poor bud.....
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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What is love, how can it be defined? How to know if you love someone (and the other way around) if there is no definition to compare against?
Did the person compliment me because they meant it or "just" to make me feel good?
This question also works in reverse: should one be nice just to be nice or only say nice things if they are 100% behind the subject?
In my worldview there is no pure though. Everything is caused by other thoughts and intentions. So if someone says something, do they mean it or do they follow an internal protocol? Am I being friendly because I am friends with the person or because of my internal cost-gain calculation which says being nice helps with later requested favors?
Questions over questions which take up my braintime and can't really be answered.
Well, they don't take up to much, as I am almost never in situations where I receive input that my brain can grind down in analytics.
A pessimistic take on this is that all relationships are transactional - basically the guilded age era of social darwinism but extended to all social interactions, not just economic.
An optimistic take is that humanity desires social interaction, and positive feedback is a motivation for engaging in polite and supportive social activity. You and others you interact with benefit from the positive feedback loop, so the chain reaction of kindness is incentivised for all those who desire it.
An analytical take is its impossible to find one theorem for all of humanity. Humanity is one massive unknown variable composed of billions of individual unknown variables, so it is foolish to try and derive one formula explaining the emotional reaction of love. How that may be triggered is just so unquantifiable at scale. The answer would be to simply embrace what works for you.
Not sure if any of these would be right.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if the ELIZA effect is a good or bad thing for humanity as a whole.
Like we can be delusional enough to believe that a chatbot with no greater depth is sentient, but is that better than the alternative? To believe that the only options we can rely on for self worth and emotional connections are other humans?
Hard to wrap your head around.