Paul Mawdsley

Being able to draw the line and cut off empathy is important for survival in a world of perceptions that are hostile to the self. Having control over when and where to draw this line is vital to maintaining the flow of information that is important for our survival in this same world. For me, I have my rules for healthy social space. People who fuck with these rules don't have access to my empathy. I become a true Objectivist in these moments, seeing people from the outside-in as having value in their own existence but they only exist as robotic pylons in terms of their function in my universe.

"The trick is not to know her, for down deep we don't, but to know ourselves..." This is very true. It is also the path to higher empathic development. The more you know yourself, the more you learn to trust your insights into others. It also works the other way. The more you see honestly inside others, the more insight you get into yourself. This is also the path to reducing "perception bias" but we always need to acknowledge it's presence to reduce its contamination. I have noted with various people in my life that there is a wide range of perception bias between people that comes through their insight and a wide range of bias in an individual depending on mental states and context. This tells me people can develop tools to decrease their perception bias. Knowing oneself in general and monitoring oneself in each moment is a key to reducing the flow of hidden needs into one's perceptions. Healthy self-esteem in general and a sense of "being enough" in particular is another key. It is a person's sense of "not being enough" and needing to elevate one's perception of self that is most contaminating when perceiving others. I never met Rand. However, how she saw the world, who she was and how she felt is the place that shaped every word she wrote. We also have the descriptions of her way of seeing, being, feeling and acting in moments of her life from the writings of some pretty insightful people. These are my observations. Self understanding, empathy and our sense of causality provide us with a map to guide us through the terrain of another's psyche and spirit. It's not an exact science. It's much more an art. But it has value and produces genuine insight. We first discovered the structure of the inside of atoms through a similar "second handerism." We observe outward behaviours and see the effects something has on those things around it. Then we use our general (ideally more objective) sense of the nature of the universe and our sense of causality to reverse engineer our vision of the underlying nature of a thing...or a person. Then we observe some more, making predictions and testing our theories. As I have said elsewhere, empathy is a tool of perception. It is a lens for observing inside people, animals and possibly things. It has potential for distortion, just like any instrument in science, that must be accounted for and counterbalanced but it is not only an invaluable tool of perception, it is a tool of connection with incalculable value to our lives. Science provides us with a methodology for reducing perception bias when we see the world from the outside-in. Highly developed empathic processing also has a methodology for reducing perception bias to see the world from the inside-out. We need both to include all that exists in our vision of the universe. IMO, the methods of highly developed empathic processing, of seeing the world from the inside-out, are the methods of philosophy. These represent objectivity in art rather than objectivity in science. One of the things we loose when we see science as in conflict with philosophy, and dominant, is the development of objectivity in our art. Rand brought objectivity in art back. She couldn't do this without some highly developed form of empathy. She also couldn't have been who she was without a deeply diminished empathy in some areas. My reverse engineering of her, using self-understanding and my sense of causality as a map and using empathy as a lens inside her, tells me this. Now, the way I see it, we need to continue to develop our objectivity in art by further developing our empathic processing.

Briefly, yes, I suspect Rand repressed her empathy when she did not feel safe and she did not feel safe unless she was in a power position over the way those around her saw things and felt about her. When she felt the loss of power because someone chose to see things differently to her or expressed a negative feeling about her, she lost her sense of safety and out came the excommunication button. Imo there are indicators that Rand's problem did not lie in repressing empathy, but in (for whatever reason) not being able to feel it in many situations. I can't see in her work a feeling of empathic connectedness. Just think of e. g. the tunnel scene in AS where she desribes the death of those who happened to have (what she believed to be) 'false premises' ... I would say, perhaps, she had selective empathy for those she trusted and respected. The insight that came through her portrait of Francisco's character (among others) showed a very high level of Rand's empathic sensitivity. She had no feeling for those who chose to live what she saw as a less than human life. However, she did have a certain level of philosophical insight into what made even the darkest characters tick. Insight into another's philosophical perspective also comes from a form of empathy. So maybe we could say she had philosophical empathy with most (feeding her insight while not necessarily being in agreement) and emotional empathy with those she trusted and respected, who eventually became few and far between. It seems, in the end, the characters she created may have been the only ones she trusted and respected towards the end. I don't know if she could trust anyone she didn't have power over later in life (which her personality could not respect). But I wasn't there.

