People don’t choose partners (lovers/friends) as independent individuals with their own character and flaws. Rather, people simply prioritize their own pleasurable feelings reacted towards specific objects, like when you adore a cat or a dog.
To put it in another way, you simply looking for pleasurable extension of yourself in other people rather than seeking complex individuals who might not conform to your worldview
This is an interesting observation of the reality but let us explore it a little deeper. While I agree that if you see yourself into another person you tend to bond with them and have deeper relationships, I don’t come to your same conclusion. Of course a narcissistic person can see their friend/lover as just an extension of themself (and there are a lot of narcissistic people around nowadays), but if I see myself in you I also see my insecurities and my mistakes and this is the very base to positive dynamics such as empathy and compassion.
The crux of this opinion is that you can’t befriend/love another person unless you find something to relate to, something close to you personally rather their own personality. Even your mistakes / insecurities and the things you don’t like in them are all about YOU, not them.
To put it differently, you (or any non narcissist) simply cannot love someone on their own, without any personal connection to your own self.
In that sense, empathy is a way to feel good about your own ability to manipulate your personal experience in the way how other people must be feeling. You cannot know how other people feel; you’ve never experienced feelings of other people directly; your knowledge about feeling of others is just a lexical speculation; hence your empathy is just a way to feel good while acting on this speculation.
In my opinion, constructive discussion for this opinion would be analysis (is it true?, why / why not?) — B+ in that regard, and if true, examination where this opinion leads us to. To make matters easier, here’s the rest of it.
The fundamental root of this opinion is that human connection, in fact, doesn’t exist: we do not love nor hate each other. Instead, we like or dislike the feelings we get from interacting with objects we call other people.
In that sense, empathy is a way to feel good about your own ability to manipulate your personal experience in the way how other people must be feeling.
This assumes you’re operating under the assumption that you have a mental model for the other person. This is not necessary, you can be open to others feeling and thinking in very different ways than you are, and using an imperfect medium (speech) to best understand it.
Not knowing with 100% accuracy that your experience matches does not invalidate the common framework that myself and another human are operating on. You can say with reasonable certainty that a computer performing a calculation is doing so very similarly to another computer. The same is true of humans because we share similar ‘hardware’.
To simplify this down to ‘we cannot ever feel empathy, only sympathy’ can be a useful exercise to frame how little we truly do know, but to make the jump to ‘therefore everything must be framed through your own eyes’ is ignoring the shared biology we have. There are behaviors that we know humans will spontaneously show, and there have been countless discussions where ideas have some level of universality to them. To ignore these is an oversimplification and shows the error of this level of inference.
As a short aside, the model you are working with ‘you simply looking for pleasurable extension of yourself in other people’ is just proof of that error of inference. You yourself already stated that you cannot exist in the mind of others, thus it is plausible (and likely) that someone else exists which does not conform to the same model that you have proposed. Compersion is a good example of a kind of behavior which does not fit your statement.
The matter is hard to tackle without splitting the focus in multiple branches, so I’ll try my best to keep it coherent.
Correct me if I misunderstood, but what your trying to say is that our love and affection for other people is not real since all we can experience, as human beings, are our own perceptions.
But ins’t that true for everything? If I bite an apple isn’t what I’m experiencing in reality the electrical messages my brain translates in what we call taste? So I cannot like apples because in reality I’m just able to enjoy electrical signals?
You’ve got it, good job! Now we can invert that notion and say that if every experience is illusion and nothing is real, then all illusions we get are as real as we can get.
We may accept the fact that our vision is capable to recognize only limited range of light wavelength. Nevertheless, we may enjoy the colours in our day-to-day life, without sacrificing the knowledge that we see only fraction of what is possible.
If so then I do believe that the intrinsic qualities of a person mediates the reaction you have to the stimulus. In poor words “I know that having a relationship with you is in reality me just feeling me, but what really love means it is how you, in your unique way, are making me feel me”
The fact that there is a translation in between doesn’t necessarely mean that there is an original message and that message isn’t true, does it?
“I know that having a relationship with you is in reality me just feeling me, but what really love means it is how you, in your unique way, are making me feel me"
this also happens to be a very good title for a love song
If so then I do believe that the intrinsic qualities of a person mediates the reaction you have to the stimulus.
Intrinsic qualities cannot communicate with you, only you can observe them; you can observe intrinsic qualities only in the way you know how. In other words, you dictate (even if unintentionally) how you see the person. “How you see” is largely predetermined by your own way of perception.
This way, you’re not able to observe the person on its merit (as if you were them) even if you wanted to. Basically, to observe the person if you were them is possible only if you become them — give up your conscious/unconscious self.
Imagine you see a lizard, you don’t know what it feels while passing you; It can bite you and you will feel it. You might reasonably see it as aggression. At no point you can get into its skin and understand what this bite actually meant. Even if you could talk with the lizard and it would try to explain itself, chances are you wouldn’t be able to give up your human perspective on the matter.
The fact that there is a translation in between doesn’t necessarely mean that there is an original message and that message isn’t true, does it?
Translation here means that there’s communication happening with outside world, while in this opinion piece, it’s so muddied up by unreliable narrator “self” that it’s basically just ever expanding confirmation bias
Yeah I understand the connection. The only thing that doesn’t resonate with me is that this opinion takes for granted the fact that any form of communication between human beings is faulty on every level.
