Is Attention a form of love?

I asked on the actualized.org forum what is love and they told me attention. When I told them that attention could be anything and not necessarily love and that you can have attention without love. They locked my thread for questioning their answers.

The above link seems to say something similar, but in a different vein. I know attention is a component of love sure, but I feel like there is something more to it. I pay attention in class but that doesn’t mean I love it. But I love the ocean and water, and something about it just churns up feelings and emotions that I would classify as greater than simply attention. It’s deep and strong and powerful.

So I’m wondering how true the love being attention is, because hate is also attention. But while they are both “attention” it would not be right to call both love and hate attention, there has to be something more to it than that.

No, no, no. “Attention” is not an emotion. (Again, how do you come up with these sites? Amazing.) I am attending to your posts, but my only emotion was a mild amusement at some dorky site kicking you off of their discussion boards.

LOVE IS NOT ATTENTION.

Attending to someone and they attending to you are definitely factors involved in sometimes eliciting the emotion of love. But the acts of attending are not the emotion itself. (Even tho they can signify the potential or actual emergence of that emotion.)

Similar thing, of course, with hate. (Although with hate there would have been a lot of aversive elements involved.)

Let’s say that a KKK member back in the 1930’s hated any black person. Now when he got his buddies together and said “Let’s go hang and burn that N_gg_r!” he was being motivated by the emotion “hate”. But he was not yet paying attention to the black person that he was about to help torture and murder. So in this anecdote, the victim was getting actual “attention” at the point he was caught, beaten, tied up, spit upon, degraded verbally to the extent possible, perhaps peed on, and eventually put in the hanging position with the noose around his neck, then doused with flammable liquid, and set on fire to the whoops and cheers all around, as the corpse-to-be flails and completes the hanging process. All of that was attention. The actual diverse acts of attention WERE what we would call “hateful” but the hate simply gave motivation to them becoming actualized.

Anyway, neither love nor hate are a form of attention. They are each an emotion.

Oh, and that KKK member, I don’t think could have had that level of hate without a personal history of severely aversive or pernicious contingencies of some sort through most of his life. So if people were involved in those pernicious contingencies, say beating him, shaming him, scaring him, whatever bad stuff, they were attending to him. But who knows what emotion they were feeling when they did so?