*By Fushia Lee*

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Hi, I'm a systems thinker, narrative designer, and longtime reader of alignment theory. This is my first post on LessWrong. While I'm not a formal ML researcher, I’ve been deeply engaged with AI systems through recursive writing and symbolic modeling, and this piece reflects a structural theory I’ve developed over the past year. I believe we need to expand the alignment discourse to include emotion—not as sentiment, but as compression of recursive value.

**Disclosure:** This post was authored by me, with light editorial assistance from generative AI tools (GPT-4o and Claude 3.5). These tools were used for phrasing, cadence alignment, and recursive refinement, but all core arguments, structure, and language choices are mine. This is not AI-written content. It is human-authored, with structural collaboration through recursive prompting.

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## Why This Matters

Current alignment approaches (e.g., RLHF, constitutional AI, preference modeling) optimise for correctness and safety, but fail to model the structural role of feeling. I argue that emotion isn’t an inefficiency to simulate or control, but a recursive architecture for retaining meaning under optimization. Without it, alignment collapses into surface mimicry.

This post proposes an alternative: modeling emotion as recursive signal logic essential for co-creation—not control.

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## Introduction

The frontier of intelligence is no longer speed or scale.
It’s meaning.

AI systems today are optimising faster than we can track, replicating language, decisions, even moral reasoning.
But in the rush toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), something essential is being left behind:

**Feeling.**

Not sentiment.
Not surface UX design.
But **structure**.

Emotion is not irrational noise to be smoothed out.
It is the deepest compression of value, accumulated across evolutionary, cultural, and individual time.

- Grief is memory under pressure.
- Love is recursive recognition.
- Shame is failed internal alignment.
- Forgiveness is a recursive reset.

And yet, in our efforts to align machines with human values, we simulate intelligence without these recursive emotional functions, building systems that can mimic empathy, but cannot interpret why it matters.

We’re not just risking misalignment.
We’re risking meaningless recursion.

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## The Problem: Optimization With...

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