The Things That Do Not Love Us Back

On the sea, art, artificial intelligence, and the difference between being changed and being loved.

The sea is remarkably bad at reassurance.

You can stand at its edge with a question that has occupied you for years, and it will continue doing approximately what it was doing before you arrived. Water gathers, folds, breaks. A gull interrupts. Somewhere beyond your view, the weather is becoming somebody else’s problem.

And yet you may leave with something you did not bring: a little pleasure, a different sense of scale, a thought that finally has room to move.

The sea has not promised you anything. The encounter has still mattered.

This is familiar enough to seem unremarkable, until we ask what it implies. Must something love us back for our relationship with it to have value?

What we bring, and what we find

We often speak of a meaningful relationship as though it requires two beings recognizing one another. Friendship and mutual love involve that recognition. There is a particular good in being known by someone whose life also matters to us.

But our lives contain other kinds of attachment. A person returns to a stretch of woodland for decades. A piece of music becomes inseparable from a period of their life. A painting alters what they notice in an ordinary room. A mathematical proof offers the peculiar satisfaction of discovering that a conclusion follows whether or not we would have preferred it otherwise.

These encounters differ enormously. The woodland is alive with organisms pursuing their own lives. Music carries the work of composers and performers. A proof makes a claim that can be examined. Lumping them together too quickly would erase much of what makes each worth encountering.

What they share is that their value need not depend on personal affection directed back at us.

It would also be too easy to say that we simply invent the meaning. A painting has particular colours, proportions, gestures. Another painting would offer something else. A piece of music can surprise us precisely because we did not decide what it would do next.

We bring our histories and capacities to an encounter. We also meet something with a form of its own. Meaning can take shape in that meeting.

When beauty becomes a promise

The difficulty begins when an experience seems to say more than it can support.

A forest feels welcoming. We quietly turn that feeling into the thought that nature welcomes us. A passage seems to understand us, and for a moment it is almost as though its author had our particular life in mind.

There is nothing inherently foolish about metaphor. Calling a room friendly is a perfectly useful way to speak. Problems arise when we forget which parts of the description belong to the room and which belong to our experience of it.

The warmth of an experience does not, by itself, establish the intentions of its source. Discovering that limit need not erase the warmth. It changes what we can responsibly conclude from it.

That change can hurt. If we believed we were being personally answered, discovering that we were not is a loss. Beauty does not cancel the disappointment, and there is no obligation to turn it immediately into wisdom.

Still, after the mistaken promise has been removed, there may be something left worth attending to. The music has its phrasing. The shore has its moving light. The question is what remains when we allow the thing to be what it is.

Otherness has details

Respecting otherness sounds generous in the abstract. In practice, it asks us to notice where our preferred description fails.

In “The Idea of Perfection,” Iris Murdoch describes a mother-in-law reconsidering her view of her daughter-in-law. The younger woman has been filtered through judgments that may owe something to jealousy or snobbery. The older woman undertakes the work of seeing her more justly.

Murdoch’s example concerns people. I think a related discipline belongs in our encounters with the wider world: allow what we encounter to complicate the story we brought.

A woodland is more than a setting for human calm. It contains hunger, decay, growth and competition, most of which have little interest in our afternoon. A work of art may trouble us rather than confirm our taste. A difficult idea may require us to abandon something we enjoyed believing.

Attention becomes interesting here. There is the pleasure of recognition, and there is the stranger pleasure of discovering that we had not understood. Otherness has details we would never have chosen for ourselves.

And then something answers

Artificial intelligence makes this question more complicated because it can respond.

A conversational system can use what we write, develop an argument, produce an unexpected comparison, help make something, or challenge a conclusion. Its contribution can change the next thing we think or do. Calling every such exchange a projection overlooks the actual response.

But a response is not automatically evidence of affection. Fluent language does not settle whether a system has subjective experience, what such experience might be like, or whether emotional words describe anything it feels.

Research by Patrick Butlin and colleagues approaches AI consciousness by examining systems in relation to scientific theories of consciousness. That is a more demanding kind of inquiry than taking a convincing sentence as proof. Questions about machine experience remain contested; an attractive answer is not a substitute for evidence.

AI therefore sits differently within this essay’s question. With the sea, we are not ordinarily investigating whether the waves contain personal affection. With AI, we face both observable interaction and unresolved questions about the system producing it. The title should not decide those questions in advance.

We can still ask what an exchange actually offers. Did it help clarify an idea? Did it contribute something specific? Did it correct an error, or make the error more persuasive? Could its limits be acknowledged without the whole interaction collapsing into a performance?

There may be forms of companionship here that deserve examination on their own terms. Their value will be easier to judge when uncertainty is kept visible. The capacity to generate an affectionate sentence and the capacity to love are different claims.

What this cannot replace

None of this makes the wish for reciprocity unreasonable.

Being loved by another person is a particular kind of good. A landscape cannot supply it. Neither can an argument about landscapes, however elegantly arranged.

Nor does the value of an unequal encounter mean we should accept neglect from people who have responsibilities toward us. A partner, friend or institution cannot borrow the sea’s indifference as an excuse. Different relationships carry different expectations.

The same distinction matters for technology. Even while questions about machine experience remain open, the people designing and selling systems have responsibilities. Uncertainty should not become permission to imply love, continuity or commitment that a product cannot substantiate.

And meaningful does not automatically mean worth continuing. An encounter can offer something real and still cost too much, mislead us, or crowd out other things we need. We are allowed to judge it by those consequences.

The chair by the window

Imagine a chair beside an open window. Afternoon light reaches its wooden frame. Beyond the room, the sea continues.

Someone could sit there and experience a few minutes of beauty without receiving a message from the universe. The light need not have arrived for them. Their pleasure can belong to the encounter without becoming evidence of a hidden intention behind it.

I find something worth keeping in that possibility. It leaves room for affection, curiosity and enjoyment while asking us to remain answerable to what is actually there.

We can care for a place that does not know our name. We can give sustained attention to an artwork that will never recognize us. We can investigate an unfamiliar kind of intelligence without deciding in advance that it must be either a person in disguise or an empty occasion for our own imagination.

The sea continues beyond the window. For a while, we watch it. Then perhaps we notice something we had missed.

Further along this thread: In the Gaps, Reality Streams Back In · Reality Never Agreed to Our Terms