Has a lack of empathy a pervasive societal condition that has grown out of an increasingly polarized social and political culture?
I don’t think so. I believe a “polarized social and political culture” are just some of the ugly symptoms of the underlying problem.
As you (my particular questioner) know, I began my thinking/reasoning quest with my friend’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) illness. She was, and still is, irrational and without empathy. It is heartbreaking for me to see. As a result of her NPD (?), she cannot develop happy relationships with others. Her past friends know it. She knows it. Therefore, add a disheartening inability to create personal relationships with others to the long list of symptoms of the problem as well.
Yet, for me, the irrationality and lack of empathy symptoms are at the center of it all.
Because of my interest in irrationality, and the focus of my old software company (https://server.learningframework.com), its focus on critical thinking, I have been able to produce the following drawing. It summarizes some of my most recent thinking on thinking.
As it relates to empathy specifically, I have the following hypothesis. IF the above diagram represents anything even close to reality, then I can theorize that a person operating using only their “execution brain”, or region (1), will have no empathy.
This hypothesis is very testable. If irrationality (but more specifically, the inability to reason) is the cause of a lack of empathy, then individuals without the capacity to reason will always lack empathy. Note, reason is a very specific process to me. Ensure that you know how to look for it in order to test the hypothesis. Nevertheless, thus far, I have found that people who lack reason consistently lack empathy.
Therefore, I say, that the collapse of individual empathy is a consequence of the collapse of reason. It is horrible. It might even lead to the collapse of civilization.
The origin of empathy
I believe that region (2), where reason happens, or the pre-frontal cortex, is where people get their empathy (there are actual neurological observations for this). Region (1), by contrast, is generally only a processing (or execution) system (including operant conditioning for incremental improvement). Region (2), the reason area, functions by producing and using models for understanding. These models, or hypotheses, because they represent understanding, have predictive abilities. Prediction is a HUGE evolutionary asset. To develop the understanding models, the reasoner must seek the truth. Critically, I hypothesize, that this truth-seeking, model-building behavior is closely related to one’s empathy development and its expression.
Making Mental Habits
Reason, because it is used for prediction, directly influences the few decisions we make in consciousness (outside of the preemptive decision-making of the execution brain (1)). Yet, once a new decision is made by consciousness, and after the individual’s mind follows through with somatic (i.e. body) execution, and after the resulting outcome is perceived, a new behavior might be accepted and recorded by the person’s execution brain (1). It is an amazing collaborative system. Slowly, as the execution brain’s (1) neural networks take form, the new behavior or thought becomes a mental habit. Through it, the processes of reason have had their influence.
Still, these mental habits don’t actually think (with free will. SEE LINK). They process. So the other side to the same coin is this: If a person primarily or only uses their execution brain, they will not have empathy. They will instead be limited to their own subjective views/truths. Only a desire for understanding drives empathy. Emotions, however, originating out of the execution brain, play an essential role.
Empathy’s relationship to emotions
I also believe that emotions are our feedback system from the “execution brain” to consciousness. There is no other practical way to connect the breadth of execution processing to consciousness. In other words, the execution brain cannot trivially explain “its thinking” to consciousness (though it does “talk” to it using your inner voice) in another way. This is because an individual’s execution (i.e. mental habit) neural networks are complex and far-reaching. And critically, these networks are not model-based. Rather, they are data or information-based. The internal voice of the individual thus does not necessarily have the “understanding”-vocabulary to articulate the brain’s wide-ranging encapsulated data. In truth, it may not be possible without some associated analysis-focused neural networks. For example, try to explain a customer database to another person. The term “customer” is, in fact, a model. Beyond that particular model label, the database’s data is just data … until it isn’t (a model is created). It is otherwise impossible to offer another person an explanation of the data unless the individual presents the other person with the database in totality as their explanation. And so it is with the execution brain’s data. Unless models are developed in reason, there is no vocabulary for the execution mind to “converse” with consciousness. Except then, that there are emotions.
The amygdala, your other “brain”
The execution brain does have analysis-oriented neural networks connected to consciousness. And this communication happens via the amygdala. Emotions are the result of the mind’s neural network analysis of the execution brain’s data and neural networks. People might think of this, in part, as their “gut” instinct. And it is. It is just not possible for consciousness to process everything the senses sense. The amygdala, with its analysis neural networks, closes this perception gap. As for empathy, when we don’t know enough about a situation of another, empathy, as an emotional response, is provoked to prompt our discovery and deeper understanding of the other’s situation. However, the empathetic person must want to understand. This desire is driven by their capacity reason. And tragically, not everyone has it developed (reason).
Understanding is key
If an individual is entirely without reason, then their understanding, or empathy for another, is impossible.
Therefore, If we want to fix NPD narcissism, we will have to develop their capacity to reason. Then, we must train the NPD narcissist’s ‘execution brain’ neural networks to be perceptive of the needs of others. This latter activity is training alone. However, developing reason is much harder. But you have to do both.
Anyway, the collapse of reason means a loss of understanding. This problem has many consequences and symptoms.