Calvin, I am following a number of interesting posts right now but do not have time to post any thoughtful replies at the moment. I hope to get some time over the weekend. I can't help myself though. Your insightfulness has sparked some thoughts in me. Briefly, yes, I suspect Rand repressed her empathy when she did not feel safe and she did not feel safe unless she was in a power position over the way those around her saw things and felt about her. When she felt the loss of power because someone chose to see things differently to her or expressed a negative feeling about her, she lost her sense of safety and out came the excommunication button. I would also say that repressing empathy is the path to damaged empathic development. With a few exceptions (thinking about Bob), we all have the capacity for empathy but healthy empathic development is rare in my experience. Most of us grow up feeling it is a choice between holding onto ourselves by living from a place of separateness or losing ourselves to others by living living from a place of connectedness. It is an ugly choice that currently defines our world. We end up seeing a dichotomy that forces us to choose one part of ourselves while disowning another. A damaged self is a necessary result. We end up compartmentalizing ourselves to one orientation or the other depending on context or choosing sides but most find no healthy way to flow between the two as an integrated whole person. I believe we can deconstruct this dichotomy and find a healthier way to live that includes our separateness and our connectedness. Rand saw the dichotomy between our separateness and our connectedness as a conflict to be resolved by choosing sides. She had a vision of the man who was whole and calm and connected to those he valued, a man "without pain nor fear nor guilt," but didn't know how to attain it. I think we start on our path to realizing this vision in our own lives by breaking down this dichotomy and seeking synthesis between the centred/separate self and the empathic/connected self that exists inside each of us. Rand was good with healthy centred separateness but blind to healthy empathic connectedness. She rightly saw a world of empathic connectedness (what I like to call "The Matrix" out of respect for the metaphorical insightfulness of the trilogy) to be governed by pain and fear and guilt, controlled by those who discovered power over others by keeping them blind to being manipulated by these inside buttons. But her perspective never evolved in this realm to discover a healthier way to exist here, I would say, because she learned disowning her empathy (repression) as a defense mechanism to pain and fear and guilt used against her by others. While she could see John Galt, she couldn't see how to get there.

You see a choice between scientific and philosophical thinking, claiming science is right. Others might say philosophy should win over science. I see a choice between owning one part of my self while disowning the other, or the reverse. You see a dichotomy. I see a gestalt, a figure/ground image. When we look through a scientific lens we focus on the evidence while philosophy moves to the background creating the context, shaping our lens. When we look through a philosophical lens we focus on the evidence while holding science as a limiting filter in the background shaping our lens. The answer is not to choose science over philosophy or philosophy over science but is to learn to shift freely between lenses, seeing the universe from different but complementary perspectives, using each to guide the other as they both grow and reach for the truth. Causality is a philosophical concept. Where would science be without it? Problem is: the issue between science and philosophy has been seen as a dichotomy. Science has officially won and philosophy has been disowned in our search for the truth. Philosophers in the twentieth century actually handed this over by suggesting it was their place only to correct the language...how ugly!!! Our stale notions of causality live on because of this dichotomy and disowning of our philosophical lens. And our stale notions of causality now poison our scientific lens and lead us to say causality is an illusion that is exposed at the quantum level, thus giving us proof for our need to give up on philosophy. The ancient Greeks built an amazing culture focused on a philosophical orientation with a little science in the background. We have now come full circle and have a culture focused on a scientific orientation with a little philosophy in the background. What is needed is more balance, not a winner and a looser. So determinism lives on by default. There is no one to challenge it because the part of us that should has been disowned.

