Well, I can certainly emphasize with the feeing that compromising on a core part of your identity is threatening ;-)
More seriously, what you are describing as empathy seems to be asking the question:
“What if my mind was transported into their bodies?”
rather than
“What if I was (like) them, including all the relevant psychological and emotional factors?”
The latter question should lead feelings of disgust iff the target experiences feelings of disgust.
Of course, empathy is all the more difficult when the person you are trying to emphasize with is very different from you. Being an outlier can clearly make this harder. But unless you have never experienced any flavour of learned helplessness/procrastination/akrasia, you have the necessary ingredients to extrapolate.
On my model of empathy, you should feel what the subject feels in a sort of sandboxed mode, but this is (usually) a strategy for understanding them, and then you take that understanding out of the sandbox and you feel the way you feel about the situation that is revealed by that understanding.
It seems perfectly plausible that empathizing with a lazy person makes you feel contentment or apathy “inside the sandbox” and then this causes you to feel disgust outside the sandbox. That doesn’t imply to me that you’re doing empathy wrong.
If you mean to suggest that the simulated feelings from inside the sandbox should be exported and you should feel them in primary reality as a replacement for what you would otherwise feel, then I don’t think you’re describing “empathy” as most people use the term, and I don’t endorse that as a strategy. That seems like it would lead to obvious problems like e.g. empathy for a suicidal person resulting in you wanting to kill that person (or maybe wanting to kill yourself, depending on how the references are exported).
I think you make an important point in this context- understanding that all the emotions you’re “feeling” are still coming from you, not from them.
“A monk rowed out to the middle of a calm lake to meditate. A while later, they were bumped into and interrupted by another boat! The monk opened their eyes in anger, ready to chide the other monk for being so careless and making them so angry… to find the other boat empty. The anger was inside them, not from another monk.”
I don’t think that koan is drawing the same distinction that I was drawing (and therefore suspect you may have misinterpreted me). I was contrasting a scenario where you feel emotions (inside the sandbox) that are shaped by the empathy-subject’s desires and principles, and then feel different emotions (outside the sandbox) shaped by your own desires and principles.
I agree in a technical sense that all the emotions you feel are coming from you (including the ones inside the sandbox), although I also think that emotions are usually a response to your circumstances (and the relation between you and those circumstances) and that they can be appropriate or inappropriate responses to those circumstances. I think it (usually) doesn’t make sense to try to understand emotions by considering only the person and ignoring their circumstances. Thus, the koan seems wrong-headed to me.
(The koan’s analysis of its own scenario also seems very shallow—the fact that no one is inside the boat does not mean that no one is at fault! Why wasn’t the boat properly secured to the dock? This doesn’t particularly matter if the koan is just trying to point to a concept so that you know what the speaker is even referring to, but it’s a weakness if the koan is trying to be persuasive.)
I was simply trying to decorate a compliment, so I suppose I will stop doing that 🤔 (EDIT: from a later vantage point, I think I now see it’s better to say “sorry for adding a distraction” rather than passively projecting blame.)
(I for one quite enjoyed the koan, even if it is not drawing quite the same distinction that dweomite was drawing. That is ok. And hey, it triggered further clarification from dweomite, which is a fine outcome.)
That koan doesn’t really seem to be related to what we’re discussing.
That aside (and this is mostly off-topic, because—see previous line), the koan also seems to “rig the thought experiment”—the author makes it easy for himself. Consider an alternative version:
“A monk rowed out to the middle of a calm lake to meditate. A while later, he was bumped into and interrupted by another boat! The monk opened his eyes in anger, and saw that the rowboat was occupied by another monk, who was deliberately bumping his rowboat into the first monk’s boat. The first monk berated the second monk for doing this, yelling at him to stop, as this was making him angry and making it impossible for him to meditate. But the second monk replied that the anger was inside the first monk, not coming from anywhere else; ‘suppose that there were no one in this boat,’ he said; ‘suppose that it were just the wind causing the boats to bump into each other—you would still be angry!’. Meanwhile he continued to bump his rowboat into the first monk’s boat. The first monk tried to ignore the distraction and resume his meditations, but was unable to do so. Meanwhile the second monk bumped the boats together harder, and the first monk’s boat capsized, dumping its occupant into the water. ‘What you’re feeling is still inside yourself!’ called the second monk down to the first monk as the latter drowned in the lake.”
