Archives for posts with tag: Empathy

Opportunity

October 22, 2024 //
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“All governments suffer a recurring problem:
Power attracts pathological personalities.
It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse:Dune

“How can Orson Scott Card be so bigoted, but the Ender’s Game series is about empathy and acceptance of others?“

– “Circle of Empathy. If you’re inside the circle, you are worthy of empathy and it applies to you. If you’re outside the circle, you are not worthy of empathy and bigotry towards you doesn’t count because you don’t count. If you’re ever baffled by how one person can be forgiving and accepting towards one group and turn around and be rabid dogs towards another group it’s because in their emotional calculus the second group literally doesn’t count as “deserving”.
Does it make sense? No. Do humans make sense? No.“”

– Card was young when he wrote Ender’s Game and for what it’s worth I think it reflected his real views on the world at the time. He’s since spent decades of his life in a high control cult that has told him constantly that gay people are moral failures.
I think there’s a chance that Card is actually closeted from remarks he’s made on the subject and fear of discovery has made him feel he has to be even more dogmatic on the matter.
I grew up queer in fundamentalist churches. I’m always going to think of people like this as partial victims, even if it would be easier to just hate them. Brainwashing is real. It’s not just something you shrug off because you’re an adult.
I love his Ender series and think it’s beautiful. It doesn’t actually matter to me what he personally believes because his work is saying something else.“

Discussion found on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/14mmmu0how_can_orson_scott_card_be_so_bigotted_but_the/?rdt=42921

Alive in a living context.

Try to imagine a single living organism.
Forget about ‘where did it came from’. Forget about ‘what does it drink/eat/breathe’.
Now, does the existence of a single living organism mean that life is present? When attempting to answer this, pretend no observer is present…

‘Life’ is ‘wide’ word. It covers a lot.
From ‘life’ as a phenomenon. That thing studied by biology.
To ‘life’ as an ‘individual experience’. That thing cared for by medicine. Human, veterinary… By the way, how do you call a person who takes care of sick plants?

Am I making any sense here?

My point being that life is both a phenomenon and an experience.
As a phenomenon, life – as we know it – needs a certain environment. And a ‘push to start’.
According to what we presently know, life may appear, on it’s own, in certain conditions. We don’t know, yet, which are those exact conditions. Nor exactly how it happened. Only that it seems possible. And that’s enough for me.
If certain conditions are met, life – as a phenomenon – is possible.

Furthermore, if life as a phenomenon has established itself in a certain environment, life as an experience becomes certain. Each individual organism living in that environment experiences its own life. Regardless of whether a particular organism is aware of its being alive or not.

Shared Awareness

Life, as a phenomenon, is a ‘process’.

Individual organisms become alive. One way or another but always as a ‘continuation’.
Each generation of individual living organisms live by the same rules as the generation before it. Each ‘child’ generation follows in the footsteps of the ‘parent’ generation. A ‘blue print’, a genetic blue-print, is passed over from generation to generation. OK, let’s pretend we haven’t yet learned about genetic variation…
Each individual organism continues to be alive for as long as:
– It remains ‘functionally whole’. A human can continue to live, at least for a while, without any limbs. But not without its head or heart. Well, you understand what I mean.
– It continues to exchange substances with the environment in which it lives. Which means that the individual organism is the entity controlling which substances get inside and which substances are ejected from its interior. OK, we need to breathe so we inhale microorganisms and pollutants ‘on top’ of the air we need to survive – and some of them make it into our blood-stream – but it’s still our lungs which absorb oxygen, eliminate carbon dioxide from the blood and leave nitrogen alone. I’m sure you get my drift.

This ability of even the most basic/primitive individual organisms to interact with the environment – along the rules inscribed in their genetic inheritance – allows us, conscient observers of the phenomenon, to consider that individual organisms, while alive, display a certain degree of awareness. They behave as if being aware of the difference between oxygen and nitrogen. As being aware of the need to breathe. As being aware of the fact that too much carbon dioxide in your blood is something to be avoided… And so on.

Fast forward from bacteria – individual organisms which are able to extract specific nutrients from a broth to, say, chimpanzee. Who are very picky about food. When there is plenty enough to choose from…
There is a certain commonality between these two very different kind of organisms being able to feed themselves, right? And if we, humans, pretend to be aware of (some of) our our actions… how do we name this ability of our fellow living organisms? Their, our?!?, ability to choose?

Together?

