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"But You'd Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? ... Right?"

by johnswentworth
15th Nov 2025
3 min read
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"But You'd Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? ... Right?"
23interstice
2Adele Lopez
2the gears to ascension
9Cole Wyeth
6Wei Dai
2Mo Putera
1Signer
6Nina Panickssery
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[-]interstice7h2314

The rest of your brain and psychology evolved under the assumption that you would have a functioning oxytocin receptor, so I think there's an a priori case that it would be beneficial for you if it worked properly(yes, evolution's goals are not identical to your own, still though.....)

Reply211
[-]Adele Lopez3h20

Maybe this is true, but I kind of suspect he would rather tweak many other aspects of himself instead, to the extent this is actually true. Sure, that's probably not possible (for now), but it may be precious enough to be worth holding out for since it is likely to also change his values (even if it is beneficial in the short term by his current values).

It would be like taking a murder-pill, except instead of murder it's love.

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[-]the gears to ascension4h20

Yeah I think it's probably inaccurate to say you don't meta-value this particular thing, OP. Seems more like you've gotten a deal where you don't need it the way others do, and that when you examine the network of implications of your other values, you will find there is an aching hole at the edges where there would normally be a connection to this value; other values putting value on things which are hard or impossible without the presence of this value, would be my main guess as to how that works. And maybe you can and want to engineer a world where you can stay that way, or maybe the values you do have would be best-according-to-you satisfied by achieving this otherwise normal thing by self-mod. That all said, this seems like a thing to worry about after the field of alignment has mostly reached maturity and you can retire.

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[-]Cole Wyeth6h92

I like it relatively better when those values are relatively more aligned with mine, but I still put some weight on people doing their own thing even when I otherwise don’t like it. And third, I am not the sort of person who would try to convince you to pursue values which are not your own (including by self-modifying into someone whose values are not in line with your current values). I might fight you, if your values are sufficiently opposed to mine, but I’m not going to try to convince you that I’m doing you a favor by fighting you. I’m certainly an asshole sometimes, but I at least strive to be an honest asshole.

Well said. I can identify with this part (and it reminds me of mtg's Black). In fact, I would go even further and say that "human values" being maximized by a Singleton forever would importantly fall short of my ideal future.

I basically agree with the rest of the essay, though I certainly feel companionate love. It has a lot of direct and indirect practical benefits (as well as being valuable for its own sake), but also means I have to make tradeoffs to pursue my ambitions (however, my revealed preferences are to follow my ambitions anyway, e.g. moving to Canada to do a PhD). 

Reply1
[-]Wei Dai5h6-1

Conditional on True Convergent Goodness being a thing, companionate love would not be one of my top candidates for being part of it, as it seems too parochial to (a subset of) humans. My current top candidate would be something like "maximization of hedonic experiences" with a lot of uncertainty around:

  1. Problems with consciousness/qualia.
  2. How to measure/define/compare how hedonic an experience is?
  3. Selfish vs altruistic, and a lot of subproblems around these, including identity and population ethics
  4. Does it need to be real in some sense (e.g., does being in an Experience Machine satisfy True Convergent Goodness)?
  5. Does there need to be diversity/variety or is it best to tile the universe with the same maxed out hedonic experience? (I guess if variety is part of True Convergent Goodness, then companionate love may make it in after all, indirectly.)

Other top candidates include negative or negative-leaning utilitarianism, and preference utilitarianism (although this is a distant 3rd). And a lot of credence on "something we haven't thought of yet."

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[-]Mo Putera2h20

Interesting, why do you have a lot of uncertainty on #4? 

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[-]Signer1h10

I get the possibility of the "Convergent" part, but what your hope for the "True" part derives from? Or is it just "as True as true knowledge", that still depends on who you want to know things and at what precision?

Also, what problems with consciousness and qualia are relevant here? Seems like maximizing of hedonic experience is possible in either dualist or eliminativist universe.

I understand you want to be uncertain, but you still need a prior to not update from, right? And so just elevating every philosophical idea humans invented to feel good about themselves to plausibility doesn't seem like the best strategy.

