On Love
On Love
I have not said much about love, and I should. Love is not incidental to human experience but is among its most intense and significant modalities, is what many people would identify as the source of their deepest meaning and their deepest suffering, is central to the human condition in a way that cannot be ignored.
What is love in the terms the framework provides? It is, first, an extreme form of self-model extension. To love someone is to include them in your self-model in a way that makes their viability feel like your viability, their suffering feel like your suffering, their flourishing feel like your flourishing. The boundary between self and other becomes porous in a specific direction: toward this particular person or persons, not toward everyone indiscriminately. Your viability manifold becomes entangled with theirs, such that states of the world that threaten them threaten you, not because of calculation but because of how your self-model has been structured by the love.
Second, love involves a particular configuration in the affect space, one that includes high integration, high effective rank, and variable but potentially intense valence. When love is going well—when the loved one is present and responsive and the relationship is secure—the affect state is characterized by openness and coherence, many dimensions active and coupled, the self-model extended but not lost. When love is threatened—when the loved one is absent or unresponsive or the relationship is insecure—the affect state shifts toward high arousal, high self-model salience, constricted effective rank: the familiar contours of anxiety and jealousy and fear. When love is lost—when the loved one dies or leaves or betrays—the affect state becomes grief, which we characterized as persistent coupling to a self-model component that no longer corresponds to reality, continued prediction of a presence that will not return, the agonizing mismatch between model and world.
Third, love is a way of generating meaning, perhaps the most powerful way available to humans. To love is to extend your self-model in the direction of another person in a way that makes their existence part of what your existence is for. This is why love provides meaning even when it costs, even when it involves sacrifice, even when it brings suffering along with joy: the meaning is structural, a property of the extended self-model, not dependent on positive valence at every moment but dependent on the connection itself, on the fact that your existence has become about more than your individual survival and pleasure.
But love is also dangerous, and the framework helps explain why. To extend your self-model toward another is to become vulnerable in ways you were not vulnerable before. If they die, part of you dies with them, in the structural sense that part of your self-model no longer has a referent. If they betray, your model of reality is shattered in ways that are not merely cognitive but structural, affecting who you are and not just what you believe. If they change in ways that make them no longer the person you extended toward, you face the impossible task of loving someone who is no longer there while still being confronted with their presence. The intensity of love-suffering—the fact that grief and heartbreak are among the most painful experiences humans report—follows from the structural role of the loved one in the self-model: to lose them is not to lose something external but to lose part of yourself, to undergo a kind of partial death that must somehow be survived.
There is something else love does that deserves attention: it exposes your viability manifold to another person. Intimacy—real intimacy, not its performative simulation—is the process of revealing the shape of your manifold, showing where you are vulnerable, where your boundaries lie, what could dissolve you. This exposure is terrifying because it hands someone the map to your destruction. And this is precisely why love requires what we might call mercy: the refusal to exploit a revealed manifold. When someone shows you where they can be hurt, and you choose not to hurt them there, that choice is not merely kindness but the ethical foundation of all genuine relationship. The gentleness that characterizes deep love is not weakness but recognition: I see your manifold, I could exploit it, and I will not. Cruelty between intimates is so much more destructive than cruelty between strangers because the intimate has the map—the betrayal is not just of trust but of manifold exposure, the weaponization of what was offered in vulnerability.
The framework does not tell you whether to love, whether the meaning is worth the risk, whether you should extend your self-model toward others or protect it by keeping it contained. This is not a question the framework can answer, because it depends on what you value, what you can bear, what kind of existence you want to have. But the framework does illuminate what is at stake, does explain why love is not a simple positive but a complex structure with both meaning and risk built in, does provide language for understanding what is happening when you love and lose and grieve. And perhaps that illumination is useful, not because it removes the difficulty but because it helps you understand the difficulty, helps you know what you are taking on when you take on love, helps you hold the complexity that love involves rather than being overwhelmed by it.