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1. 00:01 so i disagree i disagree with the distinction between
2. 00:07 inter-subjectivity and empathy i think empathy is a private case of inter-subjectivity
3. 00:13 and i also disagree with maurice and others that in the absence of communication of
4. 00:20 emotion there’s no empathy because you could empathize with non-emotional states of being
5. 00:27 so empathy is not about emotions it’s about existence it’s about being
6. 00:34 what is it that we feel in empathy do we feel our emotions do we feel
7. 00:41 do we experience our sensations provoked by an external trigger which is classic
8. 00:48 intersubjectivity or do we experience some kind of magical enchanted transfer of another person’s objects another person’s feelings
9. 01:00 and another person’s sensations to us do we see someone he triggers us and then we experience
10. 01:08 our own emotions and sensations or that person transfers to us
11. 01:14 emotions and sensations which are the two well let’s start with the basics
12. 01:22 a transfer from one person to another is physically impossible as far as we know so following sherlock holmes
13. 01:33 if you deem something impossible whatever remains however improbable must be the truth so if it’s
14. 01:39 impossible for one person to transfer feelings emotions sensations to another person it means that empathy takes place 100 inside it’s an
15. 01:53 internal phenomenon it has very little to do with anything external or anyone
16. 01:59 external the other person just triggers in us a cascade of emotions cognitions sensations feelings it’s a trigger
17. 02:13 empathy is this is a set of reactions emotional and cognitive it’s reactions
18. 02:19 to being triggered by an external object by the other it is the equivalent of
19. 02:25 resonance in the physical sciences or flashbacks in ptsd but we have no way of ascertaining
20. 02:33 that the wavelength of such resonance is identical in both subjects do we really know
21. 02:41 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
22. 02:53 verify that the feelings emotions sensations or even cognitions invoked and evoked and provoked and elicited in two
23. 03:04 subjects are the same i don’t know if my subjective experience of the color
24. 03:11 red is your subjective experience of the color red when we use the word red are we talking
25. 03:17 about the same thing and this is the color red which is a an objective
26. 03:23 um light frequency light wave frequency imagine when we talk about love or
27. 03:29 hatred or repulsion these are compounded
28. 03:35 multifaceted schemas of of everything cognitions emotions values
29. 03:42 experiences memories thoughts identity cultural and social more 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
30. 03:57 and i’m telling you i’m sad too are we talking about the same thing is there in a procedure
31. 04:05 is there a test is there an experiment we can conduct that we tell us that what icon sadness
32. 04:13 is what you consider no the answer is no colors for instance have unique uniform independently measurable properties the energy and even so
33. 04:24 no one can prove that what i see as black is what another person would call black a daltonist
34. 04:33 a color blind person uses the word black but what he means when he says black is
35. 04:39 not what i mean if this is true with colors
36. 04:45 which are objective measurable phenomena it is infinitely more true in the case
37. 04:51 of emotions and feelings and we are forced therefore to refine the definition let’s try again
38. 05:00 empathy is a form of inter-subjectivity which involves living things as objects to which the
39. 05:06 communicated inter-subjective agreement relates it is the inter-subjective
40. 05:12 concomitant experience of being the emperor for the person who empathizes empathizes not only with the empathy’s emotions but also with his physical state and
41. 05:24 other parameters of existence such as pain hunger thirst suffocation sexual pleasure but the meaning attributed to the words used
42. 05:36 by both of us by the emperor and the empathy the meaning attributed to the words the
43. 05:42 meaning the meaning attached to the inter-subjective agreement known as empathy
44. 05:48 the meaning is totally dependent upon each party there is no dictionary there can never
45. 05:55 be a dictionary between two people minds are inaccessible minds are firewalled by definition i can
46. 06:02 never enter your mind i have to rely 100 on what you report to
47. 06:08 me if you tell me i’m sad you may be faking i have no way of knowing i have no way of proving it not even
48. 06:15 with a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine because you can fake that too
49. 06:21 there’s no way no known way to establish with 100 certainty what’s
50. 06:28 happening in your mind and moreover even if tomorrow we invent a machine that shows conclusively
