 You may not have noticed but I am wearing my Count Dracula outfit Okay kiddos and kidettes women and womenettes Third time lucky. This is the third video of the day. I am testing Your resilience and your inner strength Let's see who will break up first you or me I'm gonna keep making videos until one of us one of us lies down and lays his weapons Peace So today's video is a kind of a new new theory of empathy There's a question here when you empathize with someone are Are you empathizing are you relating to are you interacting with an external object with the representation of this external object in your mind with a kind of Internal object that represents the external object with an avatar an icon. I don't know how you want to call it a handle or Are you interacting and relating to a totally internal object that has very little to do with the external object So these are the three possibilities totally external representation of the external internally or totally internal and The common answer today is that when you empathize with someone you are interacting 100% with an external Object with an entity out there and that you are relating to this entity that this entity this external entity provokes in you internal psychodynamics internal processes We're gonna study this in depth and I'm gonna come up with an alternative Which is a bit shocking because my proposed new theory of empathy is that when we empathize We are actually Reacting to a totally Internal object that is extremely little to do with the external object the external object the other person is just a trigger It triggers the internal object Now if this is true the whole nature of empathy Should be completely reconceived and many disorders of empathy like narcissism like psychopathy should also be reconsidered and then there's a question of Partial empathy such as cognitive empathy called empathy, which is reflexive plus cognitive and in babies Reflexive empathy babies have only reflexive empathy. It opens a whole a whole can of worms But before we go there just a clarification I never actually in several videos and several interviews of my channel I made very clear that I regard autism to be a brain disorder. I Do not think that autism is caused by a refrigerator mother by a bed mother by a dead mother What I did say in the previous video Had you bothered to listen carefully is that an autistic child Would react an already autistic child with flawed genetics Brain abnormality. We don't know exactly what causes autism by the way There's no a great theory on what causes autism. Well, what I'm saying is an already autistic child child with a foundation of autism Would react to a dead mother Would react to a none of the emotionally unavailable distant cold mother By developing Attention deficits and narcissism. That's all I said I don't think autism is caused by upbringing or by mother mothering or by bed parenting or by by any of the theories that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s So now to the topic of today's video a new theory of empathy first of all the very existence of empathy should be questioned It is often confused with intersubjectivity What is intersubjectivity the oxford companion to philosophy defines intersubjectivity this way it says intersubjectivity refers to the status Of being somehow accessible to at least two and usually all minds or subjectivities intersubjectivity implies that there is some sort of communication between those minds Which in turn implies that each communicating mind is aware not only of the existence of the other minds But also of its intention to convey information to the other minds Intersubjectivity is Is a kind of idea which if subjective processes Can be brought into agreement Then perhaps this is as good as the unattainable status of being objective Completely independent of subjectivity in other words if we could bring all minds into sync If we could bring all minds into agreement on something perhaps this is a good enough definition of objectivity and in this sense ironically Empathy enhance empathy theoretically should lead to objectivity By the way, this is not the case The more empathic you are the more you misread people. This is what studies have shown So empathy does not lead to objectivity It does not lead outside. It seems to lead inside The more empathic you are The more you withdraw From other people the less well you read them the less well you understand them It's a shocking Recent discovery in many many studies And so if this is true empathy has something to do not with other people But a lot more to do with you the empathizer the Companion the Oxford companion to philosophy continues the question facing us is whether Intersubjectivity is definable Without presupposing an objective environment in which communication takes place the wiring from subject A to subject B At the least fundamental at a less fundamental level, however the need for intersubjective verification of Scientific hypothesis has been long recognized. So for example in quantum mechanics, we talk about the Contribution of the observer to the experiment Okay Here's the thing if empathy was about other people Then empathizing with a huge number of other people would have led you to a better grasp of reality But this is not the case The more you empathize the less the more impaired your reality testing the less correctly your grasp reality At least about other people