LOVE

by Max T. O’Connor

It is essential to any adequate conception of love that one take the interests of the loved one as one’s own. What does this mean? Every individual has an ever-changing set of desires, with some of those desires or goals being clearly more important than others. To say that they are more important may mean either that they are stronger or that they are more central to one’s personality and identity than other desires.

Love, as distinguished from short-lived infatuation, requires a sharing of at least some important desires. Probably for love to endure the importance must be due to the centrality of the desires rather than their strength (I explain this below). Aristotle said that a friend is ‘another self,’ and by this he meant that a true friend is someone with whom you share some important - and central - interests or perspectives. People with whom you can share an activity may be friends on a lower level; they are people you enjoy being with, but they are not ‘true friends’ or soul-mates (and I don’t mean to imply anything non-physical here; perhaps a better term, though odd-sounding, would be ‘value-mates’ or ‘perspective-mates’). Infatuation is the result of an attraction, usually sudden and short-lived (though possibly neither of these), which is based on very limited factors. Common factors are sexual desire, a liking for the style or flair of the other, or simply a sympathetic response to the fact that the other person is showing interest in oneself. Somehow we can’t but help like people more when they like us - we think that it reflects on their good taste and judgement (unless we seriously lack self-esteem)!

True love, as distinct from infatuation, must involve the sharing of important interests. By ‘interests’ I mean to include desires, values, goals, and perspectives on reality. For love to flourish it is no doubt more important that the shared interests be central rather than simply strong. The degree to which an interest is central to a personality is the degree to which it is a natural outgrowth and expression of the personality. If I am to truly love another then I must love them for the person they are. I cannot do this without understanding them; I must be able to realize what their central interests are and be able to respond to them because I share them. For this to be possible it is obviously necessary that the potential objects of my love make themselves psychologically visible to me. If someone hides herself behind a facade, behind a false personality, then I cannot know her and so cannot love her for what she is. This is why the advice ‘just be yourself’ when you are looking for love is wise - if you pretend to be what you are not then you may temporarily fool the other person into loving you (or,

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rather, the false you), but this will soon lead to disillusionment and a rapid melting away of the emotional response.

To love a person then, you must both grasp their identity as an individual, you must understand what values, goals and perspectives make them what they are, and you must share these values, goals and perspectives. This is why essential to true love is the inescapable desire to take the interests of the loved one as one’s own interests. It is possible to force oneself to act in this same way for people with whom you have little or nothing in common, but this cannot happen spontaneously or easily. It’s difficult to see why anyone would do something crazy like this - unless they have been taken over by some personality-crushing moral doctrine like that of altruism or utilitarianism. This is entirely different from the kind of ‘sacrifice’ one makes for a loved one with whom one shares central interests. This is not really sacrifice at all since, as Ayn Rand pointed out (in The Virtue of Selfishness), a sacrifice is the surrender of a higher value for a lower value. This kind of unhealthy and self-destructive behavior can only happen under the influence of memes spread by others for their benefit.

Giving up certain things for the sake of the interests of a loved one with whom one shares important interests is not a sacrifice. Indeed it is just another means of self-assertion, of self-empowerment, of self-expression. In the traditional sense of ‘individual,’ love breaks down the barriers between the individuals who are in love. However this should not be seen as in any way bad, or to be avoided by the individualist or the egoist, since such fear would be based on a mistaken view of individuality. The traditional conception of the individual is insupportable. We are accustomed to conceiving of an individual in terms of an individual consciousness within an individual body. Anything which harms or limits that entity, the entity contained entirely within the skin, is self-destructive or self-limiting. The traditional view of the identity of the individual is doomed to perish at the hands of a new information-theoretic view of identity. This perspective on identity has been around for some time. The first real development of the idea that I am aware of is in Robert Ettinger’s cryonics classic of 1964, The Prospect of Immortality, and the idea burst irresistibly upon the academic philosophical scene with the appearance of Derek Parfit’s brilliant book Reasons and Persons. I will explore this theory in a forthcoming issue of Extropy.

On the information view of identity it is a mistake to limit a person’s identity to that which exists inside a single human body or brain. It’s true that, in our current world, this is generally correct since we are trapped within our single brains. But immortalists and other uploading enthusiasts have realized for years that this will not always be the case. We have good reason to expect the eventual possibility of duplicating our consciousness in a suitable computer software instantiation. Once that is possible we can make copies of ourselves and transfer data (memories, reactions, personality traits) between units with which we have a common ancestor (or even with entirely different persons). The borderlines of the individual will become more flexible as people make copies of their mind, let them gather experiences concurrently, and then recombine them to form a united mind wiser than the original.

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The wide range of possibilities that this will open up is a topic for a future article. For the present I just want to make the point that an individual is not that entity inside the skin; it is the entity defined by information content and functioning. This information may be shared between separate (or semi-separate) functioning units. In the case of true love one, has found a person with whom one shares central values and perspectives, and these are the elements that are vital to the identity of one’s personality. The idea that the other is really ‘another self’ is more than just a metaphor. Of course the sharing of identity with a loved one can never be anything like as great as with a recently created duplicate of oneself. Since I don’t have a developed and sophisticated information-theoretic account of identity I am unable to say anything precise about how much one shares identity with a loved one. What I can say is that the more two people share values, goals and perspectives the more they share identity. Presumably, the longer they live together the closer they can become to a shared identity, since they will acquire a history of shared memories and experiences which are also part of the constitution of identity. Since each of the individuals does not control the other they are not the same person, and this sharply limits the degree to which the couple share identity. (The relative importance of shared information versus coordinated control of action and thought as elements of identity will be discussed in a future issue of Extropy.)

Although I cannot claim to have yet come up with an adequate philosophical defense of my position, I believe that it is rational to direct one’s actions to preserve and promote one’s own identity, whatever that may be. But, from what I’ve said above, it will be clear that doing this will often involve a willingness, in fact an eagerness, to forgo some things in order to benefit the one who is loved. When I (this biological unit) can forgo something I want in order to promote the more important value or goal of the one I love, then this is rational and self-preserving thing to do. If my assumed view of rational action is right, then the degree to which it makes sense for me to give up something for my loved one will be proportional to the degree to which we share identity, perhaps discounted by the probability that we will separate in the future and cease to function as one (and probably to diverge, so that we gradually cease to share identity to any significant degree).

I do not claim that sharing of interests and identity is all there is to love. Clearly it is also necessary, at the least, to talk about the emotional benefits that lovers provide one another, and the ways in which they make each other feel more psychologically real and solid by acting as a mirror in which one can view one’s identity and nature (see Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Romantic Love on this aspect). I hope that I have shown that this element of a love relationship is a central and vital one. It distinguishes true love from infatuation and irrational love, and by keeping this in mind we can more easily guard ourselves against that ever present danger.

LOVE?LOVE!LOVE?LOVE!LOVE?LOVE!LOVE?LO

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