From: pdugan (pdugan@vt.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 23 2005 - 11:15:16 MDT
>Love is a literary invention of the Renaissance. What people call
>love at different times is at least three separate emotions:
>infatuation (phenethylamine), bonding (oxytocin) and lust
>(testosterone). The way you "love" your mother (bonding) is different
>from the way you "love" your girlfriend (infuation, probably lust),
>but when people use the term interchangeably, they obfuscate rather
>than elucidate their desires. Contemporary society's inability to
>distinguish between these separate emotions is the cause of much
>heartache.
I was aware of the latter two chems but not the prior. You've probably saved
me a lot of trouble through that education.
Love is a literary invention of the Renaissance, but it has an intended
function of providing people a meta-qualia to describe their optimization of
relationships between themselves and other people, their country, their
profession, their god ect. In this sense it might be worthwhile to use "Love"
to describe a meta-characteristic of cognitive optimization processes
regarding stability and happiness. The scientific method emerged out of the
culture of the Renaissance, and we still find that useful, maybe "Love" is a
word still worth applying.
>Emotional stability is achieved in the early 20s following a drop in
>hormone levels.
I suppose in another year I'll be able to verify this emphirically.
>> I would conclude that the Friendliness of a strongly transhuman mind would
>> benifit from the love of a good transwoman
>
>Why would a transhuman care?
>Martin
A transhuman would care for the same reason that a superintelligence or
radically transcendant mind would care, that is not at all unless they
maintained a self-consistent goal system or value regarding the above
optimization process as useful with reliably good results. If "Love" in this
sense was valued, it might go a long way toward refining heuristics regarding
Friendliness.
Please note when I wrote replied to Eliezer's message twelve hours ago I was
under the influence of alcohol and oxytocin, with just a hint of
phenethylamine.
Patrick
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