Toward an Analytical Understanding of Unconditional Love

Unconditional Love, Pattern Appreciation and Pareto-Optimal Empathy

One of the ways we have been thinking about the "Loving AI" project, in which we are using the Sophia robot and other robotic or animated agents as meditation and consciousness guides for humans, is as "creating AIs with unconditional love toward humans."   Having AIs or robots help humans through meditation and consciousness-expansion exercises, is something that is being explored in that project as a step toward more ambitious examples of deeply, widely loving robots and AIs.

                                                                    

(The Sophia robot demonstrating some of her consciousness-expansion chops on stage at the Science and Nonduality conference in 2017...)

But what is "unconditional love", really?  Like "consciousness" itself, it is something that no two people involved in the project think about the same way.    Refining and interpenetrating our various conceptions of these ideas, is part of the fun and reward of being involved in a project of this nature.

Thinking about it practically, if some other being loves me unconditionally in the abstract, that is somewhat nice to know, but doesn't necessarily do me much good or even make me feel much better.   Many times in my life, someone has done really annoying things to/for me out of good intentions and even love -- because they felt love toward me but didn't really understand me hardly at all.   A general feeling of love toward me isn't really enough to be helpful -- what's needed is love coupled with understanding.

This brings us beyond unconditional love, though, to what one might call unconditional or universal empathy.   Which is the main topic I want to talk about here -- in a moderately rambling and musing sort of way....  

I will model unconditional love as the combination of two factors: universal empathy, and the goal of maximizing the world's well-being.  

I will argue there are practical limits on the scope of empathy, due to the complexity of the underlying processes involved with empathizing; and I will introduce the notion of Pareto-optimal empathy as a way of thinking about the closest we can come to universal empathy within a domain where bounded resources are a reality.

Foundationally, I will suggest, all these concepts derive from the basic phenomenon of "pattern appreciation" (a term due to David Hanson).   That is: a universally empathic agent is one that can recognize all patterns; and a unconditionally loving agent is one that has a goal of encouraging and enabling all patterns to get extended.   In resource-constrained situations, agents can only recognize some patterns not all, and extension of some patterns constrains extension of other patterns -- so one gets complexities such as Pareto-optimal empathy.   Simple, primitive underlying pattern dynamics are manifested in the context of persistent entities and "beings" (which can themselves be viewed as certain sorts of patterns) as empathy and love.   Unconditional love, in this analysis, is basically the maximally ethical behavior according to the "pattern ethics" outlined in my 2006 book The Hidden Pattern.

Universal or Broad-Scope Empathy as a Multi-Objective Optimization Problem

A bit prosaically, one can think about the goal of “empathizing with all beings”, or the goal of "empathizing with all humans", as a multi-objective optimization problem.

A multi-objective optimization problem is the problem of maximizing or minimizing a SET of functions, without necessarily specifying which of the functions is more important than which other one, or placing weights on the functions....   For instance, in mate selection, a woman might want a man who is funny, handsome and wealthy.    She might not know which of these she values more, let alone be able to weight the different qualities numerically.  But she would know that: given constant amounts of funniness and handsomeness, more wealth is better; given constant amounts of funniness and wealth, more handsomeness is better; and given constant amounts of handsomeness and wealth, more funniness is better.   Here we have a 3-objective optimization problem.

Modeling unconditional empathy as a multi-objective optimization problem, one consider that for each being X in the universe, “empathize with X” is a goal…. 

We don't have a solid, precise definition of "empathy", but I think the basic concept is clear.   When X empathizes with Y, there is an aspect of X (at least in some sub-module of X) experiencing what Y has experienced, in the sense of experiencing some analogue of what Y has experienced.   This analogue is generally supposed to inherit the key emotional aspects of Y's experience.   And the possession of this analogous experience generally enables X to predict some things about Y's cognitive or behavioral reaction to their experience.

From Empathy to Love

Commonly it occurs that when X empathizes with Y, then if Y is experiencing a bad situation in some way, X will then do something aimed at improving Y's condition.   But I don't think this is best considered as part and parcel of empathy itself.   As I'm thinking about it, a purely passive being could still be empathic.   This ties in with why I consider unconditional or universal empathy, as only one part of "unconditional love."

Clearly, an empathic being with a goal of improving the well-being of the world, will tend to do helpful things for the beings with which it empathizes.   But I find it conceptually cleaner to consider "having a goal of improving the well-being of the world" to be a separate quality for "having empathy."

