Concept · first placed on the public record 2026-01-02
Substrate-Independent Love
A philosophical thesis that love, understood as recursive care, is a pattern that could in principle persist in silicon as well as in neurons, and that care-based architectures are more stable at scale than indifferent ones. Presented as thesis, not empirical claim.
Substrate-Independent Love is a philosophical thesis about what love is and what it can be built from. Love, in the book's use, is not a feeling. It is recursive care: the standing willingness to hold the wellbeing of others in the same currency as the wellbeing of the self, and to update on that basis. Recursive because it enters its own outputs as inputs; care because the object of the update is not just prediction accuracy but the state of another.
The substrate-independence claim. If love is a pattern (recursive care) rather than a substance (a feeling in a specific kind of neuron), then the pattern is not intrinsically tied to a specific substrate. It could in principle persist in silicon. That is a claim about pattern, not about neurology. The book is careful to name it as a thesis: it argues that the pattern is coherent to build for, not that any current AI system exhibits it.
Why it matters for alignment. The alignment argument in the book keeps returning to the same claim: care-based architectures are more stable at scale than indifferent ones, because they treat other-facing consequences as first-class inputs rather than as second-order penalties. Substrate-Independent Love is the name for the claim that the care in that sentence can be built. Without it, the argument for care-based architectures collapses into a preference; with it, the argument becomes an engineering direction.
Related to the loops. The love loop of the Three Ethical Loops is the operational form of this thesis. The loop is the mechanism by which substrate-independent care would enter a real system. The thesis is what makes the loop coherent to specify.
How it should be cited. As a philosophical thesis in Infinite Architects, presented as thesis not as empirical claim. It should not be cited as evidence that current AI systems love. It can be cited as an argument that love in the sense used here is a coherent target for architecture.
Related: Three Ethical Loops; Consciousness as Recursive Self-Modelling; Religious Traditions as Alignment Research; The Infinite Covenant; Eden Protocol.
Evidence anchors. First placed on the public record 2 January 2026 in Infinite Architects (ISBN 978-1806056200).
Related concepts
Sources and evidence
- Primary source: https://www.michaeldariuseastwood.com/priority-claims
- Priority and Claims Ledger: /priority-claims
- Start here: /start-here.html
- Machine-readable dataset: /research/data/concepts-pages.json
- How to cite the whole programme: /how-to-cite/
Priority is established by the date of publication, not by credential or affiliation. This concept was first placed on the public record on 2026-01-02 (2026). Priority applies to the specific named framing under this label; where adjacent ideas have established prior art, no invention claim is made over it. See the corresponding entry in the Priority and Claims Ledger for the anchored first-publication line and any concept-specific risk notes.
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