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[-]Nina Panickssery5h60

Has this train of thought caused you to update away from "Human Values" as a useful construct?

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One of the responses which one will predictably receive when posting something titled “How I Learned That I Don't Feel Companionate Love” is “... but you’d choose to feel it if you could, right?”.

Look man, your most treasured values are just… not actually that universal or convergent. I’m not saying that you should downgrade the importance of love to you. I am saying that an awful lot of people seem really desperate to find some story for why their most precious values are the True Convergent Goodness or some such. And love sure is an especially precious value generator for an awful lot of people, so people really want to find some reason why even a person who felt no companionate love would at least want to feel it. Empirically, that is just not what happens.

If I had a button which could magically turn my oxytocin receptors to the usual kind, rather than their current probably-dysfunctional state, I would view that button in basically the same way I view a syringe of heroin. It might be interesting as an experiment, just to see what it’s like. But it sure seems pretty common for heroin to give people a big new source of value to chase, and then their old values get thrown under the bus. And likewise, it sure seems pretty common for oxytocin to give people a great big value to chase (i.e. companionate love), and for their other values to get thrown under the bus.

Relationships are a place where this is relatively easy to see. After all, my path to figuring this all out routed through asking “Why do all these people around me seem happy in relationships which seem pretty darn bad to me? Is there some big source of value which I haven’t seen for some reason?”. I looked around, and saw guys I knew stressed out about earning enough to support their girlfriends who had near-zero income, and also dealing with regular and very unpleasant bouts of PMS plus ongoing background neuroticism the rest of the time, yet apparently these guys were happy with their relationships. I myself had been in a relationship which sure seemed a lot better than most of those, and it still was overall bad. That feeling of deep loving connection, of oxytocin, is apparently good enough to counterbalance all those downsides. And to be clear, I am quite comfortable recognizing that other people have different values than I do, and I’m glad on some level that those other people are pursuing their values successfully. But for myself, I would not hit a button to feel positive about terrible-by-my-current-values relationships, any more than I would shoot heroin to feel positive about other terrible-by-my-current-values situations.

So that’s relationships. But the costs of oxytocin which I consider most important and cruxiest are more speculative than relationships.

Here’s a mental model. Oxytocin has two important things going on, which together make it especially dangerous from my perspective:

  1. Its contribution to one’s values is especially strong - typically the strongest single component, though people do vary a lot.
  2. Deep loving companionship is relatively easy to achieve for a majority of humans.[1]

Put those together, and oxytocin provides a sort of… outlet. It’s a thing that’s sitting on the shelf, easy to reach for, and will make you happy. It’s a much easier way to be happy than, say, achieving some big vision, or growing stronger in some way, or bringing your fantasies into reality. Again, the comparison to heroin is apt: why chase more difficult values, when there are easier and bigger-feeling values sitting right there within reach?

The upshot is that, it seems to me, oxytocin is pretty antithetic to ambition. And not just ambition “at the grand scale”; also smaller-scale ambitions, relevant to the whole range of non-oxytocin-driven values.

And to be clear, I am not saying that those of you with normal oxytocin signalling should turn it off. First, that will just leave you with depression; never having had the thing is importantly different. Second, I do generally like to see people pursuing their own values. I like it relatively better when those values are relatively more aligned with mine, but I still put some weight on people doing their own thing even when I otherwise don’t like it. And third, I am not the sort of person who would try to convince you to pursue values which are not your own (including by self-modifying into someone whose values are not in line with your current values). I might fight you, if your values are sufficiently opposed to mine, but I’m not going to try to convince you that I’m doing you a favor by fighting you. I’m certainly an asshole sometimes, but I at least strive to be an honest asshole.

  1. ^

    Yes, I know there is a loneliness epidemic, and I do have some sympathy for those suffering from it. My point is that companionship is not hard for most people to achieve relative to, say, building a successful medium-sized company or advancing the state of knowledge in some research field or winning a local election or whatever medium-sized ambitions one might have.