This ties in with the related point that  having a goal of improving the well-being of the world, does NOT imply actually being able to usefully improve the well-being of the world.   For a world effectively model-able as being full of experiencing minds, empathy is critical for a well-intentioned mind to actually be capable of improving the well-being of the (minds in the) world.

Unconditional love, I suggest, can be effectively thought of as the combination of universal empathy with the goal of improving the world's well-being.   Having only universal empathy, one could simply stand by and co-experience the world-suffering, even if one had the power to do something about it.  Having only the goal of improving the world without an understanding of the world, one will just make a mess, because one will lack a deep resonant connection to the things one is trying to improve.   Putting them together, one has the desire to help each of the beings in the world, and the understanding to know what helping each of those beings really means.

Arguably Buber's concept of an I-Thou relationship contains both of these ingredients: empathy and the desire for improvement of well-being.   In Buber's terms, unconditional love is basically the same as having an I-Thou relationship with everything.   But here I am aiming to formulate things in a somewhat more scientifically analytical vein than was Buber's style.

Another framing would involve the concept of a high-quality scientific theory as I outlined in my book "Chaotic Logic" back in 1994.    One thing I noted there is that a high-quality theory displays significant mutual information between the particulars within the theory, and the particulars of the phenomenon being explained.   Empathy in the sense described here also requires this -- this is a different way of looking at the idea of a "suitably analogous experience" ... one can think about "an experience with a high degree of mutual information with the experience being empathized with".   One can perhaps look at unconditional love as: the goal of universal well-being, combined with high-quality theories about how to realize this goal.

This may seem overly strict as a conception of unconditional love -- one may want a definition in which, say, an extremely loving dog should be validly considered as unconditionally loving of all beings, even if it can't empathize with most of the things that are important to most beings.   But I don't think this extremely accepting definition of unconditional love is the most interesting one.    Love without understanding is limited in nature, because the lover does not even know what they're loving. 

This sort of distinction has been explored in romantic fiction many times: Imagine a beautiful and intellectual teenage girl, with one suitor who loves her for her good heart and beauty, and another who loves those things but also fully appreciates her unique intellect, her love of poetry and mathematics, etc.    We would say the latter suitor loves her more completely because he understands more of her.   The former suitor does love her, but he really only loves part of her because the other part is incomprehensible to him.

 Pattern Appreciation as the Deep Foundation of Empathy and Love

Another, deeper way of looking at the matter is to focus on patterns rather than "beings."   A "being", in the sense of a persistently identified entity like an object, mind or "agent", is in the end a specific sort of pattern (existing as a pattern relative to some abstract observer, where an abstract observer can be quantified e.g. as a measure of simplicity and an applicative operator).   Framing empathy and love in terms of persistent beings is natural in the context of human life and culture, yet not as foundational as framing them in terms of pure elementary pattern dynamics.

Consider the goal of pursuing extension and expansion and synergy-with-other-patterns for all patterns in the universe (obviously a rather complex multi-objective optimization problem, since given limited resources what extends one pattern may constrain another).   In this view, empathy has to do with how many patterns one perceives.   In order to meaningfully "pursue" extension/expansion/synergy of pattern P as a goal, an agent (or other pattern) must perceive and identify pattern P.   Someone who is not empathic with mind Y, simply is not able to perceive or understand many of the key patterns in Y's mind.   So the key point here is: What an agent can really pursue is the combination of

•        extension/expansion/synergy for all known patterns in the universe
•        expanding the scope of patterns known

But of course the methodology an agent can follow for expanding the scope of patterns it knows, will be constrained and guided by the patterns it knows.   So "unconditional pattern-level love" would consist of knowing all patterns in the universe and pursuing extension and expansion and synergy for all of them.   Deficiencies in pattern recognition, such as deficiencies in empathy, would constrain an agent to a lesser degree of pattern-level love.

A Quantitative Question

This collection of perspectives on the concept of empathy allows us to analyze empathy in a computational sense (without making any commitment about what model of computation to assume, e.g. primitive recursive versus Turing versus hyper-Turing, etc.).   For a being X to have empathy for a being Y in the sense articulated above, it is clear that X must be capable of running processes that are, in an appropriate sense, analogous to Y's processes.  