So it therefore the inevitable conclusion is Inescapably that empathy is much more in internal process much more to do with you Then with others on the face of it the difference between intersubjectivity and empathy is dual double one intersubjectivity requires an explicit Communicated agreement between at least two subjects and it involves external things so-called objective entities other people these differences are Look very fundamental, but actually they're pretty out if artificial This is how empathy is defined in a textbook psychology and introduction by Charles G. Morris 1996 He says Closely related to the ability to read other people's emotions is empathy the arousal of an emotion in an observer That is a vicarious response to the other person's situation Empathy depends not only on one's ability to identify someone else's emotions But also on one's capacity To put oneself in the other person's place and to experience an appropriate emotional response Just as sensitivity to non-verbal cues increases with age So does empathy the cognitive and perceptual abilities required for empathy develop only as a child matures in Empathy training for example Morris continues each member of the couple is taught to share inner feelings and to listen to and understand the partner's feelings before Responding to them empathy technique Focuses the couple's attention on feelings and requires that they spend more time listening and less time in rebuttal so empathy Does require the communication of feelings and an agreement on the appropriate outcome of the communicated emotions We call this an effective agreement Not effective affective in the absence of such an agreement in the absence of an agreement on the outcome of the Communicative options. We are faced with inappropriate effect. For example laughing at a funeral Laughing in a funeral is inappropriate and it happens because we don't agree on the outcome of communicating emotions such as sadness Moreover Empathy does relate to external objects. It is provoked by them There is no empathy in the absence of an empathy someone you empathize with It's true that inter subjectivity is intuitively applied to the inanimate While empathy is applied to the living animals humans even plants But this is a difference in human preferences not in definition Empathy can be redefined as a form of inter subjectivity which involves living things as Objects to which the communicated inter subjective agreement is applied It is wrong to limit our understanding of empathy to the communication of emotion Rather, it is the inter subjective concomitant experience of being The empathy for the person who empathizes Empathizes not only with the empathy is emotions But also with the empathy is physical state and other parameters of existence like pain hunger thirst suffocation sexual pleasure and so on So I disagree I disagree with the Distinction between inter subjectivity and empathy I think empathy is a private case of inter subjectivity and I also disagree with Morris and others that In the absence of communication of emotion. There's no empathy because you could empathize with non-emotional states of being So empathy is not about emotions. It's about existence. It's about being What is it that we feel in empathy Do we feel our emotions? Do we feel do we experience our sensations? provoked by an external trigger Which is classic inter subjectivity Or do we experience some kind of magical enchanted transfer of another person's objects another person's feelings and another person's sensations to us Do we see someone? He triggers us and then we experience our own emotions and sensations or That person transfers to us Emotions and sensations which of the two Well, let's start with the basics a Transfer from one person to another is physically impossible as far as we know so following Sherlock Holmes If you deem something impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth So if it's impossible for one person to transfer feelings Emotions sensations to another person it means that empathy takes place 100% inside It's an internal phenomenon It has very little to do with anything external or any one external The other person just triggers in us a cascade of Emotions cognitions sensations feelings. It's a trigger Empathy is the is a set of reactions emotional and cognitive its reactions to being triggered By an external object by the other it is equivalent of resonance in the physical sciences or flashbacks in PTSD But we have no way of ascertaining that the wavelength of such resonance is identical in both subjects Do we really know? The frequency of another person. Do we know what another person is feeling? Do we know the subjective experience of a specific emotion in another person? We have no way to verify the feelings emotions sensations or even cognitions Invoked and evoked and provoked and elicited in two subjects are the same. I don't know if my subjective experience of the color red is Your subjective experience of the color red When we use the word red, are we talking about the same thing? And this is the color red, which is a an objective Light frequency light wave frequency Imagine when we talk about love or hatred or repulsion these are compounded multifaceted Schemas of of everything Cognitions emotions values experiences memories thoughts identity Cultural and social morey they all interfere and intervene and compose and recompose and