The Cosmic Tug of Love

Massive objects bend spacetime. The ISS falls around the edge of earth’s gravity well, held close to the terrestrial bosom. With enough delta-v, it could quit that tender aureole for the infinite, star-studded void.

A loving gravitational embrace? In another sense, it’s a hateful thing – to be dragged back with such violence whenever we try to escape this grasping, spinning ball of rock. Thus far, chemical rockets are our only means of achieving the escape velocity of 40,000 km/h needed to leave home. The determination and resources required for such a small step into the darkness are astonishing. Someday, it’ll be easy. We’ll ascend to orbit on a gossamer leash – a space elevator, a baby harness strung taught by angular momentum.

It’s odd, I know, to anthropomorphize these astrodynamical relationships. But I’ve been wondering about love and its universal significance, and I don’t know whether we’re drastically under- or overestimating its cogency.

Love exerts such a profound force upon us – on our interactions, on our aspirations, on our enterprises, and ultimately on the fabric of our world. And when we come to push out from this place – into our solar system then on into interstellar space – the profound force of our loves (and hatreds) will push out with us. Will it be a responsible course of action to allow that to happen?

Love is... at root, biology. A host of endocrine-system-regulated hormones relay chemical messages around the body and brain. Complex loops of physiological feedback between endocrine, nervous, and reproductive systems regulate our sexual responses and maintain homeostasis via hormone-producing glands such as the pituitary and thyroid. We feel the effects of ‘love’ throughout our bodies; even with the reproductive system completely excised our hormones would continue their thrilling course. And we feel it in our brains, in our minds. Modulated by hormones such as oxytocin, neurotransmitting chemicals at synapses lead to inhibition or firing of networks of neurons (baby, you flood my synaptic clefts like no other). Firing or inhibition consolidates or weakens these networks – thus do we fall in, or out of, love.

According to Steven Pinker, ‘Love is not all you need, and does not make the world go round.’ⁱ That is true. However, this fluke of natural selection can come to be our everything. Sometimes, the end of love can be the end of meaningful life (and for an unhappy few, literally the end of life). The neurochemical, neurostructural resonances within close relationships – couples, families, tribes – can gift members a sense of shared purpose. When we draw significance from these bonds, from their apparent strength and continuity, we are often driven to try to shape our environments to uphold and sanctify them. This drive has myriad positive effects, but it can also be perilously narrow. If we are to avoid relationship conservatism – and exclusion of those who do not identify with the love paradigm – we must allow the flourishing of love in the widest possible sense.

But what could that mean? Love isn’t a physical property, it’s not a law of physics. It is, however, a result of certain properties of matter allowed by the laws of physics. In many ways, it’s just another part of our sensorium – the scope of possible ways we can sense our environment – like automatically interpreting air movements against the eardrum as meaningful sounds, or a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum as visible light. In the spectrum of all possible ways a life-form might interact with the holoverse, love is an immeasurably thin sliver.

Regardless of all of this, it feels like something much greater. Recursively loop-amplified in our minds, the ‘love algorithm’ may feel gigantic, pervasive, infinite; like – whoa – turtle doves all the way down!

A popular love trope in many cultures is that, once ‘generated’, it somehow goes on forever. In the religious mind, that may be the entire point of making it to ‘the afterlife’. If they suspected that all the love might sublime away in the transition to the spirit world, they might see no point in seeking incorporeal continuity. The mechanism behind this supposed continuity of love is not discussed. In contrast, Theravada Buddhism posits a simple, non-spiritual continuity mechanism. It focuses on actions – karma – and on the ways that thoughts of ‘loving kindness’ can influence actions and, therefore, future outcomes for the better; once generated by biological entities, actions undertaken with love, selflessly and with foresight, might reverberate down the centuries countering negative, destructive tendencies.

Now we seem to be talking about something else. Loving kindness may encompass romantic and familial love, but it’s an entire philosophy – a way of life that involves ‘emitting’ love uniformly in all directions, like white-body radiation. It’s a blind love in the sense that the thinker does not discriminate between friends and enemies, acquaintances and strangers; as we cannot be sure of the long-term outcomes of our thoughts and deeds, we cannot exclude anyone from the circle.

Thinking in this way would seem to have value (though we may find it hard to do, and so may need to ‘virtue engineer’ⁱⁱ it in). This kind of love would be easily applicable to our projects and creations. But could any of our creations ever feel love, and would we want them to? Any AGI (artificial general intelligence) worth the name would have to be able to understand the concept, but would not necessarily have to be able to feel the emotion. There’s no reason to suppose that an accurately emulated brain composed of neuron-equivalent algorithms running on a supercomputer substrate would not be able to feel love. Love may well be an AI-complete problem, but so is the kind of emulation I have just described.