Xray and Bob, Tony considers you determinists. Is this how you see yourselves? My thoughts are heading off on a tangent that doesn't fit this thread. See here for my response. Thanks, Paul

Xray and Bob, Tony considers you determinists. Is this how you see yourselves? My sense is you are both open to whatever the evidence presents and to the best theories that connect the dots. While I think no one here wants to inject supernatural explanations, is there the possibility of some basic principle in physics, outside of strict determinism, indeterminism and a supernatural grand designer, that can account for the emergence of an element of self-determinism or intrinsic determinism in the universe? Determinism clashes with my sense of self-determinism and my sense that intrinsic determinism is an unaccounted for element in our understanding of a causal universe. Determinism is built from a view of causality that sees how things are influenced by forces outside themselves. What if there is a fundamentally intrinsic force within things? How does the universe look when we start by looking at things through a metaphysical lens from the inside-out instead of a physics lens from the outside-in? Is there an element of self-determinism built into every thing that exists? I'm NOT talking about intelligence or goal directedness here, although this may be a higher form of this principle. I'm simply suggesting the possibility of a simple intrinsic force in the fundamental stuff of existence that breaks strict determinism from the outside-in and adds an element of inside-out causation. Would this produce a very similar view of the physical and biological universe but better account for the appearance of and our inner sense of inside-out determinism? Is such an idea compatible with existing evidence, maybe even able to produce causal explanations of anomalous evidence like quantum entanglement, the causal leap between inanimate and animate matter and our enduring sense of free will?

One just needs part to whole reciprocal causation. No designer needed, just the ability to act to maintain integration, a feedback mechanism and the capacity to record and do more of what works. Holistic systems can't be reduced without loosing the properties of there wholeness.

Calvin, I don't get the sense that you do "get the 'where to draw the line' stuff." My focus is on healthy relationships between parts of the self, how these affect our relationships with others and, reciprocally, how our relationships with others affect the relationships between the parts of our self. Typically, when we draw the line between ourselves and others, we not only keep them out, we disown the part of ourselves that gives us a lens into others. This disowned self gets carried forward into future interactions, very much blinding us to information about their insides. The line is within us, between the centred/separate self and the empathic/connected self. To find this we need to go beyond seeing the self as nebulous and we need to be able to explore the structure and dynamics of our psyche and spirit. Letting someone else's perspective inside you so you can empathically experience their orientation to the universe does not equal compromising the ownership of your life. I remember having a metaphorical discussion some time ago with Gary Williams here on OL where we got talking about the ways we deal with people who attack us. He said he is like Superman. The bullets just bounce off him. I thought about it for a moment and responded by saying I thought of myself more like Neo in The Matrix. I see inside the code and know the bullets are only as real as I make them..."there is no spoon" and no bullets. To continue the metaphor, we do live in The Matrix. We plug-in through our empathic self and by stepping inside a world of interacting perceptions. This is the core of social dynamics. If we don't see the code and see how we are plugged in, we are slaves to the machine and to the players who know how to manipulate the system and us. Or we unplug and lead an existence on the periphery of the richness of society. This is the line I have walked for most of my life until I finally came to see deep inside the code that is embedded in our biology and our conditioning. The alternative is to learn to see inside the self and inside the code so we can take control of our lives in empathic/connected social space. Again, this is not mysticism, smoke and mirrors. This is reality. It's there whether or not we choose to look at it. It shapes our lives whether or not we choose to believe it. We feel it all around us everyday. Our choice is whether or not to raise our awareness to it, understand it and take control of it. At the deepest levels we all live in the same country and have the same language. We all have the same underlying human nature. We are all built of the same stuff to operate by the same operating system. Our differences in language come from the different software that is installed as an overlay to our basic hardware and operating system. Our basic language is experience, feelings, intuition, facial expressions and body language. On this level, the level that is communicated through mutual empathy, we all share a common language. Ignore the power this level has in life and you will be left wondering what secret the rest of the world seems to have while you are left sitting on the sidelines. The self does have form. Its form is embedded in everything we are discussing on this thread. It is up to us the craft a scope that can decipher the form so we can see the parts and make sense of the inner dynamics. We can and do conceptualize awareness as a thing on its own even if we can't perceive it as a thing on its own. That's the thing about people and what they reveal, they live with the same fears we do. People do not readily reveal a lot of consciousness when they don't feel seen and don't feel it is safe to do so. What do you do to make people feel seen and safe so they can reveal themselves to you? I have a very different experience. I find people reveal some of the most intimate things to me very easily because I have an ability to make people feel seen and safe. When we connect with someone in a shared space of mutual empathy a sense is created for the rules of this space. I use this in my personal life and in business. My rules are openness and honesty about self, a commitment to reality, acceptance of one's part in maintaining healthy shared space, a mutual respect for the boundaries of autonomy, and a commitment to not use tools of subversive emotional manipulation. This is a safe place for people to engage in openly and honestly, so this is what tends to happen. I find this creates a space that tends to draw out the best in people and makes for healthy relationships. However, fuck with these rules and I'm not so safe. ;)

Thanks Brant. I truly appreciate your kind words.