51. 06:35 that when you say you that you’re said you’re not lying and you’re really sad how you experience your sadness
52. 06:43 the subjective experience the introspective experience of sadness i can’t prove that it’s the same for you as it is for me the same words are used the same denotes
53. 06:56 but it cannot be proven that the same connotates the same experiences same emotions and sensations are being
54. 07:02 discussed or communicated we are lying to ourselves
55. 07:08 we are we create a a lexical dictionary convention we say listen
56. 07:16 let’s agree that the word sadness means the same for you as it is it does to me
57. 07:22 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
58. 07:34 and even cognitions and they don’t agree on a common dictionary and why they don’t agree in a common dictionary
59. 07:40 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
60. 07:52 discuss for the next 80 years what is the meaning of love it would still
61. 07:58 be something extraneous they would still not be discussing the experience of love
62. 08:05 how does she experience love how does he experience love the physiological
63. 08:11 manifestations may be the same heartbeat blood pressure pupil dilation
64. 08:17 but that’s it what’s the subjective experience what does love mean to her in the
65. 08:24 deepest most profound sense how does he go through love how does he become through love there’s no way to communicate this
66. 08:35 we are utterly isolated solidistic islands
67. 08:42 we are ships passing at the night in the night and and we blow our foghorns and we call this love and communication and then we are gone then we’re gone
68. 08:55 language and by extension art culture they serve to introduce us to other
69. 09:01 points of view what is it like to be someone else to power for a to paraphrase thomas nego
70. 09:08 by providing a bridge between the subjective inner experience and the objective words images sounds language facilitates
71. 09:15 social exchange and interaction it’s useful it is a dictionary which translates
72. 09:21 one’s subjective private language to the coin of the public medium knowledge and language are thus the ultimate social glue though both are based on approximations
73. 09:33 guesses and frankly lies congratulations i refer you to george steiner’s after babel i had the privilege of spending three years with him in geneva amazing
74. 09:45 intellectual true intellectual old-fashioned type old school
75. 09:53 whereas the inter-subjective agreement regarding measurements and observations concerning external object is verifiable
76. 10:01 or falsifiable using independent tools so when we talk about objective things we can conduct lab experiments
77. 10:14 we can conduct studies and we can reach an inter-subjective agreement on the size
78. 10:20 of this laptop we can even to some extent reach an
79. 10:26 inter-subjective agreement on how big sam vacny’s nose is
80. 10:32 but can we reach a true inter-subjective agreement about whether my nose is ugly
81. 10:40 about how you feel about my nose what sensations my nose gives you when
82. 10:46 it’s used appropriately your emotions your experiences can you communicate these of course not none of these are verifiable or falsifiable using
83. 10:57 independent tools i cannot con construct a laboratory experiment who tells 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
84. 11:08 how it feels to you the interpretation of empathy this second kind of inter-subjective
85. 11:15 agreement is dependent upon introspection upon introspection it’s an assumption that identical words used by different subjects still possess identical meaning
86. 11:26 and it’s a fallacious this assumption is not falsifiable or verifiable it’s totally fallacious
87. 11:33 it’s neither true nor false it has no truth value it is a probabilistic statement
88. 11:39 but without probability distribution or actually even a probability object it’s a meaningless
89. 11:46 statement to say what i feel is what you feel what i think is what you this is a meaningless these are meaningless statements empathy therefore is meaningless it’s meaningless
90. 11:59 because it relies on a confabulation of communication
91. 12:05 it relies on a total misunderstanding it relies on confusing confusing words with essence
92. 12:14 confusing reports with experience confusing objective with subjective
93. 12:21 no one can access your subjective world you are trapped you are trapped there and no one can
94. 12:28 ever get to you we are all hostages of our minds we are the ghosts in our own machines inhuman speak if you say that you are
95. 12:40 sad and i empathize with you it means that we have an agreement i regard you as my object
96. 12:46 you communicate to me a property of yours sadness in this communication triggers in me
97. 12:53 a recollection of what is sadness or what it is to be said i say that i know what you mean i say that i know how you feel because i have been sad before i know