recombine and everything to yield to yield sadness When you're telling me I'm sad and I'm telling you I'm sad too Are we talking about the same thing? Is there and a procedure? Is there a test? Is there an experiment we can conduct that we tell us that what I call sadness is what you call sad? No, yes, there is no Colors for instance have unique uniform independently measurable properties the energy and even so No one can prove that what I see is black is what another person would call black adult adult honest colorblind person Uses the word black, but what he means when he says black is not what I mean If this is true with colors which are objective measurable phenomena It is infinitely more true in the case of emotions and feelings and we are forced therefore to refine the definition Let's try again Empathy is a form of intersubjectivity Which involves living things as objects to which the communicated intersubjective agreement relates It is the intersubjective concomitant experience of being The empath or the person who empathizes empathizes not only with the empathy is emotions but also with his physical state and other parameters of existence such as pain hunger first suffocation sexual pleasure, but the meaning attributed to the words used By both of us by the empath or and the empathy The meaning attributed to the words the meaning The meaning attached to the intersubjective agreement known as empathy the meaning is totally dependent Upon each party There is no dictionary they can never be a dictionary between two people minds are inaccessible Mines are firewall by definition. I can never enter your mind. I have to rely 100% on What you report to me? If you tell me I'm said you may be faking I have no way of knowing I've no way of proving it not even With a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine Because you can fake that too There's no way no known way To establish with 100% certainty. What's happening in your mind and moreover even if tomorrow we invent a machine that shows conclusively That when you say you that you said you're not lying and you're really said How you experience your sadness? The subjective experience the introspective experience of sadness. I Can prove that it's the same for you as it is for me The same words are used the same denotates But it cannot be proven that the same connotates the same experiences same emotions and sensations are being discussed or communicated We are lying to ourselves We are we create a lexical dictionary convention We say listen Let's agree that the word sadness means the same for you as it is it does to me as it does for me Let's agree that your love is my love Which is the source of a lot of misunderstanding in many couples They use words Which describe emotions and even cognitions and they don't agree on a common dictionary And why they don't agree on a common dictionary because it's impossible to do it This is impossible to accomplish Even if I put two members of a couple a man and a woman and They talk for the next 80 years they discuss for the next 80 years. What is the meaning of love? It would still be something extraneous They would still not be discussing the experience of love How does she Experience love how does he experience love the physiological manifestations may be the same heartbeat blood pressure Pupil dilation, but that's it What's the subjective experience? What does love mean to her in the deepest most profound sense? How does he go through love? How does he become through love? There's no way to communicate this We are utterly Isolated solipsistic islands We are ships passing at the night in the night and and we blow our fog horns and we call this love communication and then we are gone Then we are gone Language and by extension art culture they serve to introduce us to other points of view What is it like to be someone else to paraphrase to paraphrase Thomas Nagel? By providing a bridge between the subjective inner experience and the objective words images sounds Language facilitates social exchange and interaction. It's useful It is a dictionary which translates one's subjective private language to the coin of the public medium knowledge and language or thus the ultimate social glue Though both are based on approximations guesses and frankly lies Confabulations, I refer you to George Steiners after Babel. I had the privilege of spending three years with him in Geneva amazing intellectual True intellectual old-fashioned type old school Whereas the intersubjective agreement regarding measurements and observations Concerning external object is verifiable or falsifiable using independent tools So when we talk about objective things We can conduct lab experiments We can conduct studies and we can reach an intersubjective agreement on the size of this laptop We can even to some extent reach an intersubjective agreement on how big Saint Vakni's nose is But can we reach a true intersubjective agreement? About whether my nose is ugly About how you feel about my nose What sensations my nose gives you when it's used appropriately your emotions your experiences Can you communicate these? Of course not None of these are verifiable or falsifiable using independent tools. I cannot Construct a laboratory experiment to tell me how how really of how you really feel about my notes And even if you report how you feel about my nose. I don't know how it feels to you the interpretation of Empathy