The romance of permanence and sending costly signals to yourself

14 Dec, 2023

I realized I don't really know what "romance" means, except that we use the concept to organize the socially approved relationships that involve sex and child-raising. I do know at least one romantic thing, though, which I have tried to post about on Bluesky:

The most romantic concept is a spaceship on a long journey with a finite supply of reaction mass doing an unscheduled burn at high power, thereby permanently restricting its future trajectory.¹

What is emotionally powerful about this to me, I think, is the dimension of permanence. The spaceship is doing something that irrevocably changes (contracts) its set of future potentialities. It is doing this because it has found something that is important enough to give up those potentialities for. Possibly this is a romance that is especially affecting to me because potentialities have been so important in my conception of myself: talents, opportunities, financial assets, etc. To give them up is something I have reflexively protected myself against (yes I know it is literally impossible to protect yourself against this). So the romance is a romance of both committing and of letting go.

A reductive analysis that works pretty well is that destroying a potentiality for something is a costly signal -- it shows you care a lot about that thing, in a way that just saying how much you care can't. Something interesting I have noticed, though, is that destroying a potentiality feels romantic even when you are the sender, not the receiver, of the signal. Naively, this is puzzling. The receiver, of course, attends to my costly signals because they do not have direct access to how I feel, so they rely on the best external indications they can get. But I as the sender should be able to just know introspectively how much I care. When I send a costly signal, I shouldn't update (my model of) my own feelings. What the signal communicates about my feelings should be already built into how I feel. But empirically this is not what I find. Empirically, sending the costly signal brings with it a powerful feeling, as I have indicated.

I think the way to understand this is that, perhaps counterintuitively, you actually need costly signals to communicate with yourself, too. A simple model that supports this claim is that we understand ourselves by inference from a body of evidence. The evidence presumably includes felt experience, but it also includes past behavior. Accordingly, there is substantial overlap between how we form our self-conceptions and how we reason about other people. We think of ourselves as "the kind of person who would" do the stuff that we know ourselves to have done. And the kind of person who would send a costly signal of how much they care about $X$ is "statistically" the kind of person who cares more about $X$. You can reject this argument if you think introspection works really well and connects you with a freestanding pre-behavioral image of your character and wants. But I don't think that.