Not directly related to your query, but seems interesting:
The receptor was the first one I checked, and sure enough I have a single-nucleotide deletion 42 amino acids in to the open reading frame (ORF) of the 389 amino acid protein. That will induce a frameshift error, completely fucking up the rest of protein.
Which, in turn, is pretty solid evidence for “oxytocin mediates the emotion of loving connection/aching affection” (unless there are some mechanisms you’ve missed). I wouldn’t have guessed it’s that simple.
Generalizing, this suggests we can study links between specific brain chemicals/structures and cognitive features by looking for people missing the same universal experience, checking if their genomes deviate from the baseline in the same way, then modeling the effects of that deviation on the brain. Alternatively, the opposite: search for people whose brain chemistry should be genetically near-equivalent except for one specific change, then exhaustively check if there’s some blatant or subtle way their cognition differs from the baseline.
Doing a brief literature review via GPT-5, apparently this sort of thing is mostly done with regards to very “loud” conditions, rather than in an attempt to map out the brain in general. I could imagine that it won’t turn out that simple in practice, but the actual bottleneck is probably researchers with a good enough theory-of-mind to correctly figure out the subtle ways the subjects’ cognition differs (easy for “severe autism”, much harder for “I feel empathy and responsibility, but not loving connection”).
~Surely there’s a lot of other things involved in mediating this aspect of human cognition, at the very least (/speaking very coarse-grainedly), having the entire oxytocin system adequately hooked up to the rest of everything.
IE it is damn strong evidence that oxytocin signalinf is strictly necessary (and that there’s no fallback mechanisms wtc) but not that it’s simple.
Not directly related to your query, but seems interesting:
Which, in turn, is pretty solid evidence for “oxytocin mediates the emotion of loving connection/aching affection” (unless there are some mechanisms you’ve missed). I wouldn’t have guessed it’s that simple.
Generalizing, this suggests we can study links between specific brain chemicals/structures and cognitive features by looking for people missing the same universal experience, checking if their genomes deviate from the baseline in the same way, then modeling the effects of that deviation on the brain. Alternatively, the opposite: search for people whose brain chemistry should be genetically near-equivalent except for one specific change, then exhaustively check if there’s some blatant or subtle way their cognition differs from the baseline.
Doing a brief literature review via GPT-5, apparently this sort of thing is mostly done with regards to very “loud” conditions, rather than in an attempt to map out the brain in general. I could imagine that it won’t turn out that simple in practice, but the actual bottleneck is probably researchers with a good enough theory-of-mind to correctly figure out the subtle ways the subjects’ cognition differs (easy for “severe autism”, much harder for “I feel empathy and responsibility, but not loving connection”).
… and so at long last John found the answer to alignment
The answer was Love
and it had always has been
(hopes this is a joke)
~Surely there’s a lot of other things involved in mediating this aspect of human cognition, at the very least (/speaking very coarse-grainedly), having the entire oxytocin system adequately hooked up to the rest of everything.
IE it is damn strong evidence that oxytocin signalinf is strictly necessary (and that there’s no fallback mechanisms wtc) but not that it’s simple.