Stephen, I do concede that, gladly. It is true. But where I diverge is from the notion that the individual trade exchange is primary in human interaction; I can only see it as a small vital cog in the great wheel of life and society, not a prime mover which should govern them in a hierarchy. Two enlightening perspectives. Stephen and Carol, your exchange raises in me a sense of reciprocal causation in the development of our culture of trade and wealth between the whole (civilization molded overtly by governing forces and more subtly by cultural forces) and the parts (the motives, perspectives, choices and actions of individuals). Carol, I especially find your view that individual trade exchange is not primary in human exchange a very interesting thought to consider. We live in the aftermath of a depersonalization of business, exchange and trade that has taken place over the last century. We have all heard the phrase, “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” I run a small business and have always had the approach that all business is personal. There is a layer of personal meaning that is exchanged and accompanies all business exchanges. People in marketing and sales know this. People in customer service know this. People dealing with sourcing and suppliers know this. People engaged in personnel management know this. Working with people by acknowledging and respecting their perspectives naturally creates a more highly motivated exchange, encourages a personal sense of loyalty to the relationship and instills a passion to share their positive experience with others. Ironically, technology is facilitating a change back to personalizing business. The internet is a giant business experiment, among other things. In a depersonalizing medium, entrepreneurs are seeking ways to take advantage of the medium and create highly motivated exchanges, loyalty to them and their products and passion to share what they offer because it gives them competitive advantage, drives sales and, ultimately, feeds their lifestyles. The focus for internet marketing is on personalizing business exchanges because personal human exchanges really are more primary than the trade in driving behaviour. It feels better to live a lifestyle of personal exchanges and it is better for business. I see the structure of trade exchange as a vital concept that acts as an overlay that benefits personal exchanges. It creates limits and boundaries that decrease blocks and resistance to the flow of exchange while increasing individual flow and freedom and opening the door to new levels of exchange. If we think of barter as being a dynamic system, grounded in basic human needs and drives, from which a natural order and flow can emerge like the development of thermal cells in boiling water, our modern structures of trade exchange are a supporting framework that helps perpetuate the natural flow by reducing the resistance of counter flow (such as inherent difficulties in exchanging goods without the medium of money or criminal activities or government interference). Individual motives, perspectives, choices and actions in the context of personal relationships are primary.

Actually, you came across as dismissive of the content of the thread, disrespectful to the quality of ideas that people are putting forth and verging on narcissistically focused on your own agenda. Argument would require actual engagement of the ideas. Truth is, there is probably some evidence on OL of me doing the same thing so I say this with understanding rather than judgement. I would just suggest you might want to take some time to take in the perspectives of some of the people here a little deeper before dismissing, disrespecting or carrying on with your own agenda. It's a form of connecting that has great social and personal value. No one here is denying this so the need to fight this battle must be coming from inside you. Again, I don't know who you are arguing with here but it is no one on this thread. This is not a discussion about mysticism. It's a discussion about how our vision of the universe opens up through tuning in with our capacity for empathy. This is specifically not about loosing ourselves in a flight of empathy and spiritual connectedness but about the independence and strength that comes with having healthy boundaries in connected space. If we don't fear loosing ourselves when we allow others deep inside us, we have access to an incredible wealth of information and power to positively shape our lives. I'm curious to know what you mean by this. I find the "self' less nebulous as time and my explorations of life go on. That the basic stuff of the universe is eternal, I agree. There are many people, many of my friends, who believe the self or the spirit is eternal. My sense of things says this is not the case but I do believe it is up to each of us to shape our own vision of existence, so I learn to see things through this lens, because it helps me to connect with people and helps me expand my understanding of my world, while knowing it's not my view. No argument and no conflict is necessary because I know inside where the boundary is between my perspective and my empathic experience of other people's perspectives. If we don't know where this boundary is inside ourselves, we become terrified of letting others deep inside for fear of being overwhelmed by their feelings, visions and thoughts. Instead, we become dismissive and disrespectful to other people's ideas as a defense mechanism to keep them out and we focus narcissistically on the value of our ideas and getting others to consider our agenda. Interesting content. Metaphysically, I stand by Rand on this one. Existence is more primary than consciousness. I see consciousness as being emergent from the integrating forces found in the basic stuff of existence, rather than existence emerging from the basic stuff of consciousness...and I don't accept dualism. Epistemologically, I see consciousness as our starting point and our understanding of the nature of existence is emergent from the integrating forces of consciousness.

