Oh, I don't know. It doesn't seem unreasonable to speculate that, ... what my brain actually does is store references to my range of possible emotional states

Huh. That sounds... very reasonable, really. Of course, it requires that your emotional states be quantised, seperatable into neatly labelled boxes.

It's possible.

But I certainly agree that it's not a parsimonious explanation. Simpler to posit that my brain only has one set of emotions which it uses at all times. Similarly, simpler to posit that for a set of two brains that share an architecture.

Hmmm. There is a lot of evidence that other people's brains do not, as a rule, share the same architecture. See Generalising from one example for a brief discussion of the matter; or have a look at this comment thread in which Baughn and I try to find out just how different the way we think is. It's very different, to the point where we both appear to have some trouble understanding how someone can think like that.

There's certainly enough evidence to satisfy me that a lot of people's brains work in different ways; I'd go so far as to think that the way human brains work probably varies more-or-less about as much as people's faces do; that is, there are certain features all arranged in more-or-less the same manner, and you might find one or two who are very similar, but no-one's ever exactly the same.

And since emotions are very likely affected by neural architecture, I assume a similar level of variability there. It's not that my emotional experiences don't map to anyone else's; it's that the map is merely a poor approximation, and not a representation of someone else's genuine emotional state.

I'm pretty sure that the emotional relationship between parents and their children, though we call it "love", is not really the same thing as the other emotional relationships we call "love," and is probably something I have never experienced.

I've been told that the ancient Greeks had different words for different types of love; romantic, familial, etc., etc. This strikes me as very sensible.

Agreed. But you asked me why I believe what I believe, so I tried to answer.

Quite. This is a very interesting discussion.