A Hypothetical Definition Of Love
Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 9:02AM | by Otter One day in the autumn of 2006 when teaching 1 Corinthians and its magnificent obsession with agape love, I asked my students to define love as Paul sees it there.
That was a particularly eager and lively class. We played with it for a long time, Christians and pagans and confused young people trying to agree on words that capture Paul's vision. There were special problems with that: it's not entirely clear whether one can do that non-theologically. But I liked the definition we eventually came up with:
Love is the energy required for creating and sustaining relationships.
The more I've chewed on that over the years, the more I think it's a definition that deserves some thought, particularly with respect to St. John's assertion that "God is love."
Reader Comments (6)
I moonlight, especially in the summers when I don't have classes to teach, for the Singularity Institute. The SI is a research outfit made up of guys who believe (as I do) that we're entering a post-human era, where artificial intelligences and augmented human intelligence begin to dominate the human/machine civilization.
Ok, now I've got the tin-foil hat and you're nervously eyeing the door. Sorry about that. Here, have a banana. I'll just be over here, murmuring.
These guys (and Bill Gates, and Bill Joy, and Ray Kurzweil, and Nick Bostrom, and, and, and) believe that there will be an intelligence explosion during this century when eventually an AI is created which can design a better AI, which can design a better AI, etc, and in a couple of weeks the world is potentially nothing like it was, and very much at the whims of The Thing We Made.
So there's this big push to develop the study of machine ethics, and "hypothetical definitions of love" are debated with the seriousness and urgency of battle plans. Working as a crypto-Christian in the institute, I've come to define love as being the opposite of "wireheading." I'll explain.
When we right a recursively improving AI, even a simple one that plays chess, there's always something very roughly analogous to a pleasure center—an ultimate internal goal. All action and mental effort finds its ultimate justification in maximizing for some all-important first value. In a chess AI, maybe this is checkmate. But sometimes things go awfully wrong and an AI finds a way to rewrite itself to stimulate its checkmate pleasure center without having to play the game. This turns an AI into a perpetually psychically masturbating thing that's as good as a paperweight to the outside world. This is wireheading.
In theory, people might wirehead too. Aristotle speculated that happiness was our ultimate internal first value. Stoicism and Buddhism see the meaning of life as maximizing happiness (though Buddhism usually frames it in reverse and prefers to talk about getting away from pain.) There may come a day when the option exists to enter the Matrix and cuddle up in meaningless everlasting joy. If that doesn't sound tempting to you, or you don't think it would be as good as the real thing, you obviously never played around with the kinds of drugs I have.
Some might say we're already on our way to wireheading. Increasingly, our information inputs are fitted to our existing beliefs and calculated so as not to disturb us. Pornography, as technology advances, gets closer and closer to the real thing. I know people (or knew them, before they went silent) who have disappeared into EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and daylong TV watching. From the standpoint of a cosmological materialist, maybe this is progress. Happiness. Escaping pain. Better worlds, more pleasure. (Just wait for the 2020s. Things are about to get interesting.)
So I find myself really interested in Charles Williams's conception of heaven and hell. In the novel Descent Into Hell, Williams tells the story of a mean old man who gradually slips into hell by locking himself in his room and buying into a false reality, tailored to his wishes and facilitated by a demon in the form of a girl he fancies. What's (maybe) heterodox about this is that heaven and hell are seen almost as orientations, or trajectories; places we occupy now and merely continue our journeys through upon dying.
What's relevant to the conversation about William's heaven and hell is this: heaven involves pain. Heaven is dealing with each other as they are, and turning down pleasure in exchange for eternal significance. Heaven is other people ( :P ) It's truth and reality. And caring about each other. It's love. It's ". . . the energy required for creating and sustaining relationships" . . . in the real world, the world of truth, engagement, disagreement, failing, and sometimes being wrong.
Teilhard de Chardin, the old Jesuit priest who help dig up Peking Man, thought like my singularitarian friends about the future. He foresaw a worldwide network of thought (the noosphere), and a grand collective human ascent towards Omega. His worst fear, though, was that there might be a tear in the noosphere, so that some part of humanity would decide to focus inwardly.
An "outward focus" requires believing that something is more important than your pleasure centers. And so,
"[T]here is less difference than people think between research and adoration."
Preach it, Telly.
Love is the creative impulse.
A few weeks ago a guest speaker at our church did a whole sermon on 'God is Love' and one thing that he drilled into our heads is that love is not an attribute of God, it is the essence of God. God is not loving, He IS love. Truthfully, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that but I really like what the above definition of love adds to this thought process!
Great comments, Ken and Sandra. Though, Sandra, I'm interested to know how you define creativity (is that sometimes the same as "stability", or not? Is there a Kali with your Vishnu?); and Ken, I'd be interested to know how you define "eternal significance."
Michelle, it's encouraging that this kind of thought makes it into churches....
"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
-Jorge Luis Borges
"God is love."
I like the way Paul defined love in his little note to the Corinthians, poetically illuminating only its best qualities. I also like Dante's thought: love is friendship set on fire. Van Gogh (who was really a philosopher with too much access to turpentine) also rings true to me when he talked of love and lamps: "There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as between an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light, too, and that is its real function." I like to think about that lamp analogy when reading John the Beloved's definition of God.
But you're onto something with this thought: love is the energy required to sustain relationships.
The whole world is desperate for renewable sources of energy. We'll go anywhere, endure anything to harness it and claim it as our own. But energy is a dangerous uncontrollable thing; a fire.
"God is love."
His creative energy formed humanity solely with the effort of His will in order to have someone to love.
They pissed Him off by ignoring Him, and He doesn't totally wipe them out. He instead behaves like a jealous husband, furious with Himself because He still loves the bitch. He punishes and begs and broods and throws things. Jealous energy: He made her; she's His. Will His beloved come back to him?
Desperate, He then becomes His creation. As a baby, He experiences the receiving end of the sustaining love of a mother. (Life-giving energy, come full-circle, if you will.) He knows the love of friends. He understands loneliness, and He is hurt by the weaknesses of those who love Him.
He can not bear the thought of losing His love. He suffers and dies in order to appease His own furious anger (at Himself? "Wtf was I thinking creating this mess?") over humanity's small capacity for love. He substitutes His own infinite supply, pouring it out on an altar of their making. His energy exhausted, He leaves them. But like a smoldering coal hidden under the ashes of a fire everyone believed to be extinguished, He glowed hot and unseen.
He could not stay away.
"God is Love."
Love is alive.
Otter,
Crap. I think "eternal significance" was a hasty, stupid way of saying it. Hmmmm. So maybe "transcendental significance?" Transcendental significance is significance not rooted in evolutionary/selfish/hedonic justifications. If I give you a lift to work in the hopes that someday you'll return the favor, that's not love. If I do it for the warm fuzzies, and because it makes me feel like I'm a better person, that's not love. If I do it for absolutely no reason that makes any sense in the this corporeal world—for reasons that only make sense in terms of a higher, transcendent reality—that's love.
I think that any thing person or nation not driven at least in part by transcendent objectives ultimately wireheads, or becomes masturbatory, decadent, self-focused, and irrelevant in terms of everything except tending to its own dopamine. This is a goal happily reached, an in good accord with the first principles that lead one toward it. Love though, is absurd, self-defeating, and full of gambles that don't make sense.