You have taken these ideas into really interesting territory. Thanks for the dialogue.

In most ways, I agree with most of what you have written.

It is hard to explain what I think, however, because I analyze most concepts of human thought and behavior differently than the field of psychology does. I try not to think with the words and concepts we have inherited from psychology because I think most of its concepts are vague, inaccurate, and sloppy.

In light of this it is hard to discuss empathy, sympathy, compassion, or motor neurons. I do not trust the validity of most psychological research because there is no uniformity, clarity, or mutual agreement about the foundational concepts in play. Therefore, no two researchers could possibly be working with uniformly understood or applied concepts. The ideas behind mirror neurons has been called into question recently, but so has most every concept posed by the field of psychology.

Letting go of pre-conceived psychological constructs has freed me to arrive at very different ideas for how people think and behave. Essentially, I believe the only brain process we actively engage in is that of making predictions for what to do next. Neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins hypothesizes we make every prediction in relatively similar fashion. Psychologists have carved us up arbitrarily telling us we make rational or emotional or empathetic or selfish predictions.

I believe the unit of survival is predicting what to do next and that every single thing we think, say, or do emanates from these predictions. This indicates to me that senses, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors co-exist in an integrated fashion . They do not work separately causing us to make categorically different predictions, but they always work in an integrated fashion and have no meaning or value separately.

I hypothesize we cannot have a single response to anything that doesn’t arise from our capacity to cognitively understand and make sense of the situation we are responding to.

So technically we can only respond to another person in terms of how well we cognitively understand how to interpret the expressions coming from that person.

As a 15 year old my friend’s father was killed while driving his semi truck. I could easily imagine what she was going through but I had never experienced the death of an immediate or extended family member. I look back and wonder how well I handled my interactions with her. What if I made insensitive remarks? Does this mean I have a problem that could be described as a lack of empathy or sympathy?

Now that I think it through again after having read your thoughts as well, perhaps we shouldn’t even be using any of these words to describe our behaviors with other people.

If our brain exists in and off itself and basically everything it interacts with is information to it, then we can’t really define our human behaviors by how sensitively or insensitively we interpret the needs of other people. We should perhaps talk about our thoughts and behaviors in terms of the predictions we make for what to do next in any given context without qualifying those predictions as positive or negative.

These thoughts are unedited here…I will need to mull them over and they cold turn into something else tomorrow. I always appreciate your perspective and you always make me think…a lot!