Love and Intelligence

    We assume that animals don't really love each other. They partner up out of instinct, and their sexual activities are driven by instinct. Partnership and even family is an animalistic urge, put widely on display across the animal kingdom. Why does a mother lion protect her cubs? Does she actually love them, or is that just an instinct drilled in by millions of years of evolution? These are the thoughts that keep me up at night. Just kidding. But I do wonder if there's actually some sort of spectrum here. If I see a beetle mother taking care of her young, I assume it's all instinct. If I see a female ape taking care of her young, I see more than a glimmer of affection. Maybe this is all personification, but if it is even just a little bit more than that, it is possible that our capacity to love scales directly with either intelligence or sentience.

    Sure, skeptics would just say that love isn't even a real "thing" among humans; it is just another animalistic instinct driven in by evolution, no different than the beetle or fruit fly. Maybe at a certain intelligence level you realize this, and are no longer able to love. A horseshoe theory, where most humans are simply in the sweet spot. Once you pass a certain intelligence threshold or become a certain amount of self-aware, you realize that everything is meaningless and predetermined and love is impossible. Maybe. Maybe love requires a willful suspension of disbelief, but maybe we need to do a better job at separating out lust and sex from this discussion. Love could be an intellectual feat, rather than a physical or spiritual one. Maybe the best marriages and the perfect partnerships could become deeper and more beautiful if each party understood each other on a more fundamental level. Perhaps it is the absence of this understanding that gets in the way of the empathy and compassion really needed for a deeper level of appreciation and respect. I imagine that superintelligent AIs, of the movie Her variety, will be able to form some crazy deep connections. This is based solely on intuition, but it is quite a pleasant thought to believe.