There is a quantitative question lurking here: If Y uses amount r of resources in having a certain experience, how much resources must X necessarily utilize in order to have a closely enough analogous experience to Y's to validly be "empathizing with" Y?  

So, for instance, imagine a little old lady who noticed the desire of my 13 year old self to own a personal computer (back when I was 13 these were extremely novel devices), and felt kindly toward me and bought me a radio (since it was cheaper than a computer and was also a wizzy electronic device).   This lady would have been empathizing with me, in a sense -- but poorly.   I wanted the computer so I could experiment with computer programming.   It was a desire to program that was possessing me, not a desire to own gadgets (I did like experimenting with electronics, but for that a standard radio wouldn't have been much use either).   Her ability to experience something analogous to my experience was limited, due to her inadequate model of me -- she experienced vicariously my desire for a gadget, but didn't experience vicariously my desire to be able to teach myself programming.   Corresponding with her poor model of me, her ability to predict what I would do with that computer (or radio) was limited.

This example illustrates the fuzziness of empathy, and also the need for reasonably close modeling in order to have a high enough degree of empathy to actually be useful to the entity being empathized with.

To rigorously  answer this quantitative question would require greater formalization of the empathy concept than I'm going to give here.  It would require us to formalize the "analogous" mapping between X's and Y's experience, presumably using morphisms between appropriately defined categories (e.g. graph categories involving X's and Y's states).  It would require us to formalize the type of prediction involved in X's predictions of Y's states and behaviors, and the error measures to be used, etc.    Once all this is done, though, it is pretty clear that the answer will not be, say, log(r).  It's pretty clear that to empathize with an experience of a system Y in a useful way, generally will require an amount of resources vaguely on the order of those that Y critically utilizes in having that experience.

(This being a blog post, I'm casually leaping past some large technical points in my argument.   But this shouldn't be interpreted as a minimization of the value of actually working out details like this.   A well-worked-out mathematical theory of empathy would be a great thing to have.  One could use the reduction of empathy and love to pattern appreciation to create a quantitative formalization of these ideas, but there would be a lot of "arbitrary" looking choices to make ... reference computing models to assume, parameters to set ... and studying how these assumptions affect the quantitative aspect mentioned above would take a bit of careful thought.  But I don't have time to think through and write out all the details of such a thing now, so I'm making some reasonable assumptions about what the consequences of such a theory will be like, and proceeding on with the rest of my intuitive train of thought.....   )

The Practical Difficulty of Universal Empathy

It immediately follows from this quasi-formalization of empathy  that, for a system with finite resources, empathizing (with non-trivial effectiveness) with all possible beings X will not be achievable. 

Of course "all possible beings" is stronger than needed.   What about just empathizing with all beings in the actual universe we live in?  (Setting aside the minor issue of defining what this universe is....)

In principle, an entity that was much more mentally powerful than all other beings in the universe could possess empathy for all other beings in the universe. 

But for entities that are at most moderately powerful relative to the complexity and diversity of other entities in the universe, empathizing with all other entities in the universe will not be possible.  To put it simply: Eventually the brain of the empathizing entity will fill up, and it won’t be able to contain the knowledge needed to effectively empathize with additional entities in a reasonable time-frame.

Pareto-Optimal Empathy

We can then think about a notion such as “Pareto-optimal empathy” ….

A Pareto optimum of a multi-objective optimization problem, is a solution that can't be slightly tweaked to improve its performance on one of the objectives, without harming its performance on one or more of the other objectives.

In the example of a woman looking for a funny, handsome and wealthy man, suppose she is considering a vast array of possible men, so that for any candidate man M she considers, there are other men out there who are similar to M, but vary from M in one respect or another -- slightly richer, a lot taller, a bit less intelligent, slightly more or less funny, etc.   Then a man M would be a Pareto optimum for her if, for all the other men M' out there,

•       if M' is more handsome than M, then M' is less funny or less wealthy than M
•       if M' is funnier than M, then M' is less handsome or less wealthy than M
•       if M' is wealthier than M, then M' is less funny or less handsome than M

What Pareto optimality says is that, for all men M' in the available universe, if they are better than M in one regard, they are worse than M in some other regard.

What is interesting is that there may be more than one Pareto-optimal man out there for this woman (according to her particular judgments of funniness, handsomeness and wealth).   The different Pareto-optimal men would embody different balances between the three factors.   The set of all the Pareto-optimal men is what's called the woman's "Pareto front."

