But the greatest of these is love

1 Corinthians 13:1-8,12-1

Is it Better to Love Better Things?

It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory that love cannot be rationally justified. Since it seems better to love good people rather than evil villains, it appears that there are indeed reasons for (or, at least, against) love. Is it coherent to talk this way and deny that love can be justified? I think so and will explain how

Friendly Superintelligent AI: All You Need is Love

There is a non-trivial chance that sometime in the (perhaps somewhat distant) future, someone will build an artificial general intelligence that will surpass human-level cognitive proficiency and go on to become "superintelligent", vastly outperforming humans. The advent of superintelligent AI has great potential, for good or ill. It is therefore imperative that we find a way to ensure-long before one arrives-that any superintelligence we build will consistently act in ways congenial to our interests. This is a very difficult challenge in part because most of the final goals we could give an AI admit of so-called "perverse instantiations". I propose a novel solution to this puzzle: instruct the AI to love humanity. The proposal is compared with Yudkowsky's Coherent Extrapolated Volition, and Bostrom's Moral Modeling proposals

To love is to act

"When Jesus told us that when we feed others we are feeding Him, he wasn’t joking, and he wasn’t referring to spiritual hunger. He said that when we give a cup of cold water to the least of these, we are doing it for him. Actual water, actually for Jesus. And when we don’t, we send Jesus away thirsty. Rose taught me that to love is to act, and that is what we have been trying - more or less - to do for the last twenty years as a team. We love with words when we tell people about Jesus who loves so sacrificially. We love with actions when we meet new refugees with a cup of cold water. Without words the Gospel doesn’t have legs and without actions the Gospel doesn’t mean anything. In this magazine our team writes about how this plays out on the field and changes the lives of real people who are desperate for Good News.

Romantic Love and Knowledge: Refuting the Claim of Egoism

Romantic love and its predecessor eros have both been characterized as forms of egoistic love. Part of this claim is concerned specifically with the relation between love and knowledge. Real love, it is claimed, is prior to knowledge and is not motivated by it. Romantic love and eros according to this view are egoistic in that they are motivated by a desire for knowledge. Agapic love characterized by bestowal represents a true form of love unmotivated by selfish desires. I argue that such an emphasis on bestowal at the expense of knowledge or appraisal of the beloved is problematic. The knowledge dimension of romantic love, rather than contributing to selfishness, can be a means of freeing us from egoism when we understand identity in its relational or social form