To be clearer, the koan is meant to be related only to a sub-item of a sub-item of a comment: “you are simulating their emotions”, rather than the original post or to any entire comment.
Empathy does not just stop when you consider that their life shaped them that way! Empathy is part of emulating their mind, why they might behave in this way, and then dragging that back to how your mind understands things.
Empathy is still and should be integrated within your understanding of the world, your values, even if you understand that they are shaped differently. You can still be displeased, unhappy that they’ve been shaped in a certain way, disquieted because they do not grasp for all that they can be. I feel empathy for someone who has faltered, failed to reach even if they do not even want to reach for more because of how they’ve been affected by life.
As well, even if I take the strict latter definition and proceed from their mental frame entirely, that still entails some degree of disquiet. People often wish that they could be more, find things easier, be less stressed but then fail to take routes that lead to that which are visible from the outside but hard to see from the inside.
“What if I was (like) them, including all the relevant psychological and emotional factors?”
At that point I’m just back to thinking about them as cats.
Perhaps my terminology in the post was wrong, since I do in fact empathize with cats, and I can empathize with humans the same way I empathize with cats without inducing disgust/disappointment. That’s part of the suspension of disbelief; I empathize with them in a way which does not involve thinking of them as creatures very similar to me.
Can you expand on how you interact with cats? Do you spend much thought hypothesizing about what a cat is thinking? I do, and find it to make a significant difference in (kitty petting frequency) outcomes even though the information rate is so low and I always have many hypotheses; if that isn’t what you mean then I’d like to understand in detail what kind of modeling you’re doing when you interact with a cat “as a cat”.
Yeah, I track (my guesses of) what the cat is thinking/feeling, and one part of that is putting myself in their place and experiencing (what I believe to be) some of their feelings.
Well, I can certainly emphasize with the feeing that compromising on a core part of your identity is threatening ;-)
More seriously, what you are describing as empathy seems to be asking the question:
“What if my mind was transported into their bodies?”
rather than
“What if I was (like) them, including all the relevant psychological and emotional factors?”
The latter question should lead feelings of disgust iff the target experiences feelings of disgust.
Of course, empathy is all the more difficult when the person you are trying to emphasize with is very different from you. Being an outlier can clearly make this harder. But unless you have never experienced any flavour of learned helplessness/procrastination/akrasia, you have the necessary ingredients to extrapolate.
On my model of empathy, you should feel what the subject feels in a sort of sandboxed mode, but this is (usually) a strategy for understanding them, and then you take that understanding out of the sandbox and you feel the way you feel about the situation that is revealed by that understanding.
It seems perfectly plausible that empathizing with a lazy person makes you feel contentment or apathy “inside the sandbox” and then this causes you to feel disgust outside the sandbox. That doesn’t imply to me that you’re doing empathy wrong.
If you mean to suggest that the simulated feelings from inside the sandbox should be exported and you should feel them in primary reality as a replacement for what you would otherwise feel, then I don’t think you’re describing “empathy” as most people use the term, and I don’t endorse that as a strategy. That seems like it would lead to obvious problems like e.g. empathy for a suicidal person resulting in you wanting to kill that person (or maybe wanting to kill yourself, depending on how the references are exported).
I think you make an important point in this context- understanding that all the emotions you’re “feeling” are still coming from you, not from them.
“A monk rowed out to the middle of a calm lake to meditate. A while later, they were bumped into and interrupted by another boat! The monk opened their eyes in anger, ready to chide the other monk for being so careless and making them so angry… to find the other boat empty. The anger was inside them, not from another monk.”
I don’t think that koan is drawing the same distinction that I was drawing (and therefore suspect you may have misinterpreted me). I was contrasting a scenario where you feel emotions (inside the sandbox) that are shaped by the empathy-subject’s desires and principles, and then feel different emotions (outside the sandbox) shaped by your own desires and principles.