98. 13:04 what it is like to be sad i empathize with you we agree about being sad we have an inter-subjective agreement
99. 13:12 but alas such an agreement is meaningless we cannot yet measure sadness quantify
100. 13:20 crystallize it pulverize it access it in any way from the outside measure it and most importantly
101. 13:28 experience it we are totally and absolutely reliant
102. 13:34 on your introspection and my introspection there is no way anyone can prove that my
103. 13:41 sadness is even remotely similar to your sadness i may be feeling or experience something that you might find hilarious and not said at all this happens a lot by the way someone is communicating some tragic
104. 13:53 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
105. 14:07 encyclopedia britannica young children’s growing awareness of their own emotional states characteristics and abilities leads to empathy in other words the ability to appreciate
106. 14:18 the feelings and perspectives of others empathy and other forms of social awareness are in turn
107. 14:24 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
108. 14:36 their relation to other people is according to lip’s concept of empathy a person appreciates another person’s reaction by a projection of the self onto the
109. 14:47 other in his book as aesthetic aesthetic it’s a german book published between
110. 14:54 1903 and 1906 he made all appreciation of art dependent upon a similar self-projection
111. 15:01 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
112. 15:08 project yourself into the work of art this may well be the key empathy has
113. 15:14 little to do with the other person the empathy empathy is simply the result of condition of socialization we are taught
114. 15:25 empathy in other words when we hurt someone we don’t experience his pain we
115. 15:32 experience our pain we project ourselves hurting somebody hurts us the reaction of pain is provoked in
116. 15:44 us by our own actions including the act of observation
117. 15:51 we have been taught a learned response a conditioned response operant
118. 15:57 conditioning of feeling pain when another person is in pain and also when we inflict pain but we’ve also been taught to feel
119. 16:09 responsible for our fellow beings this is guilt judeo-christian guilt nietzsche would
120. 16:16 say so we are taught two things we are taught
121. 16:22 to appropriate other people’s experiences as ours in other words to experience our
122. 16:30 pain for example our sadness and mislabeling and say
123. 16:36 it’s not i who who is said it’s he he said it’s not i um who is in pain she is in
124. 16:43 pain we misappropriate other people’s emotions states like pain hunger first
125. 16:51 and then we attribute these to our to ourselves we mislabel we mislocate
126. 16:58 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
127. 17:14 we feel guilty and when the emotion is positive we feel responsible somehow very often we meet someone and they’re
128. 17:25 happy and he’s she’s happy and unconsciously we would we would say to ourselves i had
129. 17:31 something to do with it i have something to do with it even if i only share this happiness
130. 17:38 just share sharing is caring you know sharing also makes her happy
131. 17:44 so her happiness is multiplied by sharing um and
132. 17:52 this is a social instinct it’s nothing to do with psychology it’s a social conditioning part of
133. 18:00 socialization so when we see another person there are two processes immediately two reactive processes
134. 18:07 that start immediately another person’s presence just the fact that he’s there and breathing triggers two processes
135. 18:15 process number one we appropriate we steal from him we we confiscate his emotions
136. 18:24 his facial expressions his body language he’s he’s um everything and we
137. 18:31 emulate we imitate we mold ourselves we shape-shift to become him
138. 18:38 numerous experiments have demonstrated that body language is contagious when someone crosses legs you cross legs
139. 18:45 it’s a fact when someone’s someone repeats a certain word a lot of times you’ll repeat the same word a lot much more these are facts social behavior is contagious so that’s the first thing
140. 18:57 we appropriate these emotions these states of being and we attribute them to ourselves
141. 19:03 we steal them in effect it’s shop other lifting like shoplifting
142. 19:10 so this is the first thing and then we mistakenly say his sadness is my sadness so i’m
143. 19:16 experiencing sadness second thing we feel responsible if the emotion is negative the other’s emotion is negative we feel guilty what did we do if the other’s emotion is
144. 19:28 positive we feel that by sharing it we’re amplifying it we are giving back to him his emotion
145. 19:34 we are like mirroring or reflecting the emotion thereby amplifying it you know when you shine a
146. 19:40 light to a mirror it’s amplified we can use mirrors to amplify light we can use this process of mirroring