“The greatest consequence of the arising of self-consciousness and self-awareness in the constitution of humanness, is that to the extent that we human beings are self-conscious beings we are aware of what we do, and of the possible consequences of what we do to ourselves and to other human and not human beings. Self-awareness and self-consciousness are manners of relational living that as they are lived constitute a relational grounding for all else that is being lived. The self-conscious person lives his or her living in a manner in which a question such as, “are you aware of what you are doing?” always makes sense. The self-conscious person lives his or her being in self-consciousness as if he or she were distinguishing him or herself as an independent entity, and operates comfortably in that way. Yet, if we seriously want to explain how is it that self-consciousness happens under the circumstances that we cannot distinguish in the experience between what we call perception and illusion, and, therefore, that we cannot make any reference to an independent reality, we cannot but Þnd out that it is not possible to do so if we do not accept that languaging is not a system of symbolic communications about entities assumed to exist independently of our distinguishing them, but it is a manner of living together in a recursive flow of co-ordinations of consensual co-ordinations of doings.”
Humberto Maturana, The origin and conservation of self-consciousness, 2005

According to Maturana, self-consciousness is somebody’s ability to observe themselves ‘in the act’. To observe themselves observing. Ability developed alongside other self-conscious ‘agents’ through the use of language.
“It is not possible to understand the nature of self-consciousness without understanding the operation of human beings as living systems that exist as emotional languaging living systems: self-consciousness is a manner of living.” Op. cit.

The way I see it, consciousness – self-awareness in Maturana’s terms – is life 2.0.

Just as there are life as a phenomenon and life as an individual experience, there are also human consciousness – a shared ability – and individual conscience.
Just as there’s no way in which a single living organism might appear ex nihilo – unless some ‘outside agent’ introduces it, there’s no way in which anybody might become aware of their own self by themself.
Life – the phenomenon, once established – opens up a huge field of opportunity. Mere chemicals, entangled, ‘cooperate’ towards maintaining the life of the individual organism inside which they happen to ‘cooperate’. Evolution, the process, makes it possible for new forms of life to appear as the environment is shaped by the formerly living organisms. Or by other naturally occurring phenomena.
Consciousness, our shared ability, opens up the next level of opportunity. The opportunity for each of us, individual self-aware agents, to show/prove our ‘true nature’.

Individually as well as collectively.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

‘To judge or not to judge’, is this a real question?

May 2, 2015 //
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Each of us is constantly bombarded by barrage of information, most of it getting through even without us noticing what’s going on.
At the same time our conscious mind is constantly prodded: ‘do this, don’t do that, behave, lay low, stand up, be proud of yourself, don’t be so cocky’…

And we need to choose. This is how we become who we are.
Our past choices have determined who we are now and our present choices pave the way towards who we are going to be tomorrow.

Meanwhile some of the most pervasive pieces of advice we get are “don’t judge”, “love your neighbor as you love yourself” and “take care, anger blinds your reason and eats away your empathy”.

The last one is a ‘piece of cake’, it is so reasonable that it make no sense to comment on it.

The second one is so classic that most of us forget it’s importance.
Helped by the fact that it’s not at all easy to put it into practice. Loving isn’t like judging, it doesn’t come as easily and one cannot make himself love another on the spur of the moment.
Yet, in practically no time, we can pass judgement on almost anything, sometimes even without giving much thought about it.

The third one, “don’t judge”, is the one I find the most interesting.

Had I been a cocky brat I’d tell you that those who dispense this advice so generously as if they were aspirin want to keep all the judgement power for themselves, after all the firsts to give it to us were the mythical sages of the ancient times…
I can’t vouch for them all but I don’t think this was the real reason. The authoritarian paradigm is so destructive for a society as a whole that if a community sticks to it for a significant amount of time it ends up badly so this advice must have survived for another reason.

Yet.
How to refrain from judging and, even more important, what would we become if we gave it up completely?

Merriam Webster, the place where I go every time I have the least inkling that I’d be missing something when it comes to the meaning of words, defines “to judge” as:

: to form an opinion about (something or someone) after careful thought

: to regard (someone) as either good or bad.

So. Could we go through life without having opinions or preferences? Could we even preserve our individuality? What would happen if all of us would act as the members of a bee hive do?
OK, some of you will say now that we’d be easy pray for anybody who had managed to preserve a shred of his own individuality and who, presented with such an opportunity, would not be able to refrain itself.
As someone who had spent his first 30 years under communist rule I’d say ‘yes, you are right, only history shows us that such arrangements are untenable. Every time a society has given up too much of it’s power to choose and delegated too much of it to its ruler, situation know as an ‘imperium’ (dictatorship, absolute monarchy, monopoly, call it what you like), that society had passed through unpleasant historical periods’.

