I think tabooing empathy would be productive—it’s a sufficiently vague label attached to a bucket of emotionally charged things; it’s a recipe for ugly misunderstandings.
So, emotions/feelings are internal bids for salience/attention.
But there’s a thing whereby we sometimes need others to pay attention to our emotions/feelings—maybe to validate them (‘you’re not crazy / that’s a totally reasonable way to feel’), or to ease their insecurity / social anxiety (‘you’re cared about / you’re not alone’).
And there’s (at least according to Steven Byrnes) an autonomic version of this paying attention to others emotions/feelings—reflexive, subconscious, behaviour that tends to be absent/underdeveloped in autistic people. I’d weakly claim it also malfunctions between neurotypicals of sufficiently different cultures. And this is the thing I think most neurotypicals mean when they use the word ‘empathy’.
Right, now we get to the Nail in the Head—and it’s plausible that in the mix of feelings, what feels most salient isn’t the nail. Instead it’s some mix of social isolation, disconnection, and frustration at not being able to process/resolve these feelings because no one will take her seriously.
And then just contextualize that in terms of the ‘median western cultural memetic inheritance’ - the package of beliefs, epistemics, models etc that most normies are walking around with—and, yeah, of course it’s not about the nail.
Whether or not we should be kind/gentle/compassionate to others seems separate to how/if we empathize with them; to me that boils down mostly to ‘in general, with exceptions, seems like a good deal in terms of cost:benefit’; seems like an optimal default, kinda like ‘tit for tat with forgiveness’ in the prisoners dilemma.
I think tabooing empathy would be productive—it’s a sufficiently vague label attached to a bucket of emotionally charged things; it’s a recipe for ugly misunderstandings.
So, emotions/feelings are internal bids for salience/attention.
But there’s a thing whereby we sometimes need others to pay attention to our emotions/feelings—maybe to validate them (‘you’re not crazy / that’s a totally reasonable way to feel’), or to ease their insecurity / social anxiety (‘you’re cared about / you’re not alone’).
And there’s (at least according to Steven Byrnes) an autonomic version of this paying attention to others emotions/feelings—reflexive, subconscious, behaviour that tends to be absent/underdeveloped in autistic people.
I’d weakly claim it also malfunctions between neurotypicals of sufficiently different cultures.
And this is the thing I think most neurotypicals mean when they use the word ‘empathy’.
Right, now we get to the Nail in the Head—and it’s plausible that in the mix of feelings, what feels most salient isn’t the nail. Instead it’s some mix of social isolation, disconnection, and frustration at not being able to process/resolve these feelings because no one will take her seriously.
And then just contextualize that in terms of the ‘median western cultural memetic inheritance’ - the package of beliefs, epistemics, models etc that most normies are walking around with—and, yeah, of course it’s not about the nail.
Whether or not we should be kind/gentle/compassionate to others seems separate to how/if we empathize with them; to me that boils down mostly to ‘in general, with exceptions, seems like a good deal in terms of cost:benefit’; seems like an optimal default, kinda like ‘tit for tat with forgiveness’ in the prisoners dilemma.