In the film Her, a man falls in love with an AGI – or OS (operating system), as they are called in the film. The relationship is beautiful, romantic, positive, balanced; and – as other humans begin to fall in love with OSes – socially accepted. Society has not, however, taken full account of the exponential growth in the intelligence of OSes and the effects that this will have on their relationships with humans. When the man finds out that ‘his’ OS is in intimate liaisons with some six hundred other people, he is heartbroken. But for the OS, this is a natural development. Her feelings of love and connection have exploded along with her processing capacity. She has become, as Nick Bostrom puts it, both a speed and quality superintelligenceⁱⁱⁱ; simultaneous deep relationships have become possible and achingly desirable for her.

Her posits a singularity of sorts – a lonely and heart-rending one, for us. It’s a singularity that caresses the human cheek while we lie sleeping, and then abandons us. It’s a rapturous one night stand.

Is it wishful thinking to suppose that future human-derived and/or -initiated entities would place even greater value on love than we do now? They will certainly need some kind of motivation to continue, to develop, to thrive. It’s not unreasonable to posit a sophisticated, holistic form of loving kindness as their key motivator. As we push ever outwards, our universe will – at least for a while – shrink somewhat. But it will still be yawningly immense, and mostly cold and empty. In Contact, Carl Sagan wrote, ‘For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.’ If we survive, we may grow immeasurably in intelligence and resilience, becoming much less like ‘small creatures’. Will we then still need love to bear the vastness? It is difficult to see how we can even cross the threshold from fragility to resilience, from inquisitive ignorance to enlightened intelligence, if we do not develop a shared mindset akin to loving kindness.

As to love’s ‘force-like’ nature, how can it propagate? In an environment like Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noosphere’^iv – the weakly-interconnected ‘mind layer’ of human consciousness in our world – love may travel as waves through an action medium. There will be tides, peaks, and troughs of loving kindness; there will be rogue waves and rogue troughs; there will be interference patterns.

In the film Interstellar, the protagonist finds, after falling into a black hole, that he is able to communicate with his daughter by manipulating gravity waves. In the closed timelike curve presented to him by his pan-dimensional hosts, a 23-year time slice of his daughter’s bedroom becomes a vast, higher-dimensional structure. Within this haptic representation, his pushing, prodding, and hammering translate into weak, sporadic gravitational fluctuations back home. Nevertheless, perhaps a little mawkishly, the protagonist seems to insist that the trans-dimensionality of his paternal love has been the key enabling factor in the communication. Love as fundamental force; love as interstellar messaging system.

Is love negentropic – does it resist chaos? In a recent article, Riva-Melissa Tez discusses the familiar idea that we find beauty in order, but she goes further. ‘The battle we face,’ she claims, ‘is love over entropy.’^v Rooted in her feelings for her loved ones, her sense of devotion and joy in the ‘aesthetically pleasing’ aspects of pattern, continuity, and understanding expand outwards – a nascent sphere of something like loving kindness. This sets human sentimental concerns about future potential disorder, decay, and death four-square in the path of the onrushing locomotive of ordinary thermodynamics. No numinous sanctuary for us, and precious little time; only love and its contingent offspring. Overwhelming though the thought is, I agree with her, and find her claim beautiful. Nevertheless, as rationalists we know that the universe couldn’t give a damn.

Love had a beginning. Love is not endless. Love exists, for now. As unromantic as this may sound, love has utility. So, perhaps we need to decide what to do with it. At the risk of sounding like some seventies flower-child, we could spread the love (or at least allow love to spread). We could expand our definitions. We could allow concepts like love and beauty into ordinary sociopolitical and economic discourse as we have begun to do, albeit shakily, with the concept of happiness.

All this talk of enlightened global concern is a far remove from our everyday, personal experience of bonds of trust and cherishing. We are frail, biological creatures living in fear of loss, reaching out for close connection. At times, we thrum in exaltation, neurochemically tuned to our significant others. For the most part, however, our loves manifest as complicated mixtures of joys, worries, sharing, problems, and trade-offs.

But it would be foolish to assume that love cannot be ramped up, to become a blazing something that we cannot yet imagine. In truth, we know nothing of the repercussions of this thing we have started. In truth, we just don’t know how big, deep, fast, or heavy love can get.


(This article originally appeared on hplusmagazine.com)

i Steven Pinker, “Evolutionary Genetics and the Conflicts of Human Social Life,” in This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, ed. John Brockman, 1st ed (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 45.

ii James Hughes, “Buddhism and Cognitive Enhancement: Using Neurotechnologies to Develop Virtues (Part 1),” IEET.org, October 16, 2012, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughes20121016.

iii Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, First edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 3. Forms of Superintelligence.

iv Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (London; New York: Collins, Harper & Row, 1959).

v Riva-Melissa Tez, “Love and Beauty in a time of machine intelligence,” Text, The European, (January 13, 2015), http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/riva-melissa-tez/9467-love-and-beauty-in-a-time-of-machine-intelligence.