Gene,
Thanks for the links; I’m quite familiar with the mirror neuron research and
the inferences various people have drawn from it, and it reinforces the point I
was trying to make, that empathy is deeper than deliberate reasoning — as well
as Peirce’s point that science is grounded in empathy (or at least in “the
social principle”).
I didn’t miss the point that it is possible to disable the feeling of empathy —
I just didn’t see that point as being news in any sense (it’s been pretty
obvious for millennia!). I see the particular study as an attempt to quantify
some expressions of empathy (or responses that imply the lack of it). What it
doesn’t do is give us much of a clue as to what cultural factors are involved
in the suppression of empathic behavior. (And I thought that blaming it on
increasing use of AI was really a stretch!) As I wrote before, what
significance that study has depends on the nature of the devices used to
generate those statistics.
There are lots of theories about what causes empathic behavior to be suppressed
(not all of them use that terminology, of course.) I think they are valuable to
the extent that they give us some clues as to what we can do about the
situation. To take the example that happens to be in front of me:
The election of Donald Trump can certainly be taken as a symptom of a decline
in empathy. In her new book, Naomi Klein spends several chapters explaining in
factual detail how certain trends in American culture (going back several
decades) have prepared the way for somebody like Trump to exploit the
situation. But the title of her book, No is Not Enough, emphasizes that what’s
needed is not another round of recriminations but a coherent vision of a better
way to live, and a viable alternative to the pathologically partisan politics
of the day. I can see its outlines in a document called the LEAP manifesto, and
I’d like to see us google that and spend more time considering it than we do
blaming Google or other arms of “The Machine” for the mess we’re in.
But enough about politics and such “vitally important” matters. What interests
me about AI (which is supposed to be the subject of this thread) is what we can
learn from it about how the mind works, whether it’s a human or animal bodymind
or not. That’s also what my book is about and why I’m interested in Peircean
semiotics. And I daresay that’s what motivates many, if not most, AI
researchers, including the students that John Sowa is addressing in that
presentation he’s still working on.
Gary f.
} What is seen with one eye has no depth. [Ursula LeGuin] {
<http://gnusystems.ca/wp/> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
From: Eugene Halton [mailto:eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu]
Sent: 26-Jun-17 11:09
To: Peirce List <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu>
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: AI
Dear Gary F,
Here is a link to the Sarah Konrath et al. study on the decline of empathy
among American college students:
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eob/edobrien_empathyPSPR.pdf
And a brief Scientific American article on it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-me-care/
You state: "I think Peirce would say that these attributions of empathy
(or consciousness) to others are perceptual judgments — not percepts, but quite
beyond (or beneath) any conscious control, and . We feel it rather than reading
it from external indications."
This seems to me to miss the point that it is possible to disable the
feeling of empathy. Clinical narcissistic disturbance, for example, substitutes
idealization for perceptual feeling, so that what is perceived can be idealized
rather than felt.
Extrapolate that to a society that substitutes on mass scales idealization
for felt experience, and you can have societally reduced empathy. Unempathic
parenting is an excellent way to produce the social media-addicted janissary
offspring.
The human face is a subtle neuromuscular organ of attunement, which has
the capacity to read another's mind through mirror micro-mimicry of the other's
facial gestures, completely subconsciously. These are "external indications"
mirrored by one.
One study showed that botox treatments, in paralyzing facial muscles,
reduce the micro-mimicry of empathic attunement to the other face in an
interaction. The botox recipient is not only impaired in exhibiting her or his
own emotional facial micro-muscular movements, but also is impaired in
subconsciously micro-mimicking that of the other, thus reducing the embodied
feel of the other’s emotional-gestural state (Neal and Chartrand, 2011).
Empathy is reduced through the disabling of the facial muscles.
Vittorio Gallese, one of the neuroscientists who discovered mirror
neutons, has discussed "embodied simulation" through "shared neural
underpinnings." He states: “…social cognition is not only explicitly reasoning
about the contents of someone else’s mind. Our brains, and those of other
primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism, embodied
simulation, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds. The
shareability of the phenomenal content of the intentional relations of others,
by means of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional attunement.
Intentional attunement, in turn, by collapsing the others’ intentions into the
observer’s ones, produces the peculiar quality of familiarity we entertain with
other individuals. This is what “being empathic” is about. By means of a shared
neural state realized in two different bodies that nevertheless obey to the
same morpho-functional rules, the “objectual other” becomes “another self”.
Vittorio Gallese, “Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron System and Its
Role in Interpersonal Relations,” 15 November 2004 Interdisciplines,
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1
Gene Halton
On Jun 20, 2017 7:00 PM, <g...@gnusystems.ca <mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca> >
wrote:
List,
Gene’s post in this thread had much to say about “empathy” — considered as
something that can be measured and quantified for populations of students, so
that comments about trends in “empathy” among them can be taken as meaningful
and important.
I wonder about that.
My wondering was given more definite shape just now when I came across this
passage in a recent book about consciousness by Evan Thompson:
[[ In practice and in everyday life … we don’t infer the inner presence of
consciousness on the basis of outer criteria. Instead, prior to any kind of
reflection or deliberation, we already implicitly recognize each other as
conscious on the basis of empathy. Empathy, as philosophers in the
phenomenological tradition have shown, is the direct perception of another
being’s actions and gestures as expressive embodiments of consciousness. We
don’t see facial expressions, for example, as outer signs of an inner
consciousness, as we might see an EEG pattern; we see joy directly in the
smiling face or sadness in the tearful eyes. Moreover, even in difficult or
problematic cases where we’re forced to consider outer criteria, their
meaningfulness as indicators of consciousness ultimately depends depends on and
presupposes our prior empathetic grasp of consciousness. ]]
—Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in
Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Kindle Locations 2362-2370). Columbia
University Press. Kindle Edition.
If we don’t “infer the inner presence of consciousness on the basis of outer
criteria,” but perceive it directly on the basis of empathy, how do we infer
the inner presence (or absence) of empathy itself? In the same way, i.e. by
direct perception, according to Thompson. I think Peirce would say that these
attributions of empathy (or consciousness) to others are perceptual judgments —
not percepts, but quite beyond (or beneath) any conscious control, and . We
feel it rather than reading it from external indications. To use Thompson’s
example, we can measure the temperature by reading a thermometer, using a scale
designed for that purpose. But we can’t measure the feeling of warmth as
experienced by the one who feels it.
Now, the statistics cited by Gene may indeed indicate something important, just
as measures of global temperature may indicate something important. But what it
does indicate, and what significance that has, depends on the nature of the
devices used to generate those statistics. And I can’t help feeling that
empathy is more important than anything measurable by those means.
(I won’t go further into the semiotic nature of perceptual judgments here, but
I have in Turning Signs: http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/blr.htm#Perce.)
Gary f.
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