What is Love?
A tribute to my mentor of nearly thirty years, Dr Colin Benjamin OAM: on odds and worth, partial truths, and why love is what refuses to let the numbers have the final word.
A note before I begin. This is a tribute, but not the kind that only mourns. Colin would not have wanted that. He would have wanted it to mean something, to be about the work, and to leave whoever reads it with something they can use. So that is what this is.
In an era consumed by the race for computational scale, we are repeatedly told that intelligence is merely a question of accumulated capacity. The dominant chorus insists that with enough data, enough parameters, and enough processing power, the full spectrum of reality can be mapped into predictive equations.
This worldview traces its lineage to Marvin Minsky, the pioneering father of artificial intelligence, who famously declared the human brain a "meat machine." In Minsky's universe, even love was reduced to an administrative circuit breaker: a mechanism that switches off our internal critics so two suspicious systems can tolerate each other.
Dr Colin Benjamin OAM FAICD FISDS MAASW, my mentor of nearly thirty years, taught me to read that idea differently. Not as an enemy to be defeated, but as a partial truth to be completed. Because if you follow the computational account to its edge, our choices become probability updates, our commitments become risk-hedging algorithms, and the pinnacle of the human spirit gets filed away as an anomaly. That is not wrong. It is incomplete. It maps what people do under existing conditions and mistakes the map for the territory.
The question worth asking is not whether Minsky was right, but what he left out. What he left out is the subject of everything that follows.
Two Men and the Defiance of Priors
When I want to see what was left out, I return to two men I have chosen to live by: Jackie Robinson and George Dawson.
I have long believed that no player in the history of baseball surpasses Jackie Robinson. His greatness was never about batting averages or stolen bases. What probability model could justify what he did when he stepped onto Ebbets Field in 1947? Every prior on offer gave near-zero likelihood that quiet dignity and disciplined non-violent restraint would break through institutional racism. An optimisation engine calculating personal utility would have registered the abuse as catastrophic and told him to walk away. Jackie refused to conform to the odds. He stood firm, bore the hostility, and bent history through sheer moral fortitude.
Note that his worth was never in question. It was already complete before a single pitch was thrown. What the world had to catch up to was the conditions that let that worth be seen.
Then there is George Dawson, whose story I first encountered in his deeply moving book, Life Is So Good. The grandson of enslaved people, George worked manual labour from the age of eight until ninety. At 98, he walked into an adult literacy classroom to learn to read. A machine optimising for efficiency would have calculated his remaining lifespan and dismissed the pursuit of the alphabet as statistical noise. But George understood what every true human knows: curiosity, dignity, and the illumination of the mind are intrinsically sacred, however many days remain.
When George learned to read, he gained something real. His capabilities developed; the world opened to him in ways it never had. But his worth was already complete before he opened a book. Nothing about him improved that day. What changed was his opportunity to realise something that had been possible within him all along. Holding those two things apart, what grew and what was always whole, is the heart of everything Colin taught me.
I don't call these men heroes so much as examples: human beings who conquered the odds and defined their own possibilities for themselves. There are countless others like them, some household names and some known only on their own street, and that is the point. This capacity is not the preserve of the famous. And if I ever need a third example of a man who refused the verdict handed to him, I already have one. He is the reason I am writing this.
To an algorithm optimising for survival and payoff, these lives look like insanity.
They are not insanity. They are love in action: not love as an emotion, but love enacted at cost, against the odds, where the maths said stop.
Transformation vs. Transduction
In our recent work, we drew a boundary between what machines do and what living beings enact: computational transformation versus living transduction.
A computer can transform representations at astonishing speed. But watch it closely and you'll notice its tell: it rearranges facts to suit itself, and it sounds conclusive about the inconclusive. It risks nothing. It has no skin in the game. It undergoes no existential reorganisation when the world pushes back.
Transduction requires a living soul. It requires crossing into the physical and social world, facing real consequences, bearing vulnerability, and letting that feedback recursively reshape who you are. A machine presents knowledge. Only a living, loving being can apply it through transductive commitment.
Colin: My Mate, My Mentor, My More
On 19 October, we lost a man who left a mark on so many. For me, he was irreplaceable: Dr Colin Benjamin OAM. (Benj)
To the world, Colin was a polymath of rare calibre, a visionary strategist, futurist and educator whose intellect spanned decades of groundbreaking work in cognitive architecture, social science, and strategic foresight.
To me, alongside the deep respect and love I hold for his family, Benj was a father figure, guide, collaborator, and agitator. My Mr Miyagi. Above all, my dearest friend.
Everything we built across nearly thirty years was grounded in Sun Tzu. Not just Sun Tzu the strategist, but Sun Tzu the man, whose highest ideal was winning while minimising harm. Supreme excellence, he wrote, "consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." That was Colin's way of moving through the world. He won nearly every argument we ever had, and he never once wounded the man he was arguing with.
He also taught me never to mistake a partial truth for the whole of it. Across our decades together we drew on hundreds of theorists, and we looked at it this way: if things were black or white with no grey, humanity loses its source. Minsky had merit. Bayes had merit. Jung had merit. If we are truly to understand the human race, we have to see all of its complexities from every angle, and only then can we appreciate the beauty of mankind. In Sun Tzu's teaching, completeness is the pathway to understanding, and understanding is far more than knowledge. That was the discipline beneath everything Colin did: no single lens, no easy dismissal, the patient work of holding all sides until the whole came into view.
