Ok. A glorious conversation. Yes, I can handle that!
It's worth saying that my reference to "poets" and "scientists" shouldn't be taken literally, but more as symbols for tendencies to look at life in different ways. I don't mean to create straw-men here that I can dismiss with a stroke of a pen (or thumb, since I'm typing on a tablet).
I also don't intend to dismiss science either. I have a degree in computer science, and have worked as a software engineer and I.T. administrator before I went into a career in education. Science is important! It teaches us how to carefully observe and study our world, critically think, understand how things work, etc.
I suppose conversations like this eventually come down to some level of faith. I can't prove to you that love is more than the sum of its parts. It's a gut feeling, a hunch, a commitment. It's how I choose to live my life. I understand that others could see that as a weakness, believing that I somehow need to make life into something it's not in order to make it worthwhile. I see it as a strength, something that gives me direction and purpose.
There are many times I find I have to exercise love towards others in ways that run contrary to my feeling. Someone hurts me in some way, and my natural inclination is to withdraw or fight back - the evolutionary response, flight or fight. What happens if I do neither? If I use the cutting pain of woundedness to understand myself and understand the other? I find strength to stand without a response of fear or anger, and I find compassion towards the other, even seeing glimpses of myself in them. What begins as hostility can end (at least on my part) with unity. I see myself as one with them, knowing they may not see the same.
This for me is the "more" to love that gives meaning to my life, more than relational practicality, social collectivism, or natural selection. I recognize that others could even explain my response above in evolutionary biological terms, so I guess it just comes down to me seeing it differently and being OK with that.
I would be interested to hear what brings meaning to your life. Where do you find value and give yourself to it wholeheartedly?
For me, I find meaning in the little things.
Things like love, good food, a warm bed, security in life. Making money, learning stuff, reading cool stories and ideas, and whatever else is real and true.
I'm content with just living my life as it appears, and not looking too deeply into those dark corners. And if I do look into them, I use a light, and generally find that the dark corner is just like the rest of the room, and it was hiding nothing spooky at all.
I don't mind the biological or scientific. I can multi-task, and feel both the happiness of an idea, and also the technical aspects of it, and be content with both.
So although you mentioned before "there must be more to love," which I assume is something to do with the grand psychedelic mystery of the mind and genetic code, for me, it's just a thing that I assume can be explained, even if it's wonderfully complex.