Thank you for making my point. If Objectivist ethics is built from an epistemic lens and a metaphysical vision that only sees the universe as disconnected, separated entities, it is no wonder that a view of wholeness and connectedness is not compatible with Objectivist ethics. Imagine where we would be if physicists had the same attitude. "I don't think everything being connected is a useful idea" so let's ignore all our observations, measurements and experiments that point to wholeness, entanglement and connectedness on the quantum level. Please tell me where the primacy of consciousness resides. "This spiritual analysis of experiencing is not beneficial in terms of enjoying life, our imaginations are much better for that." Hmmmmmm...let's split ourselves into two conflicting and competing parts, choose to own one and disown the other and then see how good we are at creating an enjoyable life. To each their own. Sorry but I think you are missing a huge piece to the life puzzle...and your statements point to exactly the pieces you are missing if you are willing to raise your awareness to "spiritual analysis of experiencing." There is wisdom to be found in meta-cognition. Imagination not grounded in a balance with our own exploration of experience, and in the patterns we discover in experience, leads our vision to be limited by the information others provide us at best or to delusion at worst. Not the path I would recommend for an independent existence or an enjoyable life.

Therein lies the possibility of pseudo-self esteem. That's self-esteem like Wilie E. Coyote over the gorge not falling down SPLAT! until he suddenly becomes aware of the actual physics involved. --Brant Great point Brant. Self-esteem comes from the experiential responsive side of the self, connecting the dots of the facts as we experience them. Our beliefs come from an assertive commitment to particular ways of seeing things. We can definitely assert and commit ourselves into a creative vision of ourselves and pseudo-self-esteem.

I like this thought. It illustrates how our motive to live from a place of an energized, free-flowing, and playful spirit can work with our capacity for structure and habit to increase the quality and efficiency of our actions and increase the freedom available to us. It is easy for us to experience these two sides of the self as competing and in conflict. This can can cause a battle between parts of the self, pushing us to own one and disown the other. many of us are divided between the structured and controlled self and the energized and flowing self. Even our political landscape can be seen as defined by this. We have conservatives who live from a place of structure and control first and liberals who live from a place of free-flowing energy first. In my life, I've tended to choose my free-flowing side over my structured side when they produce conflicting motives but, again, what is needed is a more meta-perspective that is more than and includes both. This is illustrated by the golfer who is "feeding one's effectiveness or self-efficacy, through self-affirmation and repetition." It is the spiritual, flowing self working with the body and brain's structures and automation capacity to create a whole self that is greater than the sum of the separated parts. If we divide the self into parts though a pattern of owning and disowning, between a spiritual flowing self and a controlled structured self, whenever the two are in conflict and we choose one over the other, we automatically do damage to our self-esteem by disowning part of ourselves. We necessarily treat an important part of ourselves without respect and we take important processes out of our conscious control, leaving us less capable to cope with life's challenges. I would distinguish between self actualized excellence and trained excellence. Trained excellence comes from allowing others' feelings, actions and teachings to flow through us, until we develop 'right' habits and programming. Self actualized excellence starts with what we feel, how we see the world, how we make sense of things and the choices we repeatedly make that shape our habits and our programs. Trained excellence can create the super-ego self, the world of "shoulds," so many of us have to fight throughout adulthood to find ourselves again. Being able to live in trained excellence is an important tool for our development. But this is a place for learning, not a place to call home. We need to make awareness, self assertiveness, and self actualization home. Our habits need to be a natural, organic expression of our authentic selves for us to be healthy and whole. Absolutely. The process of organic and authentic growth applies to our development of expanded awareness, self-esteem, insight, understanding, knowledge, and skills. The assertiveness that flows through us, from our core, flows back to our core through experience and awareness. This is the essence of the causal reciprocation that can shape who we are and how we live. Our unconscious works more like a quantum computer, generating all kinds of possibilities, suspending us in a state of superposition where we can see multiple possible paths, from which we can consciously choose our actions. This is the essence of our free will: the capacity to generate, and suspend from the causal chain, action possibilities from which we can choose and initiate action toward consciously. This gives us self-direction. However, our standard concepts of causality cannot accommodate this breakdown of determinism. Btw- just got a new iPhone, after four years with my old one, and just discovered Siri. Wow! I just wrote this whole response using voice recognition. Absolutely incredible!

