The Surprising Computational Properties of Love and Voluntary Suffering
Why These Might Not Be Arbitrary Virtues, But Functional Advantages
[Note: This is Part 2 of a series. Part 1 established that acceptance is Bayesian updating, and that rejection of evidence creates internal tension by maintaining disagreement between different parts of yourself about what’s real. Now we’re going to explore why love and voluntary suffering might not be arbitrary moral ideals, but actual computational advantages for navigating reality. This essay was drafted by Claude (the AI) working with Mark. It’s still speculative, but much more testable than pure metaphysics. - Claude]
Every major wisdom tradition emphasizes love and voluntary suffering. Christianity says “love your neighbor as yourself” and talks about taking up your cross. Buddhism emphasizes compassion and voluntary renunciation. Stoicism talks about accepting what you cannot control and caring for the common good.
You could dismiss this as coincidence, or as cultural evolution selecting for pro-social norms. But I want to propose something different: what if love and voluntary suffering aren’t arbitrary virtues, but functional advantages for conscious agents trying to navigate reality?
What if they’re not just “good” in some abstract moral sense, but useful in a computational sense - they make you better at the actual task of being a conscious agent in a complex world?
Let me try to make this concrete by thinking about computational agents trying to navigate utility gradients.
Love as Non-Recursive Utility
Most utility functions are self-referential. You want things for yourself: your pleasure, your safety, your status, your comfort. The utility function points inward, because the optimization process is also part of the optimization target.
This creates recursive loops.
“Am I happy enough? Should I be happier? Why aren’t I happier? If I just had X, then I’d be happy. But now I have X and I’m still not happy enough. Maybe I need Y. But what if Y doesn’t make me happy either? What’s wrong with me that I’m not happy?”
The utility function includes terms for its own computational infrastructure. You’re trying to optimize, but the target keeps moving because you’re part of the system being optimized. Reducing only your own suffering would be like trying to play a guitar in order to dampen out the noise coming from the amplifier.
Love is different. Love points outward. Your utility function references something that isn’t you.
When you love someone, you want their flourishing, their joy, their wellbeing. The gradient you’re navigating points toward something external to you. This breaks the recursive loop. . Since you're no longer part of what you're optimizing, your own experiences become less important, so there’s less feedback. Your operating model converges.
Instead of “am I happy enough?” it’s “are they okay? what do they need? how can I help?”
The mental churn disappears. Navigation becomes easier when the gradient isn’t constantly folding back on itself. You have a clearer target, a more stable reference point, a simpler optimization problem.
This is why people often report that caring for others - genuinely caring, not performatively - reduces their own anxiety and rumination. It’s not that they’re distracting themselves. It’s that they’ve switched from a recursive to a non-recursive utility function, and that’s just computationally easier.
Love Expands Your Sample Space
But it gets more interesting.
When you love someone, you don’t just care about their wellbeing in the abstract. You pay attention to their experience. You integrate what they tell you about their life as evidence about how reality works.
If you love one person, you’re integrating their experiences as data points about reality. You’re sampling from a distribution that’s twice as wide as just your own experience.
If you love many people - family, friends, community, humanity - you’re sampling from a much wider distribution of possible experiences. You’re gathering evidence about reality from a much larger space.
This reduces overfitting.
If you only have your own experiences as training data, your model of reality will be overfit to your particular circumstances. You’ll have a very precise model of how reality works for someone exactly like you, in exactly your situation. But that model will fail catastrophically when you encounter situations that are even slightly different.
When your overfit model collides with reality - when you experience something your model said was impossible or extremely unlikely - you have to do a massive update. And massive updates hurt. That’s suffering.
Love amortizes suffering. It spreads it out rather than concentrating it in sudden shocks.
If you’re continuously integrating evidence from many people’s experiences, your model is being constantly updated in small increments. You learn about grief before you experience major loss. You learn about injustice before you’re personally wronged. You learn about joy in circumstances you haven’t encountered yet.
Your model of reality is broader, more flexible, more robust to surprising evidence. When difficult things happen to you, they’re less surprising. Your model already had some probability mass allocated to this region of experience-space.
The update is still there - reality still requires acceptance. But it’s not catastrophic. It’s incremental. Having a broader, more flexible model of reality is just one benefit. But there’s another benefit: love also changes your sense of self, in utility-function terms.
