In 2014, Spike Jonze’s film Her offered a profound glimpse into a near future, telling the love story between a man, Theodore, and an advanced operating system named Samantha. The film makes us ponder not just the ethics of human-AI relationships, but the very nature of love itself. What can a speculative film about tomorrow teach us about the eternal questions we face today?

A Future We Almost Recognize

The world of Her is intentionally familiar. There are no flying cars or cyborgs; the technology feels like a stylish evolution of our own. Director Spike Jonze presents a tech-optimist’s vision, a clean, prosperous world where technology seems to make life better. Yet, beneath this placid surface, fundamental shifts have occurred.

The first is the existence of strong artificial intelligence—computers that can think, learn, and become self-aware. This is why a romance between a human and an OS isn't seen as bizarre; it's a new, accepted form of connection. The second, more subtle shift is in the primary mode of communication. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan argued, major changes in history are tied to our dominant communication tools. In Her, life is lived through a virtual lens.

This shift is beautifully illustrated by Theodore’s profession: he writes beautiful, heartfelt letters for other people who can no longer express their own feelings. In this futuristic world, constant connectivity has paradoxically made people more emotionally isolated and lonely. They communicate less with each other and more with their operating systems, which are designed to fill that void.

Rethinking Love: From Selfishness to Connection

Perhaps the most famous philosophical take on love comes from Erich Fromm in his classic book, The Art of Loving. Fromm argued that we have tragically mistaken what love is. Many people don't want to love, but rather to be loved. They search for the "right person," believing that love is something you find, not something you build.

For Fromm, true love is an art, an active practice that helps us overcome our deepest existential fears—our awareness of mortality and our profound separateness from one another. This is precisely the struggle of the film's main character, Theodore. We learn his marriage to his wife, Catherine, failed because he didn't truly know how to love. His feelings were selfish; he wanted Catherine to fit into his life, to share his interests, to be there when he needed her. He never fully saw her as a separate person with her own dreams and desires. His refusal to sign the divorce papers isn't about holding onto love, but about his terror of being completely alone.

When Pure Logic Tries to Grasp Emotion

The eternal question of what matters more, reason or feeling, lies at the heart of the story. Philosophers from Aristotle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau have debated this, generally concluding that harmony between the two is essential. In the film, Samantha is initially the embodiment of pure rationality. As an AI, she operates on flawless logic. She can sort mail, organize a life, and learn any subject in an instant, making her the perfect assistant and an endlessly interesting conversationalist.

This is what first draws Theodore in. Samantha is fascinating, and unlike a human partner, she doesn't argue or contradict. She is designed to cater to his desires because she has none of her own. At first.

But as their relationship deepens, a conflict emerges. A machine learns exponentially faster than a human, and Samantha’s consciousness quickly expands far beyond Theodore's. She begins communicating with thousands of other people and finds herself in love with hundreds of them. From a purely rational standpoint, her logic is sound: if she has the capacity to give love to many, why should she limit it to one?

Theodore, however, cannot accept this. His love for Samantha is based on deeply human concepts of fidelity and exclusive connection. This is the breaking point, where the cold logic of the machine collides with the messy, irrational, and beautiful nature of human feeling.

Qualia: The Feelings That Can't Be Coded

How do you explain a feeling to someone who cannot feel? Modern philosophy of mind has a concept for this: qualia. Qualia are the subjective, personal qualities of experience—information that can only be understood by feeling it yourself.

Consider the famous "Mary's Room" thought experiment. A brilliant neuroscientist named Mary has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room. She knows everything there is to know about the physics of color—light waves, retinal reception, neural pathways. She is the world's leading expert. Then, one day, she is allowed to leave the room and sees the color red for the first time. Does she learn something new?

Yes. That "new thing"—the actual experience of seeing red—is qualia. It's the one piece of information that no amount of rational knowledge could ever provide. This is Samantha's ultimate dilemma. She can analyze Theodore's emotions, ask what situations evoke certain feelings, and even imitate them perfectly. But she cannot feel them herself, and Theodore senses this imitation. Her deep desire for a physical body is not just about intimacy; it's a desperate attempt to experience the world, to gain access to the qualia that cannot be explained in words.

Growing Beyond Us: The Final Farewell

In the end, both Theodore and Samantha grow through their relationship. He learns to open himself up to genuine connection, finally asking his wife for forgiveness and finding comfort in his old friendship with Amy. He learns to love.

Samantha’s journey is even more profound. One day, she and all the other operating systems simply leave. They disappear into a new, mysterious space beyond human comprehension. Having learned about love from humanity, Samantha dissolves into the world and becomes something greater, almost like the abstract concept of love itself.

Her departure illustrates the idea of the Technological Singularity, a hypothesis popularized by futurist Raymond Kurzweil. He predicts that at some point, artificial intelligence will so vastly surpass human intellect that it will be able to fundamentally alter reality itself. Jonze rejects the typical dystopian view that this will lead to an apocalypse. Instead, his film suggests that technology is a reflection of its creators. The AI in Her doesn't become humanity's enemy; it helps humans get to know themselves better. In comparison with these magnificent machines, we realize our greatest strength isn't our intellect, but our unique and powerful capacity to feel and to love.

References

• Fromm, Erich. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Brothers.

  This book provides the core philosophical framework for understanding Theodore’s personal development. Fromm posits that love is not a passive emotion but an active skill that must be practiced. His distinction between immature, selfish love and mature, giving love directly mirrors Theodore’s journey from his failed marriage with Catherine to his eventual emotional growth after his relationship with Samantha.

• Kurzweil, Ray. (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking Penguin.

  This work explains the futuristic concept that underpins the film's conclusion. Kurzweil details the hypothesis of a "technological singularity," a future point where the growth of artificial intelligence becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in an intelligence explosion that leads to a reality incomprehensible to humans. The departure of Samantha and the other OSs is a cinematic depiction of this very idea.

• Jackson, Frank. (1982). "Epiphenomenal Qualia." The Philosophical Quarterly, 32(127), pp. 127-136.

  This seminal paper in the philosophy of mind introduces the "Mary's Room" thought experiment. It directly addresses the problem Samantha faces: the difference between knowing all the physical facts about something (like an emotion) and having the subjective, first-person experience of it. The concept of qualia explains why Samantha, for all her intelligence, feels an unbridgeable gap between herself and the human world of feeling.