this second kind of intersubjective agreement is dependent upon introspection Upon introspection. It's an assumption that identical words used by different subjects still possess identical meaning And it's a fallacious this assumption is not falsifiable or verifiable. It's totally fallacious It's neither true No false. It has no truth value. It is a probabilistic statement But without probability distribution or actually even a probability object It's a meaningless statement to say what I feel is what you feel what I think is what youth This is a meaningless. These are meaningless statements empathy. Therefore is meaningless It's meaningless Because it relies on a confabulation of communication It relies on a total misunderstanding. It relies on confusing confusing words with essence Confusing reports with experience confusing objective with subjective No one can access your subjective world. You're trapped you're trapped there and no one can ever get to you We are all hostages of our minds We are the ghosts in our own machines In human speak if you say that you are sad and I empathize with you It means that we have an agreement. I regard you as my object You communicate to me a property of yours sadness and this Communication triggers in me a recollection of what is sadness or what it is to be said I Say that I know what you mean. I said that I know how you feel Because I have been said before I know what it is like to be sad. I empathize with you We agree about being sad. We have an inter subjective agreement, but alas Such an agreement is meaningless We cannot yet measure sadness Quantify crystallize it pulverize it access it in any way from the outside Measure it and most importantly experience it We are totally and absolutely reliant on Your introspection and my introspection There is no way anyone can prove that my sadness is even remotely similar to your sadness I may be feeling or experience something that you might find Ilarious and not said at all. This happens a lot by the way. Someone is communicating some tragic experience and Someone else finds it very funny Still I call it sadness and I empathize with you regardless of the of the internal content in Cyclopida Britannica Young children's growing awareness of their own emotional states characteristics and abilities Leads to empathy. In other words the ability to appreciate the feelings and perspectives of others Empathy and other forms of social awareness are in turn important in the development of a moral sense Another important aspect of children's emotional development is the formation of their self-concept or identity Their sense of who they are and what their relation to other people is according to leaps concept of empathy a person appreciates another person's reaction by Projection of the self onto the other in his book as aesthetic aesthetic So a German book published between 1903 and 1906 he made all appreciation of art Dependent upon a similar self-projection into the object He said that when you empathize with someone you project yourself into something similarly when you see a work of art You project yourself into the work of art This may well be the key Empathy has little to do with the other person the empathy Empathy is simply the result of conditioning of Socialization We are taught empathy In other words when we hurt someone We don't experience his pain We experience our pain. We project ourselves Hurting somebody hurts us The reaction of pain is Provoked in us by our own actions including the act of observation We have been taught a learned response a conditioned response operant conditioning of feeling pain When another person is in pain and also when we inflict pain But we've also been taught to feel responsible for our fellow beings This is guilt Judeo-Christian guilt Nietzsche would say So we are taught two things We are taught to appropriate other people's experiences as ours In other words to experience our our pain for example our sadness and Mislabelling and say it's not I who we said it's he he said It's not I Who is in pain? She's in pain We misappropriate other people's emotions states like pain hunger thirst and then we attribute this to art to ourselves We mislabel we mislocate We dislocate and The second thing we have been taught to feel responsible for what happens to other people via guilt and conscience So we experience pain or Any other state whenever another person claims to experience it as well. We feel guilty and When the emotion is positive we feel responsible somehow Very often we meet someone and they're happy in his she's happy and Unconsciously what we would say to ourselves. I had something to do with it. I Had something to do with it even if I only share this happiness Just share sharing is caring, you know Sharing also makes her happy. So her happiness is multiplied by sharing And This is a social instinct. It's nothing to do with psychology It's a social Conditioning part of socialization. So when we see another person, there are two processes immediately To reactive processes that start immediately another person's presence Just the fact that he's there a breathing triggers two processes process number one we Appropriate we steal from him We confiscate His emotions his facial expressions his body language his he's everything and We emulate we imitate we mold ourselves with shape shift to become him Numerous experiments have demonstrated that body language