I agree in a technical sense that all the emotions you feel are coming from you (including the ones inside the sandbox), although I also think that emotions are usually a response to your circumstances (and the relation between you and those circumstances) and that they can be appropriate or inappropriate responses to those circumstances. I think it (usually) doesn’t make sense to try to understand emotions by considering only the person and ignoring their circumstances. Thus, the koan seems wrong-headed to me.
(The koan’s analysis of its own scenario also seems very shallow—the fact that no one is inside the boat does not mean that no one is at fault! Why wasn’t the boat properly secured to the dock? This doesn’t particularly matter if the koan is just trying to point to a concept so that you know what the speaker is even referring to, but it’s a weakness if the koan is trying to be persuasive.)
I was simply trying to decorate a compliment, so I suppose I will stop doing that 🤔 (EDIT: from a later vantage point, I think I now see it’s better to say “sorry for adding a distraction” rather than passively projecting blame.)
(I for one quite enjoyed the koan, even if it is not drawing quite the same distinction that dweomite was drawing. That is ok. And hey, it triggered further clarification from dweomite, which is a fine outcome.)
That koan doesn’t really seem to be related to what we’re discussing.
That aside (and this is mostly off-topic, because—see previous line), the koan also seems to “rig the thought experiment”—the author makes it easy for himself. Consider an alternative version:
“A monk rowed out to the middle of a calm lake to meditate. A while later, he was bumped into and interrupted by another boat! The monk opened his eyes in anger, and saw that the rowboat was occupied by another monk, who was deliberately bumping his rowboat into the first monk’s boat. The first monk berated the second monk for doing this, yelling at him to stop, as this was making him angry and making it impossible for him to meditate. But the second monk replied that the anger was inside the first monk, not coming from anywhere else; ‘suppose that there were no one in this boat,’ he said; ‘suppose that it were just the wind causing the boats to bump into each other—you would still be angry!’. Meanwhile he continued to bump his rowboat into the first monk’s boat. The first monk tried to ignore the distraction and resume his meditations, but was unable to do so. Meanwhile the second monk bumped the boats together harder, and the first monk’s boat capsized, dumping its occupant into the water. ‘What you’re feeling is still inside yourself!’ called the second monk down to the first monk as the latter drowned in the lake.”
To be clearer, the koan is meant to be related only to a sub-item of a sub-item of a comment: “you are simulating their emotions”, rather than the original post or to any entire comment.
Empathy does not just stop when you consider that their life shaped them that way! Empathy is part of emulating their mind, why they might behave in this way, and then dragging that back to how your mind understands things. Empathy is still and should be integrated within your understanding of the world, your values, even if you understand that they are shaped differently. You can still be displeased, unhappy that they’ve been shaped in a certain way, disquieted because they do not grasp for all that they can be. I feel empathy for someone who has faltered, failed to reach even if they do not even want to reach for more because of how they’ve been affected by life.
As well, even if I take the strict latter definition and proceed from their mental frame entirely, that still entails some degree of disquiet. People often wish that they could be more, find things easier, be less stressed but then fail to take routes that lead to that which are visible from the outside but hard to see from the inside.
At that point I’m just back to thinking about them as cats.
Perhaps my terminology in the post was wrong, since I do in fact empathize with cats, and I can empathize with humans the same way I empathize with cats without inducing disgust/disappointment. That’s part of the suspension of disbelief; I empathize with them in a way which does not involve thinking of them as creatures very similar to me.
Can you expand on how you interact with cats? Do you spend much thought hypothesizing about what a cat is thinking? I do, and find it to make a significant difference in (kitty petting frequency) outcomes even though the information rate is so low and I always have many hypotheses; if that isn’t what you mean then I’d like to understand in detail what kind of modeling you’re doing when you interact with a cat “as a cat”.
Yeah, I track (my guesses of) what the cat is thinking/feeling, and one part of that is putting myself in their place and experiencing (what I believe to be) some of their feelings.