147. 19:46 to amplify happiness in some to use the example of pain we experience
148. 19:53 pain in tandem together with the other person because we feel guilty we feel somehow responsible for his
149. 19:59 condition a land reaction is activated and we experience our kind of pain as
150. 20:05 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
151. 20:18 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
152. 20:29 very existence we attribute feelings sensations and experiences
153. 20:35 to the object of our actions it is the psychological defense mechanism of projection
154. 20:41 he was right this guy the german guy i quoted before he was right lip we do project
155. 20:48 unable to conceive of inflicting pain upon ourselves we displace the source so this there’s a
156. 20:55 someone with pain we look at him we observe him it triggers pain in us but
157. 21:03 inflicting pain on ourselves is no no it’s taboo it’s wrong it’s pathological
158. 21:10 so we say well the pain we are feeling it was not self-inflicted it was imported from
159. 21:16 the other guy it was transferred from the other guy to me i’m experiencing his pain not
160. 21:24 my pain i’m defending defending against the realization that i’m the one who is causing pain to myself i’m acting in a way mini micro
161. 21:36 suicidally a proper mini
162. 21:42 hello ah where would i be without her she’s my
163. 21:49 liquidity so this is again a second layer of
164. 21:55 confabulation the first layer of confabulation we can experience what other people’s what
165. 22:02 other people experience wrong second level of confibulation and emotion is triggered in us but we
166. 22:10 attribute this emotion to someone else to the other you say we got this emotion from him
167. 22:16 by contagion he infected us with his emotion i appropriated his emotion it’s another
168. 22:23 confirmation it’s not true the emotion is ours the emotion i feel when i see someone
169. 22:29 said is my sadness not his sadness the britannica encyclopedia britannica
170. 22:36 perhaps the most important aspect of children’s emotional development is a growing awareness of their own emotional
171. 22:42 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
172. 22:53 characteristics abilities and potential for action this phenomenon is called self-awareness
173. 23:00 i must add that it is coupled with strong narcissistic behaviors and traits primary narcissism coming back to the
174. 23:07 brita secretary britannica this growing awareness of an ability to recall one’s own emotional
175. 23:14 states one’s own emotional states leads to empathy
176. 23:20 or the ability to appreciate the feelings and perceptions of others young children’s dawning awareness of
177. 23:26 their own potential for action inspires them to try to direct or otherwise affect
178. 23:32 the behavior of others with age children acquire the ability to understand the perspective or point of view of other people a development that is closely linked with the empathic sharing
179. 23:44 of other people’s emotions one major factor underlying these changes is the child
180. 23:50 increasing cognitive sophistication for example in order to feel the emotion of guilt
181. 23:56 a child must appreciate the fact that he could have inhibited a particular action of his that violated
182. 24:02 the moral standard the awareness that one can impose a restraint
183. 24:08 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
184. 24:21 that empathy is a reaction to external stimuli that is fully contained within the empath 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
185. 24:42 in response to facial expressions newborns react this way to mother’s facial
186. 24:48 expression of sadness or distress and the fact that newborns can react
187. 24:56 can imitate can emulate mother’s facial expressions six hours after they’re born
188. 25:04 six hours after they’re born they turn their head to follow mother and within four months they
189. 25:11 imitate expressions this serves to prove that empathy is very little to do
190. 25:17 very little to do with the feelings experiences or sensations of the others
191. 25:23 of the other like the empathy the the child at age four months
192. 25:29 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
193. 25:40 he has a unitary view of the universe he is the world like the famous rock roxanne you know we are the world
194. 25:49 the child regards himself he is the child is so expansive he regards himself as the world he and the world are one he there’s no concept of me and others
195. 26:00 so where does the empathy come from if it crucially depends on feeling another person experiencing
196. 26:07 another person sensing another person and on the feeling experiences and sensations of
197. 26:13 other people how does it manifest at age four months
198. 26:19 surely the infant has no idea what it is like to feel sad definitely not what it is like for his