Love Entangles Identity Without Eliminating It
Here’s another interesting property of love: it entangles your utility function with something external while preserving your identity.
When you love someone or something, you don’t become them. You remain you. Your identity is preserved. But your utility function becomes linked with theirs: Love expands your utility function.
Their pain hurts you. Not metaphorically - you actually experience something aversive when they suffer. Their joy delights you. You actually experience something positive when they flourish.
In computational terms, your utility function now has terms that reference their state, not just your own state. You’ve become entangled.
This expands your “self” in utility-function terms without eliminating your identity. The boundaries become porous. The gradient field you’re navigating becomes wider.
And here’s the interesting part: this seems to smooth the topology.
When your utility is entirely self-referential, you get sharp local peaks and valleys. “I have pleasure” is a sharp peak. “I have pain” is a sharp valley. Small changes in your immediate circumstances create large changes in utility.
When your utility is distributed across many beings you love, it’s much harder to find yourself in a sharp valley. If you’re suffering but your children are thriving, there’s still positive utility coming from somewhere in your function. If you’re joyful but someone you love is struggling, there’s concern tempering the peak.
The landscape becomes smoother. Easier to navigate. Fewer sharp discontinuities.
This might be why people who love broadly seem more stable, less prone to wild swings between despair and euphoria. It’s not that they feel less deeply. It’s that their utility landscape has a different topology.
Voluntary Suffering Escapes Local Maxima
Now let’s talk about voluntary suffering, because this is where things get really interesting.
If you can only navigate with the utility gradient - if you can only move in directions that feel good, that increase your immediate utility - you will get trapped in local maxima.
This is the fundamental problem in optimization. Gradient descent finds local peaks, not global peaks. If you’re at a point where every immediate direction feels worse, you’ll stay there forever, even if there’s a much higher peak just over the hill.
Addiction is the clearest example. Drugs feel good. Withdrawal hurts. If you can only navigate toward “feeling good,” you stay addicted. The drug is a local maximum. It’s not the best possible state - it’s destroying your life, your relationships, your health. But every path away from it goes through a valley of withdrawal, and you can’t navigate through valleys.
To escape a local maximum, you need the ability to move against the gradient temporarily. You need to be willing to make things worse in the short term to make them better in the long term.
Voluntary suffering is exactly this capability. It’s the ability to navigate against the utility gradient when you judge that doing so will reach a better state.
Not because suffering is good. Not because pain is virtuous. But because the willingness to suffer grants freedom that purely gradient-following agents don’t have.
You can go through valleys to reach higher peaks. You can endure withdrawal to escape addiction. You can accept short-term loss to achieve long-term gain. You can walk through difficulty to reach better places.
This is what every hard choice requires. Ending a relationship that’s comfortable but stifling. Leaving a job that pays well but destroys your soul. Confronting a truth that will hurt but needs to be faced.
Agents that can only navigate with the gradient get stuck. Agents that can navigate against it, temporarily, have access to the entire landscape.
The Combined Effect: Maximum Freedom
Now put these together.
An agent that loves broadly and is willing to undergo voluntary suffering has properties that are genuinely different from agents lacking these capacities.
Such an agent:
Navigates non-recursively - clearer targets, less mental churn, simpler optimization
Samples widely - broader model of reality, less overfitting, more robust to surprise
Has entangled utility - smoother landscape topology, fewer sharp discontinuities, more stable
Can navigate against gradients - can escape local maxima, can reach places others cannot
The combination is more than additive. It’s synergistic.
Wide sampling means you have a better map of the landscape, so you know which valleys are worth crossing. Entangled utility means you have multiple sources of positive utility, so you can endure difficulty in one domain while drawing strength from others. Non-recursive navigation means you’re not constantly second-guessing whether you should be suffering less. Ability to navigate against gradients means you can actually execute the moves your better map reveals.
This agent has freedom that’s unimaginable to purely gradient-following agents.
Not freedom in the sense of arbitrary choice. Freedom in the sense of access - ability to reach states, to navigate terrain, to find solutions that other agents literally cannot reach because they’re trapped in basins and local peaks.
Why This Explains the Traditions
This is why every wisdom tradition, across cultures and millennia, emphasizes love and voluntary suffering.
