What I am contesting here is the idea I have come across in some science-focused publications that our lives, emotions and actions are governed solely by physical and chemical laws. E.g we fall in love because of pheromones and chemicals in the brain. We do good things only because it creates 'feel good' chemicals in the brain, etc., Morality comes to have no philosophical meaning but only a chemical one. And as other posters above have pointed out, if morality is simply chemical reactions, once again there is no wrong or right and we should dry our eyes over Virginia Tech.

This is an excellent statement of an idea that I keep hearing, and am glad to have the chance to try to clarify.

Various sciences have demonstrated:

1) The lives of our cells, just like the lives of any other mammal, are, indeed, "governed solely" - in the physiological sense - "by physical and chemical laws." We are no different from a blade of grass in that sense.
(2) The *perception of* love is indeed brought from your brain (body) to your mind (spirit) through the actions pheromones and neurotransmitters, but to say that "we fall in love because of pheromones and chemicals in the brain" conveys a seriously misunderstood interpretation of that datum.

But we don't live our lives at the cellular level. What I referred to above as "spirit" is what you do with the mind you happen to have, given to you by the brain you evolved and the experiences you've had with it. Your soul in the interpersonal sense - your core, your essense, what makes you You, what brain-dead people have lost - I prefer the word Spirit to describe this because it literally means Breath.

Life is biochemistry at the fundamental level, not at the level at which we experience it. And consciousness is electro(bio)chemistry.

But through a wonderful fluke of nature, because of becoming bipedal, we got the outgoing, movement/motivation parts of our brain - the parts that run animals' bodies so they can Eat Survive Reproduce - in close physical proximity to the incoming, perceptual, monitoring part, that brings in the information needed for the brain of any animal to decide which way to move its body. That presented us, who were already environment-manipulating little animals, with a sudden connection between motion and emotion - which is usually not the case.
So we can actually *make decisions about* all kinds of things related to eating surviving reproducing that other animals just do naturally. And suddenly, we invent things like Morality, to guide *whether* we should do anything.
But morality is a human invention. Cats playing with their birds are not being cruel, and the bird is not offended. So when you say "Morality comes to have no philosophical meaning but only a chemical one" again, you are conflating biological reality (it is certainly brain chemicals which provide you with guilt feelings, or righteous indignation, or that virtuous glow you mention) with the reality of living as a human, at the spiritual level (in my sense of the term Spirit).

To us, it matters a great deal. And our intelligence tells us that that poor crazy VT guy who slaughtered all those people did a terrible thing, that it is terrible for the dead and for their survivors, that it's just as well he killed himself so we won't have to deal with having to either kill him provide food, clothing and shelter for the rest of his life.