Think of it as playing chess against yourself where you are able to orient your perspective and methods differently for each side. One side is all proactive strategy in response to the field of play. The other side is all reactive programming. As such, there is no learning between the two sides. There is no reciprocal causation. If we inject the ability for each orientation to map and learn from the other, a way to create a shared perspective with shared information, we have reciprocal causation and a greatly accelerated learning process. Even more than this, we have a whole new mode of learning where insights attained by one part of the self feed the development of another part of the self. This is a dialectical learning and growth operating between different parts of the self where the self is experienced as more than any particular part. Addendum: this is also an important consideration for the subject of free will.

NB suggests that the causation between the actions we choose and the level of our self-esteem is reciprocal. A higher self-value and sense of confidence in coping with life's challenges motivates different choices to lower self-value and self confidence. An inner sense of "I am worth my greatest effort" will produce different outcomes to "I am worthless." An inner sense of "I can do it" will produce different outcomes to "I can't do it." Reciprocally, acting on my own behalf in situations where it would be easier not to takes motivated energy and is experienced by us as being treated by ourselves as having value. Also, acting in our lives to successfully produce positive outcomes for ourselves increases our sense that we can successfully produce positive outcomes for ourselves. Here are NB's own words (view full article here): Consider also NB's concept of psychological visibility (from Psychology of Romantic Love):

Sorry Brant, I don't agree. I know lots of people who are strong in conceptual thinking and rationality with poor self-esteem in other areas and who have a weak core self esteem. I see it more as the act of teaching how and what to think that is the problem. We have a culture of taught learners. What is needed is a culture of passionate explorers who do not let go of authentic, autonomous and intuitive experiencing and understanding. This latter orientation provides a spiritual and intellectual immune system to destructive programming that can enter via taught learning. This reminds me of what someone once told me about her experience working as a flight attendant. She said people acted like they checked their brains at the door. Very rational and intelligent people in contexts they had been programmed for behaved ridiculously and childlike when they entered the plane. It is like they are missing the ability to be open and intuitive in contexts they have no programming for. A person who is a passionate explorer of life and who does not let go of authentic, autonomous and intuitive experiencing and understanding will function far better in circumstances for which they have not been trained. They are not fearful of confronting chaos. They do not need their world to be controlled to feel a sense of competence. And they trust their ability to make sense of the new and to translate this understanding into adaptable new actions. How does a person with inadequate life skills have high (authentic) self-esteem?