199. 26:25 mother to feed said in this case it is a complex complex reflexive reaction
200. 26:31 later on empathy is still rather reflexive the result of conditioning empathy
201. 26:37 therefore technically is a form of psychosis
202. 26:43 what is psychosis in psychosis we have hyper reflection the the self of the psychotic expands to include the world
203. 26:55 and as it includes the world the psychotic confuses internal objects with external he thinks
204. 27:03 that his internal objects are actually outside himself they’re external this confusion he has a voice in his head it’s an introject he hears it coming from the corner of
205. 27:15 the room there’s an image in his hand 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
206. 27:32 self-contained internal process it is triggered by the presence
207. 27:38 of another person so there’s another person that other person triggers a cascade
208. 27:45 of emotions and cognitions inside and memories inside us this cascade is totally
209. 27:53 totally internal it involves only internal objects
210. 28:00 only internal emotions only self-generated internal cognitions
211. 28:07 only it has nothing to do with the external object and yet
212. 28:15 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
213. 28:28 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
214. 28:40 it’s coming from the outside empathy is the same it happens inside
215. 28:46 but we misspecific is coming from the outside so empathy is a form of psychosis the
216. 28:52 encyclopedia britannica quotes fascinating research which dramatically proves the
217. 28:58 object-independent nature of empathy in other words that it’s a totally internal process
218. 29:04 empathy is an internal reaction triggered by external and external cue provided by animate
219. 29:11 objects it is communicated to the empathy other by the empath or but the communication
220. 29:18 and the resulting agreement i know how you feel and how you feel therefore we agree on how you feel
221. 29:24 this resulting agreement is rendered meaningless by the absence of a monovalent unambiguous dictionary
222. 29:32 and so the britannica says an extensive series of studies indicated indicated that positive emotion feelings
223. 29:40 enhance empathy and altruism in other words when we feel good when we’re happy we’re in a good mood we are much more empathic by the way when we had just exercised physically we are much
224. 29:52 more empathic when we are sick ill physically we are
225. 29:58 less empathic empathy depends critically on what’s happening to us not on anyone outside it’s a totally
226. 30:06 internal thing it reacts to our state of mind and to our health and to our
227. 30:12 to exercise and to neurotransmitters and to hormones it’s totally totally internal thing and
228. 30:18 yet we keep saying no it’s not eternal it’s external i’m empathizing with him i’m empathizing
229. 30:25 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
230. 30:36 american psychologist alice m eisen isen that relatively small favors
231. 30:42 or bits of good luck like finding money in a coin telephone or getting an unexpected gift
232. 30:48 this kind of serendipitous events or small favors or or some small gift
233. 30:54 they induce positive emotion in people and that such emotion regularly increases the subject’s inclination
234. 31:00 to sympathize to empathize to provide help several studies have demonstrated that
235. 31:06 positive emotion facilitates creative problem solving one of these studies showed that positive emotion enabled subjects to name more uses for common objects
236. 31:17 another study showed that positive emotion enhanced creative problem solving by enabling
237. 31:23 subjects to see relations among objects and among other people and these relations
238. 31:30 between objects would have gone unnoticed otherwise positive psychology positive
239. 31:37 emotionality positive experiences like gifts positive positive everything makes you
240. 31:43 much more empathic what is empathy empathy is observation of a trigger and then whole networks
241. 31:51 inside you come to life empathy and livens makes you come alive that’s why people seek connection that’s why they want friendship that’s
242. 32:02 why they socialize britannica continues a number of studies have demonstrated the beneficial effects of positive
243. 32:09 emotion on thinking memory and action in preschool and older children but if empathy increases with positive emotion if empathy increases with good luck
244. 32:21 with good mood with exercise then it has little to do with the alleged objects of empathy with
245. 32:28 the other people is a lot to do with the person in whom the empathy is provoked
246. 32:35 it’s a lot to do with you it’s again about you it’s in a way narcissistic
247. 32:43 empathy is a narcissistic psychotic defense and that’s the new way of totally new
248. 32:51 way of looking at empathy
249. 32:58 you