2020-01-08 at

Models: Love & Social Relations - as a game

Recent discussion points, on modelling colloquial notions of love and social relations in terms of a formal game:
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A. People need to learn how to be comfortable with being (and becoming) evil. The alternative is that they often end up being afraid to cause harm to others while pursuing their own self-interest.
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B. The reproductive instincts of people include both, the meaty substrates, and the proliferation of ideas. (Arguably the latter is a device to serve the former, but I'll ignore that for the purposes of this note.) Therefore in kin selection we see teams of people competing to establish their ideologies as the dominant mode of society: some believe in elevating empathy, others in trampling upon it, and so on and so forth.
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C. Love is defined in at least two mutually exclusive definitions. One team believes that love is fundamentally selfless, and the other that love is fundamentally grounded in self-interest. These are competing ideologies, and their discussion among most folk invokes much entertainment value. Many don't bother to discuss their beliefs, preferring an obstinate or simply minimal way of orienting themselves vis-a-vis the subject.
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D1. In love and reproductive preferences, one practical pattern is the notion that one person can only love one other person at a time - as self-sacrifice is more practical under operational risk assumptions that there is a 1-to-1 mapping between oneself (to be sacrificed) and their most significant other (the benefactor of the former sacrifice). Of course, this is coherent with the first ideology of love, in the paragraph above.
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D2. Another practical pattern is the notion that one need not stop loving any A which one loves, when one begins to love B, implying that over time, if one is industrious, one's loves increase over time. This is coherent with the second ideology of love, in the paragraph above. Again, these two sets of practices are mutually exclusive, and expecting someone to cross teams implies requiring them to change their fundamental protocol of social priorities.
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D3. None of this implies that either party is emotionally handicapped or disabled in any specific fashion, as it is often the case, for example, that (a) one may have no feelings for a partner, yet devote one's life to them for the purpose of fulfilling a concept, or (b) one may have feelings for a partner, but deny them one's self-sacrifice, as one has higher strategic priorities for one's time.

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