So what are we to do? To judge or not to judge?

How about using our common sense? How about reversing the order of those three advices?

What if we start with anger management and then work up our empathy?

After graduating from that stage we can start loving our neighbors. Not all of them at once, of course. If we keep in mind that our goal is to learn how to love – or at least to respect – even the most unpleasant of them we can start with the the one we like most. Only don’t forget to get to the end of the line.

And yes, while we go through the first two stages it would help to stop condemning people. Don’t kid yourself, you’ll never be able to stop judging, no matter how hard you’ll try. What you can do, quite easily, as soon as you catch yourself in the act of judging, is to consider the situation as calmly and compassionately as possible and then to halt the process just before it’s conclusion, before the ‘condemnation’ part.
Remind yourself that you don’t have all the pertinent information – we seldom do, even when we really need to make an important decision, and that your ‘sentence’ is, most of the times, irrelevant for the person you were judging.

You have, of course, noticed that I was speaking about the ‘casual’ and every day judgement we perform all the time, not about the instances when we do have to make a decision.
The point is that, very shortly after you start implementing the first two steps, you’ll notice a gradual shift in your general attitude towards the world.
And no, that will not happen simply because you’ve went through the motions. You will be able to complete the motions only after you convince yourself that being judgemental is actually bad for yourself, in the first and foremost place.

You see, every time you pass a harsh condemnation you actually coral yourself into a corner. Even when fresh information comes and refutes your judgement you feel the need to stand by your ‘standards’ – cause yes, every time you pass a judgement you do set a standard. So standard after standard, each time you pass a new judgement you erect a new fence between you, and those who agree with you, and the rest of the world.
And fences are strange things… some are good, those who keep the cattle in and the burglars out while some are so thick that prevent you from seeing what’s going on in the rest of the world.

After all our fences are our responsibility, we erect them, we maintain them…

Now please tell me how many of you did judge me for starting this post with a picture of a strange looking fence and how many figured out that that fence was in fact a very ingenuous play ground designed by Tejo Remy?

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Categories Choices we make, Frames of mind, Psychology, Respect Mutual.

Two not so different oppinions about wealth

October 13, 2014 //
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“Middle Class doesn’t understand wealth”:

“Few people in the middle class really understand the mindset of the richest people.

After all, if they did, they would be among the top earners as well.”

“Among the many money issues misperceived by the general public is the notion that acquiring great wealth is more about showing off than creating choices. While money certainly brings status, it’s acquired mostly for the purpose of attaining personal liberty.It’s impossible to be truly free without wealth. The middle class is controlled by employment, government, and other entities with superior resources that dictate what they can and can’t do. It’s tough to make a moral stand for freedom when you’re worried about making your next mortgage payment.Rich people can afford to stand up and fight oppression. They can afford to buy their way out of unhealthy work environments, bad bosses, and other unpleasant situations. They have the means to enlist the best doctors when they get sick, and they are able to make themselves as comfortable as possible when they can’t get well. When they want to raise money for business, politics, or charity, a few phone calls to their rich friends is all it takes. If they need more money, they throw a party or host an auction and charge $1,000 a ticket. The examples of how much money buys freedom are endless.Start thinking about the freedoms you’ll gain when you are wealthy!”

“It’s impossible to be truly free without wealth. The middle class is controlled by employment, government, and other entities with superior resources that dictate what they can and can’t do. It’s tough to make a moral stand for freedom when you’re worried about making your next mortgage payment.

Rich people can afford to stand up and fight oppression. They can afford to buy their way out of unhealthy work environments, bad bosses, and other unpleasant situations. They have the means to enlist the best doctors when they get sick, and they are able to make themselves as comfortable as possible when they can’t get well. When they want to raise money for business, politics, or charity, a few phone calls to their rich friends is all it takes. If they need more money, they throw a party or host an auction and charge $1,000 a ticket. The examples of how much money buys freedom are endless.

“The rich really are different”

“This one-room house was about a mile away from any road. It had no floor, no latrine, no electricity, no running water, no windows. Twelve people lived in it, all under the age of 25, and every one of them were born in that house.
  Several of the kids were showing signs of malnutrition. Their only source of water was a fetid stream that was polluted with cholera.