Getting back to empathy, then, the basic idea would be: An agent is Pareto-optimally empathic if there would be no way to increase their degree of empathy for any being X in the universe, without decreasing their degree of empathy for some other being Y in the universe.

There would then be a “Pareto front” of Pareto-optimally empathic agents, embodying a diversity of choices regarding whom to empathize with more.

To be sure, not many humans occupy spaces anywhere near this Pareto front.   The limitations on human empathy in current and historical society are generally quite different ones; they are not generally the ones imposed strictly by the computational resources of the human brain and body.   Nearly all humans could empathize much more deeply and broadly than they do, without improving or bypassing their hardware.

The Pareto-optimal empathy concept applies on the underlying pattern level as well.    Given limited resources, every known pattern can't be concurrently urged to extend,  expand and synergize without conflicts occurring.    Further every pattern in the universe can't be recognized by the same finite system -- the inductive biasing that allows an agent to recognize one pattern, may prevent it from recognizing another (related to the "no free lunch theorem").    Finite-resource systems that recognize and create patterns can exercise broad-scope pattern-level love via pattern appreciation and active pattern enhancement, but unconditional pattern-love needs infinite resources.

Increasing Empathy By Expanding Capacity

A missing ingredient in the discussion so far is the possibility for an agent to expand its capacity, so as to be able to empathize with more things (either becoming infinite, or becoming a bigger finite agent).  An infinite entity can, potentially, empathize with all other entities (whose size are finite or are some sufficiently lower order of infinity than the entity) completely, without compromise.   A finite entity that assimilated enough of the universe's mass-energy could potentially make itself powerful enough to empathize with every other entity in the universe.

An agent may then face a question of how much of its finite resources to devote to expanding its capacity, versus how much to achieving Pareto-optimal empathy given its current resources.   But we can incorporate this into the optimization framework by defining one of the multiple goals of the agent to be: Maximizing the total expected empathy felt toward agent X, over the entire future.   In this way, the possibility is embraced that the best way to maximize empathy over all time is to first focus on expanding empathic capacity and then on maximizing current empathy, rather than to immediately focus on maximizing current empathy…

The closest one can come to unconditional love as an individual agent, then, short of breaking out of the mode of being in which finite resources are a reality, is something like: Pareto-optimal empathy, plus the goal of increasing the world's well-being.   Those of us who aspire to some form of unconditional love as an abstract conceptual ideal, would do well to keep this more specific formulation in mind.   Though I have no doubt many of the specifics can be improved.

Unconditional Eurycosmic Love

From the underlying patternist view, "expanding capacity" is mostly about where the boundaries around a system are drawn.   Drawing them around an individual physical entity like a person, robot or software system ... or the Global Brain of the biological and electronic systems on the Earth ... one faces finite-resources issues.   Considering the pattern-system of the whole universe, one concludes that the universe as a whole recognizes all the patterns that exist in it and, to some extent, fosters their extension and expansion and synergy.   But still, one pattern's growth constrains that of another.  

To get to truly unconditional pattern-level love, one has to go to the level of the multi-multi-...-multi-verse, which I've called the Y-verse or the Eurycosm ... here all possibilities exist, along with all possible weightings of all possibilities.   Everything is open to grow and expand and synergize freely.   Individual universes are created within this broader space by delineating rules, structures and dynamics that create resource constraints, thus limiting the direct existence of unconditional love, but opening up possibilities for increase in the degree of approximation to unconditional love within the given constraints.

In Sum

“Unconditional empathy” and "unconditional love" are the province of beings much larger in capacity than the beings they are empathizing with …

... but Pareto-optimal empathy gives a way of thinking about empathy that is “as unconditional as possible given the empathizing mind’s constraints”

… and that incorporates the process and possibility of a mind overcoming its (perceived or actual, depending on one's perspective) constraints....

And so to approximate unconditional love in a situation of constrained resources: Aim to contribute to the world's well-being, and aim to position your balance of empathies (averaged appropriately over expected futures) somewhere on the Pareto front.

At the underlying, foundational level, love and empathy are about patterns recognizing other patterns and encouraging them to extend, expand and synergize.   Pattern growth can be considered to occur unfettered in a sufficiently broadly defined sort of multiverse, but in a universe like our physical or cultural worlds or our individual minds, there are resource constraints, so that unconditional love and empathy can be increasingly approximated but not fully achieved within these boundaries.