On love.

It's come to my attention recently that a lot of people have dubious opinions of romance. To these people I say that romance is an enduring thing. People keep and inflate what is important to them, and so romance grows. People investigate and practive what is interesting to them, and so romance grows more skillful. And people make mistakes and so romance grows more thoughtful.

Romance is both a function of biological imperatives and information theory. Suppose you have an intelligence, who looks around, and tries to figure out why things act the way they do. And suppose there is another intelligence who does the same thing. What do you think will happen? They begin to pay attention to each other. As intelligences they are some of the complex AND unpredictable behavior in their local environment. And as they learn, they become more complex. Becoming more complex forces the other intelligence to try harder to understand, growing itself. And so these two happily spend ever increasing proportions of their time on each other, growing and learning. A simple story, of love? Love is the story of two people growing together, but it seems like more than that. But weakly, already we begin to see a basis for fascination with other within even simple expressions of people.


Love is not an emergent thing, but it is something that has great basis in our identity as thinking beings, and as such, it will endure so long as that remains so. Love is important to people now for a wild variety of reasons, the greatest of which is emotional. But important and beautiful things are preserved, even through great change. So we can expect love to outlast our simple emotions in some form or another. As we grow up, we only lose those things we no longer want or need.