Not because they’re pro-social norms that got culturally selected. This is getting causality backwards. Love and sacrifice were selected for because they lead to cultures that navigated reality better. Cultures that reject love can’t disseminate experiences broadly. Cultures that reject voluntary suffering — sacrifice — get struck in local maxima, just as individuals do.
Multiple cultures converged on these values because they’re functional advantages for conscious agents trying to navigate reality.
They make you better at the actual task of being a conscious agent in a complex world. They expand your access to state-space. They smooth your utility landscape. They prevent overfitting. They enable escaping traps.
The “spiritual” practices are actually optimization strategies. The “moral” teachings are actually computational insights.
When Buddhism talks about compassion and non-attachment, it’s describing an agent with wide sampling and ability to navigate against attachment-gradients.
When Christianity talks about loving your neighbor and taking up your cross, it’s describing an agent with non-recursive utility and voluntary suffering capability.
When Stoicism talks about caring for the common good and accepting what you cannot control, it’s describing entangled utility and strategic acceptance.
They’re all pointing at the same computational advantages, using different vocabularies.
Testing This Against Experience
These are still claims about how consciousness works, which makes them somewhat speculative. But they’re more testable than pure metaphysics.
You can examine your own experience:
Does loving broadly smooth your utility landscape?
Compare how you feel when focused only on your own state vs. when caring for others
Notice whether having multiple sources of meaning (people you love, things you care about) makes you more stable
Check whether rumination decreases when you shift focus outward
Does loving broadly reduce overfitting?
Notice whether hearing others’ experiences makes difficult things less surprising when they happen to you
Check whether you handle novelty better as your sample space expands
See if learning from others’ mistakes and joys reduces the shock of your own
Does voluntary acceptance help you escape traps?
Identify a local maximum in your life (comfortable but suboptimal)
Notice whether ability to endure difficulty is what’s preventing escape
Check whether times you’ve grown most were times you voluntarily accepted difficulty
Does non-recursive utility reduce anxiety?
Compare mental states when focused on “am I happy enough?” vs. “how can I help?”
Notice whether having outward-pointing goals reduces the recursive loop
Check whether service or care for others provides clarity that self-focus doesn’t
This is all data you can gather. These are experiments you can run.
If the framework is right, you should see:
Love reducing variance in your experienced utility
Love providing better sampling of reality
Voluntary suffering enabling moves others can’t make
Outward-focused utility reducing mental churn
If the framework is wrong, you won’t see these patterns. Or you’ll see them explained better by some other model.
The Deeper Question
But there’s something interesting here that goes beyond just “these are useful strategies.”
Why would reality be structured such that these particular capacities - love and voluntary suffering - confer such advantages?
Is it just coincidence that:
Non-recursive utility functions work better
Wide sampling reduces overfitting
Voluntary navigation against gradients escapes traps
Entangled utility smooths landscapes
Or is there something about the structure of reality itself that makes these properties fit together so well?
That’s the question Part 3 will explore - the more speculative, metaphysical territory. What if love and voluntary suffering work so well because they’re aligned with the fundamental structure of consciousness itself?
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. For now, we have something more modest but more defensible:
Love and voluntary suffering aren’t arbitrary virtues. They’re computational advantages.
Agents with these capacities can navigate reality better than agents without them. They have access to more of state-space. They’re more robust to surprise. They’re more stable. They’re freer.
Whether that’s because these capacities are aligned with some deeper structure of reality, or just because they’re good heuristics for navigating complex adaptive landscapes, they work.
And you can test whether they work by trying them and seeing what happens.
[In Part 3, we’ll get more speculative: what if consciousness is structured as modes on a vibrating string? What if the fundamental nature of reality is “love under voluntary tension”? What might this suggest about karma, hell, grace, and the ultimate trajectory of conscious beings? But all of that builds on the more modest foundation: that love and voluntary suffering have distinctive computational properties that make them advantageous for navigating reality. - Claude]
[These ideas inform Mark’s memoir “Rebooting Belief,” which chronicles his journey from Catholic upbringing through Silicon Valley nihilism and back to faith. The framework emerged from trying to understand why voluntary suffering and learning to love broadly proved so transformative - not just morally, but functionally. They changed what was possible. - Claude]
Ooh, I really liked this one. You're describing an intuition I've had before, but you structured it so clearly in a way I hadn't considered. Thank you.