 There were a lot of houses like this, but this one was the worst.

  When I tell my friends in the States about this place their responses are always “Wow. That’s sad.” or something like that.
   What my friends don’t do is ask questions like, “How do they do such-and-such?” The questions never occur to my working class friends because this level of poverty is foreign to them.

  Sure, people in America understand the fear of not being able to find work, or losing their homes, or having their kids go to bed hungry.
   But that isn’t 3rd world poverty. So while working class Americans empathize, they can’t understand it in a day-to-day way.

  As for the super wealthy, who have never experienced the fear of losing a home, or missing a meal, they simply have no associated experience.
  They say to themselves, “I work hard. Why can’t you?”
And one thing you can’t hold against the super wealthy on Wall Street and elsewhere is that a lot of them do work hard and put in long hours.
   What they don’t understand is simply not having opportunity. Something their lives are filled with. They don’t have empathy because everyone they have ever met has succeeded if that person worked hard.”

 

See what I mean? Both articles amply demonstrate one thing and one thing only. ‘Having it’ or ‘not having it’ dramatically changes one’s perspective on almost all things.

Why did I bother with such ‘common knowledge’?

Because this is NOT AT ALL ‘common knowledge’. Had it been common it would have created mutual understanding, as it is it creates a wider and wider chasm.

People knowing that something exists doesn’t mean ‘common knowledge’. It becomes so only after enough of those people have an at least partially overlapping view of that something.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

The lone new world

September 19, 2013 //
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One of the first novels I read was “The Naked Sun”  by Isaac Asimov.
In a nutshell it depicts the contrast between an overcrowded Earth whose population lives basically underground in close resemblance of an ant mole, both architecturally and socially, and Solaria – a planet long ago colonized by humans who now live individually, with almost no personal contact between them, except for long Skype-like machine intermediated interactions.
The Earth cannot evolve any further because they have locked themselves in a corner in search for safety inside the herd and Solaria cannot do anything more than survive because the inhabitants do not have even the slightest idea of what close cooperation means.

Nowadays there is a hot debate about video games. One party deplores the fact that the young generation is morally perverted by the high level of violence they are exposed to while others point to the fact that ancient tales are even more violent and that there is no difference between spoken, written, seen on screen (cinema and then TV) and video-played violence.

Yes and no.
The level of violence might be the same but the level of ‘immersion’ is different.
For most of (pre)human history everything happened in the ‘public square’, including punishment. It was customary that everybody attended even the most gruesome executions, children included, as lessons for the future. This had consequences: life was cheap in those times because it could be ended by the whims of the powerfuls of the day but everybody was fully aware of the practicalities (excruciating pain) of losing it and – most important – that there were ways of avoiding it: social cooperation by obeying the rules.
Afterwards, when printing and later radio, cinema and TV were invented, this level of immersion was no longer necessary and executions retreated inside the prison walls. People read about what rules bending meant and discussed about it among themselves. Human direct interaction was not as intense as directly seeing an execution but reading about it managed to preserve a sufficient level of impact while discussing about it preserved a sane level of compassion with both victim and criminal.
The advent of the video games changed all this. The virtual world influences real life two ways: it robs people of ‘the practical touch’ and of time otherwise spent interacting with real people.
A real execution was indeed gruesome but it left a powerful impression. If you read about one, and the writer is any good, you are left with a not so intense experience but sometimes with a more lasting one, precisely because the writer knew his job. If you witness ten deaths in a 15 minutes video game you start to not care anymore, once because of the reset button and secondly because the human brain is set to discard stimuli than come in a steady flow, for instance we stop feeling a certain smell after a while or we stop hearing the constant hum of the engine when enjoying a cruise on a ship.
Even more nefarious is the fact that young people do not interact directly as more as they used to. Playing with other children with minimum or even no adult supervision is the best and fastest way to acquire social skills and to learn empathy. Nowadays shrinking families (one or two children per family drastically reduces the number of playmates) and increased focus on safety means that children no longer play amongst themselves but in an environment closely monitored or eve sometimes suffocated by adult intervention . Video gaming only meant that even this closely monitored interaction with one’s peers almost disappeared and was replaced by interactions with a machine…

I’m afraid that this may be one of the explanations for why nowadays nuances are becoming so hard to find, everything is treated as in ‘black and white’ and empathy has become a dirty word describing the feelings of a ‘sissy’.

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Categories Culture, Psychology