is contagious When someone crosses legs you cross legs the fact When someone's someone repeats a certain word a lot of times you repeat the same word a lot much more these are facts Social behavior is contagious. So that's the first thing we appropriate these emotions these states of being and we attribute them to ourselves we Steal them in effect. It's shop other lifting pitch like shoplifting So this is the first thing and then we mistakenly say his sadness is my sadness. So I'm experiencing sadness Second thing we feel responsible If the emotion is negative the others emotion is negative. We feel guilty. What did we do? If the others emotion is positive, we feel that by sharing it. We amplify it We are giving back to him his emotion. We are like mirroring or reflecting the emotion thereby Amplified it. You know when you shine a light to a mirror. It's amplified. We can use mirrors to amplify light We can use this process of mirroring to amplify happiness in some To use the example of pain We experience pain in tandem together with the other person because we feel guilty We feel somehow responsible for his condition a Land reaction is activated and we experience our kind of pain as well We communicate it to the other person and an agreement of empathy is struck between us He's in pain. I resonate It triggers my pain or a recollection of my pain I communicate to him this recollection and this resonance and we have an agreement now about pain Pain its nature its experience and its very existence We attribute feelings Sensations and experiences to the object of our actions. It is the psychological defense mechanism of projection He was right this guy the German guy quoted before he was right live We do project unable to conceive of inflicting pain upon ourselves. We displace the source So there's there's a someone with pain We look at him we observe him it triggers pain in us but inflicting pain on ourselves is no no it's taboo. It's wrong. It's pathological So we say well the pain we are feeling it was not self-inflicted It was imported from the other guy. It was transferred from the other guy to me I'm experiencing his pain, not my pain and defending Defending against the realization that I'm the one who is causing pain to myself I'm acting in a way mini micro-suicidally apropos mini Hello Where would I be without her? She's my liquidity So this is again a second layer of confabulation The first layer of confabulation We can experience what other people say what other people experience wrong second level of confabulation and emotion is triggered in us But we attribute this emotion to someone else to the other We say we got this emotion from him by contagion. He infected us with this emotion. I Appropriated his emotion. It's another confabulation. It's not true The emotion is ours The emotion I feel when I see someone said is my sadness not his sadness The Britannica cyclopedia Britannica Perhaps the most important aspect of children's emotional development is a growing awareness of their own emotional states and The ability to discern and interpret the emotions of others The last half of the second year is a time when children start becoming aware of their own emotional states characteristics abilities and potential for action this phenomenon is called self-awareness I Must add that it is coupled with strong narcissistic behaviors and traits primary narcissism Coming back to the Britannica cyclopedia Britannica this growing awareness of an ability to recall one's own emotional states one's own emotional states leads to empathy or The ability to appreciate the feelings and perceptions of others young children's dawning awareness of their own potential for action Inspires them to try to direct or otherwise affect the behavior of others with age Children acquired the ability to understand the perspective or point of view of other people a Development that is closely linked with the empathic sharing of other people's emotions One major factor underline these changes is the child increasing cognitive sophistication For example in order to feel the emotion of guilt a child must appreciate the fact that he could have inhibited a particular Action of his that violated the moral standard The awareness that one can impose Every strength on one's own behavior Requires a certain level of cognitive maturation and therefore the emotion of guilt cannot appear until that competence is attained That empathy is a reaction to external stimuli That is fully contained within the empath or the person who empathizes and then projected onto the empathy Is clearly demonstrated by inborn reflexive empathy? It is the ability to exhibit empathy and altruistic behavior in response to facial expressions newborns react this way to mother's facial expression of sadness or distress and The fact that newborns can react Can imitate can emulate mother's facial expressions six hours after they're born Six hours after they're born that turn their head to follow mother and within four months They imitate expressions This serves to prove that empathy is very little to do Very little to do with the feelings Experiences or sensations of the others of the other like the empathy The child at age four months when he is already clearly empathic Does not perceive the existence of other people as separate He does not perceive other people as autonomous independent entities He has a unitary view of the universe. He