Notes: Chapter 20: Love as the Algorithm
Chapter notes for “Chapter 20: Love as the Algorithm”
Notes
1 M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (1978). Peck’s definition emphasizes love as action and will rather than feeling.
2 The convergent discovery of the Golden Rule across traditions is documented extensively in the comparative ethics literature. See, e.g., the Parliament of the World’s Religions’ “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic” (1993), which identified “Do not do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself” as a principle shared across all major traditions.
3 Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17:2 (2003): 297-314. See also Keltner’s Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023) for accessible summary of subsequent research.
4 Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (2021). Slingerland synthesizes evolutionary biology, archaeology, and cognitive science to argue that intoxication has been adaptive for social coordination — explaining why genetic and cultural solutions to the “problem” of alcohol haven’t spread despite millennia of documented harm. The argument is supported by research on ritual, costly signaling, and the role of altered states in facilitating trust among strangers.
5 Surowiecki, James, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (2004). Doubleday. Surowiecki’s four conditions for crowd wisdom (diversity, independence, decentralization, and aggregation) map directly onto the design requirements for human-AI coordination.
6 Stiegler, Bernard, The Neganthropocene (2018). Open Humanities Press. Stiegler’s distinction between the “Entropocene” (our age of accelerating entropy through extractive consumption) and the “Neganthropocene” (a possible future built on negentropic, creative construction) parallels Trust Attractor’s distinction between extraction and coordination economics.
7 ahbez, eden, “Nature Boy” (1948). Recorded by Nat King Cole. ahbez (who spelled his name in lowercase, considering only God worthy of capitalization) lived as a mystic and wanderer in Los Angeles; the song became one of the most recorded standards in American popular music.
7b Bruteau, Beatrice. The Grand Option: Personal Transformation and a New Creation. University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
9 Wilson, Edward O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Wilson argued that all branches of knowledge could and should be unified under a framework grounded in the natural sciences. His ambition was correct; his method was imperialist. Wilson’s consilience dissolves the humanities into biology. The mandorla preserves both circles: mechanism does not explain away meaning; it reveals why meaning was there in the first place.
8 The case described is that of Krista and Tatiana Hogan, born 2006 in British Columbia, Canada. Their cranial bridge includes a thalamic connection that appears to enable shared sensory experience. See Dominus, Susan, “Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?” The New York Times Magazine (May 25, 2011). The case remains one of the most thoroughly documented examples of shared neural processing between distinct consciousnesses.