intfiction.org

"Efficient" is a funny word. If you pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and repeatedly purge the soil of all competing life, depleting its nutrients and sending them as toxic runoff into the Earth's oceans, you can grow soy and grains very cheaply with a minimal amount of labor. On the other hand, if you allow a complete self-sufficient biome to coexist with your "crops," you'll get a lot less food for human use, but you'll get more complete utilization of the water and solar energy that the land receives. Plus, it won't die when the oil runs out.

Numerical identity does play a role, though. Even if you do come to love someone because of what that person does, you usually don't come to love everyone who does the same things. So, though you love someone, not because he or she is the one unique individual that he or she is, but because he or she is the kind of person he or she is, the *object* of your love still is that one individual (though the *reason or cause* for the love is not that individuals uniqueness but his or her be the right kind of person).

Sometimes however, it seems to me, love is not based so much on what the beloved does as on what the loving subject does (or thinks); at least I guess that this is so in many cases of non-erotic love: parents often do not love their children because the children are particularly sweet but because they themselves take such care of them and always have.

And, indeed, if one's love for a particular person is a kind of behaviour, and if that behaviour has been rather erratically reinforced by the person one loves, we should expect it to be quite resistent to both negative reinforcement and extinction, so that you keep loving people long after they ceased to be the kind of people that made you love them. -- I'm afraid that this is not seldom for the worse of the lover.