While it might be right that there are some things that cannot be talked about, abstract concepts as love, fear, faith and such, I think it’s a little forced IMHO to presume that NOTHING, EVER can get through the Veil.
Your friends and lovers are just your pets.
People don’t choose partners (lovers/friends) as independent individuals with their own character and flaws. Rather, people simply prioritize their own pleasurable feelings reacted towards specific objects, like when you adore a cat or a dog.
To put it in another way, you simply looking for pleasurable extension of yourself in other people rather than seeking complex individuals who might not conform to your worldview
This is an interesting observation of the reality but let us explore it a little deeper. While I agree that if you see yourself into another person you tend to bond with them and have deeper relationships, I don’t come to your same conclusion. Of course a narcissistic person can see their friend/lover as just an extension of themself (and there are a lot of narcissistic people around nowadays), but if I see myself in you I also see my insecurities and my mistakes and this is the very base to positive dynamics such as empathy and compassion.
The crux of this opinion is that you can’t befriend/love another person unless you find something to relate to, something close to you personally rather their own personality. Even your mistakes / insecurities and the things you don’t like in them are all about YOU, not them.
To put it differently, you (or any non narcissist) simply cannot love someone on their own, without any personal connection to your own self.
In that sense, empathy is a way to feel good about your own ability to manipulate your personal experience in the way how other people must be feeling. You cannot know how other people feel; you’ve never experienced feelings of other people directly; your knowledge about feeling of others is just a lexical speculation; hence your empathy is just a way to feel good while acting on this speculation.
In my opinion, constructive discussion for this opinion would be analysis (is it true?, why / why not?) — B+ in that regard, and if true, examination where this opinion leads us to. To make matters easier, here’s the rest of it.
The fundamental root of this opinion is that human connection, in fact, doesn’t exist: we do not love nor hate each other. Instead, we like or dislike the feelings we get from interacting with objects we call other people.
This assumes you’re operating under the assumption that you have a mental model for the other person. This is not necessary, you can be open to others feeling and thinking in very different ways than you are, and using an imperfect medium (speech) to best understand it.
Not knowing with 100% accuracy that your experience matches does not invalidate the common framework that myself and another human are operating on. You can say with reasonable certainty that a computer performing a calculation is doing so very similarly to another computer. The same is true of humans because we share similar ‘hardware’.
To simplify this down to ‘we cannot ever feel empathy, only sympathy’ can be a useful exercise to frame how little we truly do know, but to make the jump to ‘therefore everything must be framed through your own eyes’ is ignoring the shared biology we have. There are behaviors that we know humans will spontaneously show, and there have been countless discussions where ideas have some level of universality to them. To ignore these is an oversimplification and shows the error of this level of inference.
As a short aside, the model you are working with ‘you simply looking for pleasurable extension of yourself in other people’ is just proof of that error of inference. You yourself already stated that you cannot exist in the mind of others, thus it is plausible (and likely) that someone else exists which does not conform to the same model that you have proposed. Compersion is a good example of a kind of behavior which does not fit your statement.
You said that way better than I did, thank you Sensei
Ok, I give up, you’ve won, good job :)
The matter is hard to tackle without splitting the focus in multiple branches, so I’ll try my best to keep it coherent. Correct me if I misunderstood, but what your trying to say is that our love and affection for other people is not real since all we can experience, as human beings, are our own perceptions. But ins’t that true for everything? If I bite an apple isn’t what I’m experiencing in reality the electrical messages my brain translates in what we call taste? So I cannot like apples because in reality I’m just able to enjoy electrical signals?
You’ve got it, good job! Now we can invert that notion and say that if every experience is illusion and nothing is real, then all illusions we get are as real as we can get.
We may accept the fact that our vision is capable to recognize only limited range of light wavelength. Nevertheless, we may enjoy the colours in our day-to-day life, without sacrificing the knowledge that we see only fraction of what is possible.
If so then I do believe that the intrinsic qualities of a person mediates the reaction you have to the stimulus. In poor words “I know that having a relationship with you is in reality me just feeling me, but what really love means it is how you, in your unique way, are making me feel me” The fact that there is a translation in between doesn’t necessarely mean that there is an original message and that message isn’t true, does it?
this also happens to be a very good title for a love song
Intrinsic qualities cannot communicate with you, only you can observe them; you can observe intrinsic qualities only in the way you know how. In other words, you dictate (even if unintentionally) how you see the person. “How you see” is largely predetermined by your own way of perception.
This way, you’re not able to observe the person on its merit (as if you were them) even if you wanted to. Basically, to observe the person if you were them is possible only if you become them — give up your conscious/unconscious self.
Imagine you see a lizard, you don’t know what it feels while passing you; It can bite you and you will feel it. You might reasonably see it as aggression. At no point you can get into its skin and understand what this bite actually meant. Even if you could talk with the lizard and it would try to explain itself, chances are you wouldn’t be able to give up your human perspective on the matter.
Translation here means that there’s communication happening with outside world, while in this opinion piece, it’s so muddied up by unreliable narrator “self” that it’s basically just ever expanding confirmation bias
Yeah I understand the connection. The only thing that doesn’t resonate with me is that this opinion takes for granted the fact that any form of communication between human beings is faulty on every level. While it might be right that there are some things that cannot be talked about, abstract concepts as love, fear, faith and such, I think it’s a little forced IMHO to presume that NOTHING, EVER can get through the Veil.