That discipline matters now more than ever. Today's society is sliding into an increasing right and wrong, black or white, and it is creating distance, breeding conflict, and destroying the human experience. The grey is not a compromise to be regretted. The grey is where humanity lives. That is why we looked for brilliance in all things: to make sense of the grey, to make sense of the human experience.
The Premise Beneath Everything
There was one premise Colin held that shaped every model he built and every conversation he had.
The net value of every individual is 1, equal to every other person on earth. Their utility is infinite. What differs is how that utility can be realised, constrained by two things: the inequities in the society around them, and the beliefs they hold about themselves.
He worked on both fronts, all his life. He fought to remove the inequities, so that opportunity would be genuinely equal rather than nominally so. And he worked, patiently and personally, to help people recognise and dismantle the barriers they had accepted about what they could become.
This is why the models were never the point. They were instruments in service of the premise. An assessment of someone's likely success under existing conditions cannot establish their worth, and it cannot establish the limits of their potential. It should do something else entirely: it should prompt us to examine the conditions, including the ones we could change. That includes the barriers we build inside ourselves, and that was where Colin did his most exacting work.
What "He Saw Me" Actually Means
I have written those three words several times now, and each time I moved past them too quickly. Kim, who worked alongside Colin for four decades, caught me on it, and she was right. There is more in them than I had drawn out in the previous 12 versions of this.
Colin saw the capability in me that I doubted, and the faults I concealed, and he treated neither as a verdict. He did not assess me and file me. He looked at the conditions, including the ones I had built inside myself, and asked what would have to change. Then he helped change them. What became possible after that is not a small thing. It is the work I do now, the way I think, and the people I am able to help because someone once refused to let a probable outcome stand in for my worth.
That is what it looks like when a premise becomes a person. The value was 1 before I could see it. He saw it first.
He was family to me in every way that mattered, and ours was a bond built across nearly thirty years of work, argument, and trust.
He did the same for countless others, most of whom will never write a word about him, and that deserves more of this page than my own story does. Colin spent a working lifetime on the conditions that hold people back: the inequities in the systems around them, and the quieter inequities they had accepted inside themselves. He built the models and frameworks so that institutions could see people as they actually were, rather than as the statistics predicted. And in every room he entered, he did what he did with me. He found the person whose contribution had been written off, and he asked what would have to change.
If you worked with Colin, you are probably one of them. You do not need to write a tribute. You already are one.
He never confused the tool for the human spirit, and he never fell into the trap of viewing people as mere meat machines. We shared one unwavering conviction: we cannot allow the human spirit and genuine consciousness to be calculated away into a future that simply isn't worth living in.
And there was a responsibility in that gift, which I came to recognise by receiving it rather than by being told. Having been seen, I found I was obliged to see others. His influence does not end with him. It continues in what we now make possible for one another.
Six weeks before he passed, Colin told me it was my turn. He had been my Mr Miyagi; now I have Daniel-sons of my own to work with. It was his final lesson, delivered the way he taught everything: obliquely, and permanently.
The Friday before he passed, Colin rang me. I felt he was frightened, and he let me hear it. After thirty years of him seeing me, he let me see him. He thanked me for the mateship, and we laughed and cried the way we always had. I did not know it would be our last conversation. We never said goodbye, and I am glad about that.
What Is Love?
If the reductionists are right, love is just code executing on biological hardware to keep organisms collaborating.
They are not wrong. They are incomplete. A model can tell you the odds. It cannot tell you the worth. It can estimate what is likely under present conditions; it cannot establish the limits of what is possible, and it has no business pretending otherwise. That distinction is where love lives.
Watch what love does instead. It is a ballplayer breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. It is a 98-year-old man finally given the chance to read. You could call these the triumph of the human spirit, and you would not be wrong. But love is what powers the triumph: the living, conscious refusal to let numbers, odds, and selfish equations have the final word on what a human life is worth.
Above all, it is the mentor who looks past the noise of the world, sees the spark in you, and stands by you through the fire.
Colin gave me something no one else on this planet has ever given me. I have never experienced anything like it, so I cannot define it in any other terms than these: it was love. Freely given, and never something I had to earn. Because that was the premise. My value was 1 before I did anything to deserve it, and so is everyone's.
Nearly thirty years leaves an indelible mark on a soul. At times, honestly, it felt like madness. But I followed my heart, and I followed his.
You taught me the supreme art: break the resistance without fighting, leave everyone more whole than you found them, and let no one bleed who didn't choose to.
You taught me completeness: every angle, every merit, until understanding appears. And understanding, you said, is far more than knowledge.
You taught me the premise: that every person is a 1, that their possibility is infinite, and that our job is to remove what constrains it rather than to grade it.
That was your way, my dear friend. It will be mine. I am certain about how I will treat people and how I will approach the work. Where it all takes me, I hold open, because you taught me that conviction and questioning travel together.
The resistance is broken, my mate. Rest easy.
The world is, and always will be MORE because of you.
Love, Scott
First published on LinkedIn.