is the world like the famous rock rock song You know We are the world the child regards himself Is the child is so expansive? He regards himself as the world he and the world are one he does not concept of me and others So where does the empathy come from if it crucially depends on? Feeling another person experiencing another person sensing another person and on the feeling the experiences and sensations of other people How does it manifest at age four months? Surely the infant has no idea what it is like to feel sad Definitely not what it is like for his mother to feel sad In this case, it is a complex complex reflexive reaction Later on empathy is still rather reflexive the result of conditioning empathy therefore Technically the form of psychosis What is psychosis in psychosis? We have hyper reflection The the self of the psychotic Expands to include the world And as it includes the world the psychotic confuses Internal objects with external he thinks that his internal objects are actually outside himself. They're external This confusion he has a voice in his head. It's an interject He hears it coming from the corner of the room There's an image in his head. He sees it standing there. He confuses He kind of projects his internal objects to the outside. That's what we do in empathy We actually Empathy is a totally self-contained internal process. It is treated by the presence of Another person So there's another person That other person triggers a cascade of emotions and cognitions inside and memories inside us This cascade is totally Totally internal It involves only internal objects Only internal emotions Only self-generated internal cognitions Only it has nothing to do with the external object and yet Anyway, and yet We make we are confused. We make the mistake of thinking that these emotions and cognitions come from the other person not from us Everything happens inside, but we think it comes from the outside This is an excellent definition of psychosis Everything happens inside, but we think it's coming from the outside. That's what a psychotic would tell you It's coming from the outside Empathy is the same. It happens inside But we misperceive it is coming from the outside So empathy is a form of psychosis The encyclopedia Britannica quotes fascinating research which dramatically proves the object's independent nature of empathy In other words that it's a totally internal process Empathy is an internal reaction Triggered by external an external cue provided by animate objects It is communicated to the empathy other by the empathore But the communication and the resulting agreement I know how you feel. I know how you feel Therefore we agree on how you feel this resulting agreement is rendered meaningless by the absence of a monoviland unambiguous dictionary And so the Britannica says an extensive series of studies indicated Indicated that positive emotion feelings enhance empathy and altruism In other words when we feel good and we're happy we're in a good mood. We are much more empathy By the way, when we had just exercised Physically, we are much more empathic When we are sick ill Physically, we are less empathic Empathy depends critically on what's happening to us Not on anyone outside It's a totally internal thing. It reacts to our state of mind and to our health and to our To exercise and to neurotransmitters and to hormones. It's totally Totally internal thing and yet We keep saying no, it's not internal. It's external. I'm empathizing with him I'm empathizing with her. I feel bad for him. I feel good for her They have nothing to do with it. It's psychotic to claim otherwise Britannica continues it was shown by the American psychologist Alice M. Eisen That relatively small favors or bits of good luck like finding money in a coin telephone or getting an unexpected gift This kind of serendipitous events Of small favors or some small gift They induce positive emotion in people and that such emotion regularly increased the subjects inclination To sympathize to empathize to provide help Several studies have demonstrated that positive emotion facilitates creative problem solving One of these studies showed that positive emotion enabled subjects to name more users for common objects Another study showed that positive emotion enhanced creative problem solving by enabling subjects to see relations among objects and among other people And these relations between objects would have gone unnoticed. Otherwise Positive psychology positive emotionality positive experiences like gifts positive positive everything makes you much more empathic. What is empathy? Empathy is observation of a trigger And then whole networks inside you Come to life Empathy and livings Makes you come alive. That's why people seek connection. That's why they want friendship. That's why they socialize Britannica continues a number of studies have demonstrated the beneficial effects of positive emotion on thinking memory and action In preschool and older children, but if empathy increases with positive emotion If empathy increases with good luck With good mood with exercise Then it has little to do with the alleged objects of empathy With the other people There's a lot to do with the person in whom the empathy is provoked. It's a lot to do with you It's again about you It's in a way narcissistic Empathy is a narcissistic psychotic defense And that's the new way A totally new way of looking at empathy