility of differing experience in identical brain states aside, this seemed to at least gesture at some kind of isomorphism, or resemblance, between two brain states both experiencing love. Upon closer inspection, however, we ultimately are forced to admit of some unavoidable difference between instances of love brain states. Then what makes a pattern a pattern? Interestingly, it looks like the question of love brain states becomes an analogue of the very question of love. Like the concept of love, the brain states of love share some vague sense of similarity, but which cannot be defined by any precise mechanism or pathway. This returns us to the question of irreducibility, but in a way that may appear more palatable now that we're dealing with love instead of religion. What difference can we define between that vague, (("floofy")) thing we call love and the HARD SCIENCE thing we call brain states?

P.S. We'd probably have a better time defining it in a Shakespeare class, if only we could stand the floofiness of it all.