You may recall that I am of the strong opin­ion that love — real­ly, any sort of emo­tion along the spec­trum of human feel­ing — can­not be reli­ably quan­ti­fied. At the very least, I don’t think it can be numer­i­cal­ly quan­ti­fied in any per­sua­sive way à la the eco­nom­ic con­cept of car­di­nal util­i­ty. But the fact remains that we as humans do exhib­it pref­er­ences; which is to say, that we like or love some things more or less than oth­ers.… Con­tin­ue Reading

From time to time, I’ve had occa­sion to won­der whether it is pos­si­ble to numer­i­cal­ly quan­ti­fy our feel­ings; that is, their inten­si­ty, mag­ni­tude, depth. I per­son­al­ly think the answer is a resound­ing “no,”  but if we were to assume that such a thing were pos­si­ble, the impli­ca­tions would be both fas­ci­nat­ing and far-reach­ing — in par­tic­u­lar, might it allow us as humans to mea­sure our roman­tic rela­tion­ships such that we could make explic­it com­par­isons between them, and then ren­der sup­pos­ed­ly… Con­tin­ue Reading