As I showed in Part 3 of this series, it's easy to explain empathy if you assume that the brain's architected to experience an emotion when it's recognized in any of its mental models.
For example, Bill experiences the emotion of pain (but not the physical sensation of its cause) when his mental model of Sally is recognized as being in pain. Similarly, Bill experiences relief when its mental model of Sally is recognized as being relieved.
At first, this seems odd and counterintuitive. Why would *we* experience an emotion when it's something happening to someone else?
However, when you think differently about what a mind is, then it all makes sense. Indeed, the concept that we should only feel an emotion when something happens to us actually becomes the odd and counterintuitive idea!
In my next series, "What is a Mind?", I'm going to describe what I think a mind actually is. As part of this series, I'll show that our brains don't fundamentally distinguish (at an architectural level) between self and non-self, between past, present and future, and between time and space. Nice!
Recent Comments