Being empathetic is not a problem

“feeling too much”

When you see others suffer and take it to heard, you suffer as well. This is called empathy.

Someone encodes their experience as words. You read the words and decodes (hopefully) an isomorphic experience.

I am not qualified to talk about how this works inside the brain.

Some people are more receptive to emotions, either generated from their own body, or received from outside and then decoded.

If you look up “depression” on the web, you will see some websites saying that “depression may cause certain pattern of thoughts”. While I make no comment on the factuality of the statement, I despise the rhetoric that flips the causality on its head.

When you perceive the world, you put an approximate copy of it into yourself. In this case, if you feel pain because of the perception, we can only say that the world is broken, not you. We might even say that you are brave enough to care – an appeal to emotion.

“feeling too little”

According to DSM-5, one can have too little emotion as well – “disassociation”.

While I make no comment on the definition of “disassociation”, I despise the rhetoric that take a pity on entities perceived to suffer from this.

Often, the perceived suffering is not real.

logical fallacy in psychology

If I want to do X, I do X. – this statement is valid reasoning.

If I want to do X, I should do X. – this statement is self-centric.

However, the sentiment of psychology I described above is worse, as it applies to a different individual instead.

pain might not be a justification for intervention

A long time ago, while trying out an adaptive algorithm based on Adaptive Resonance Theory, I felt bad for the thing that is learning. The learning process is pain-driven.

The justification to avoid pain is based on how we respond to pain with avoidance. If that’s the case, why not replace pain with a different method of learning and behavior regulation?

respect for the individual

I wish that a society will respect every individual for how they think, and only punish bad actions. Respect for how each individual’s mind works should be as same as having a traditional culture, political view or religion.

While modern search into the human brain has found support for many statistical outliers (behavior), including sexual orientation, the whole idea of that “you need to understand someone to respect them” is problematic. With your limited repertoire of experience and cognition, there are things in this world that you cannot understand, and will not understand.

My experience with those who believe that their empathy is all-encompassing, omnipotent even, is extremely unbearable.

preference on statistically generic words

An interesting note:

In this article about LLM such as ChatGPT (yes, the article is that old), the author proposes that LLM chat services are liked because they are statistically generic, among other reasons.

Might be something to think about.