Patterns

Empathy is an expression of the human tendency for pattern-perception, namely the pattern of correlation between feeling and behavior. If I build a friendship with a person, establish a mutually beneficial relationship involving habits of give and take, then find one day that I am let down in a time of need without explanation, I should justly feel anger and betrayal. If I experienced this same buildup and let-down at the hands of a computer, I would rightly be judged a neurotic who needs to get out more. My experiences in these situations are identical, but in the case of the computer most would agree that I'm seeing a connection between behavior and intention that isn't there, because computers aren't people. We know they aren't people, because we don't see in them the pattern of behavior we see in people.

What if this ability of pattern-perception, linking feeling to action, were absent? Whether because feelings themselves are absent, or the connection just isn't made, it does happen sometimes that humans will not see other humans as people any more than they will see computers as people. If they grow angry in such a situation, it is over just as petty an issue as "it" not working like it should.

So. Mistakes of empathy may occur at two extremes: as an excess which makes us think of things as people, and a deficiency which makes us think of people as things. But I ask again, as I have elsewhere, how is a mistake to be gauged  What is the "right" amount of empathy to feel, the True pattern, which accurately reflects reality?

I find myself speculating on the extremes. Is the personality of another person entirely my own creation? Is there Really a pattern to reality, or just a very large opportunity to find things to understand?

Fools & Madmen

Since I was in high school, my moral tendencies have hinged on the practice of consideration, one I've seen referred to as mindfulness elsewhere. The idea was that people wouldn't hurt each other if they really knew the consequences of their actions, or I'd they did at least it would be done responsibly.

I think now that what I've been advocating is empathy. Not the passive sort which we describe people as either having or not, but the active, sustained effort to understand why another person feels as they do. It is so very easy to dismiss someone as crazy, stupid, ignorant or evil, but that's because these are passive labels, applicable only to people you don't care to explore any further but instead wish would change.

But we all rationalize, so at any given moment it is very likely that a person's actions make sense To Them. They have a brain very similar to yours, a mind shaped by the human cultures we all share, a life of seeking the same basic needs. And this very same propensity for dismissive stereotyping, I might add :l

Arrogance

Figured it out.

We learn from each other, compare and trade wisdoms and beliefs and perspectives, and through this grow individually and grow together. If you have bad ideas and weak convictions, you benefit most from this process while enjoying it least; if you are confident and wise, you gain nothing and feel awesome about it.

Wise and unsure is a problem, though. Someone with a good idea they don't believe in strongly can be steam-rolled out of it by a relatively complicated bad idea; if you don't understand something, but want to be thought to, you kinda have to agree with it. It's a rule, though admittedly one that defeats the purpose of discussion.

When two such persons meet, and if neither is aware of this process, the most complicated belief on a given subject will end up being accepted by both regardless of how consistent it is with reality.

Ergo, if you are unsure of the validity of your beliefs, but find them apparently more intricate than those of others, such beliefs must be restrained from overpowering the potentially good, if perhaps simpler, ideas of others, something I would call a destruction of wisdom.

To be clear, this does of course presume that my ideas Are more complicated than yours, something we can't know for sure without discussion. A risk, to be sure, but in most cases of my experience not a large one.