Love and Hormones

When I hold my baby in my arms, I feel pleasure within myself and tenderness toward her. The rate of the hormone oxytocin in my bloodstream is increased. Which of these two phenomena is the cause, which the effect?

Pleasure and tenderness are feelings, phenomena which I experience physically and emotionally, of which I am conscious, and which “make sense” to me in terms of definitions and relationships within a personal history. (She is “my” child, I “love” her, etc.)

Increased oxytocin is a physiological phenomenon, unconscious and yet measurable, which is commonly conceived of as “producing” an “effect” of pleasure and tenderness.

But what produces the producer? What raises my oxytocin? The fact that I am holding my baby, whom I love. Preceded by the fact that I decided to hold my baby, be it in response to her call or out of my own appetite for cuddle.

Moreover, even though the oxytocin “makes me” feel good, and incites me to continue holding my baby, I can put her down in her cot if I decide to, if I need or want to do something else. So I am not mechanically destined to continue responding uniformly to physiology. But if I decide to continue holding my baby, my body will produce more oxytocin.

It seems that behavioral (conscious decisions) and physiological (varying hormone levels) phenomena continuously feed off each other, infinitely being each other’s cause and consequence, which makes them ultimately a single phenomenon progressing in time, rather than two phenomena linked by a causal relation, a view which appears only by artificially stopping time and distinguishing scopes according to our mode of observation.

Therefore, we could say that pleasure and tenderness are “associated with”, rather than “caused by”, an increased level of oxytocin in the bloodstream.

Instead of trying to determine causal relations between our physiology and our behaviors, it seems more accurate to consider our condition as “incarnation”, a continuously bidimensional existence, the ultimate logic of which or direction (whether or not I will hold my baby or not, keep holding her longer or not) cannot be reduced to either of these two (artificially distinguished) dimensions.