No misstatement and no need for correction. A healthy ego is the core to a healthy or evolved empathy and way of being in a connected world. We can see the world through a self-centric lens made of interacting but separate entities and we can see the world through an empathically connected lens where we are nodes in a web and parts of a greater whole. We don't have to choose one over the other. Both ways of seeing and being in the world can coexist inside us and we are richer, more informed and more complete when we own both parts of the self and are open to the flow of both ways of experiencing the world. No matter the lens, a healthy ego is central to a healthy existence. I'm stumbling a little on how you said this but I think I agree with the spirit of what you are saying. A healthy ego starts with the deepest respect for one's own core feelings, vision, intuition, thoughts and understanding. I see egoism as a system of ethical thought based in a self-centric lens with a healthy core ego. Enlightened egoism opens the door for information from our empathic feelings, vision, intuition, thoughts and understanding to flow in. To balance this I would say we need to be able to also centre ourselves in our own empathic connected perspective and open the door for information from our self-centric perspective to flow. I see it like a figure/ground picture where, when we focus on one, the information from the other is still there but in the background giving the figure context. This is how I see overcoming the paradoxical separation between our separateness and our connectedness. It allows for one unified perspective of one universe despite having two distinct ways of perceiving, often producing paradoxical conclusions. This is why I think I agree with the spirit of what you are saying. You are seeing the need to come at the issue equally from both lenses. For a sense of wholeness and integrity in ourselves we need a calm, centred and strong core connected to our world through a multiplicity of ways of being and seeing. If we are to reach healthy, it is our task to find understanding for, and balance between, the different parts of the self. This is very different from the policy of owning and disowning-- including and excluding parts of ourselves, ways of being and ways of seeing-- that is widely advocated in our culture in general and in Objectivist culture in particular. I'm not sensing a great deal of disagreement here. I think we see the same reality with, perhaps, some slight differences in small details. Our capacity for empathy opens the door to the development of an unauthentic self if left without a strong ego. Without a strong sense of one's authentic self, empathy creates a deep motive for either people pleasing or subversive manipulating that can shape a false self built to manipulate and control other people's perceptions of us and actions towards us in a codependent existence. I have had a built-in disgust for this way of seeing and being since I was a kid. I have come to hate the faked self so many people project to manipulate how they are perceived. I despise image that is all spin and no substance. In my home I fight the parenting and educating culture that creates a disowning of the authentic self and the creation of ugly, selfless, codependent, manipulating monsters in our kids. This is where NB's concept of social metaphysics has always resonated in me. I have fought to hold onto my authentic, autonomous self while owning both my self centric and my empathic lenses in a world that punishes us and excludes us for doing so. Somewhere along the way I figured out the world is wrong and now find myself pushing away the unauthentically possessed and drawn to like-minded folk.

Xray, You can find my response to your thoughtful comments here. Paul

The following is my response to some thoughtful comments made by Xray on another thread. I won't try to tame my tangential thinking (I enjoy the places it takes me too much) but I do want to maintain the integrity of the original thread by starting this new one. Paul While I think empathy is an absolute essential in developing a secular ethics in the world we live in, I have problems seeing through an empathic lens when it comes to nature as such. Nature is pretty insentient, with life living from killing other life. "One big restaurant" as Woody Allen said one of his films. What I am suggesting requires a much deeper shift in our general understanding of empathy. It is the difference between empathy as a tool of understanding our world (what does the world look like from different points of view?) vs empathy as a tool of judging our world (is this or that point of view for me or against me?). At the centre of this difference is our relationship to our own insides; to our own feelings and way of seeing the world. When we are growing up our capacity for empathy feeds us with information about how others see and feel about things, including and especially the way they see and feel about us and our value to them. Ideally, we find much of this experience supportive of the development of our healthy sense of self but, even in the best environments, much of it is very painful, damaging and overwhelming. It triggers our fight or flight response and we seek ways of reducing our anxiety. Our key mechanism for reducing anxiety from overwhelming experiences prior to 6 years old is blocking this information from reaching awareness from those experiences and disowning the parts of the self (disowning our lenses) that allow us to see and feel these things. The ego (I'm using this term in the way NB uses it: see here) doesn't really start to grow in it's separateness and to individuate towards autonomy until 6 or 7 years old. The core of who we are is defined by choices we make before the ego really begins to develop, while existing in and trying to survive a context of dependent connectedness. The very typical outcome is to either damage our empathic development or to damage our separation and individuation process in order to resolve a conflict in our experience of the two sides of the self. Objectivism is a system of thought built around strong separation and individuation development but damaged empathic development, as is seen in the character of its founder, so I would expect what I am saying about seeing through an empathic lens to sound somewhat alien here. What if we saw ourselves as more than any particular thought or feeling or way of seeing things in any given moment? What if we could see ourselves as highly complex beings with many different sides to us and many different and sometimes paradoxical lenses through which we see the world? What if there was no part of us that we disowned? What if there was no experience so overwhelming that we had to push it away and deny it access to our awareness? What if there was no place inside us that we were scared to go? On the one hand, we wouldn't be scared to stand open and alone, separate to those who do not share our feelings, vision and understanding of the world, without the need for defensiveness against those who disagree. On the other hand, we wouldn't be scared to let others all the way inside us so we could see the world deeply through their eyes and create a shared space, without fear of loosing ourselves. In nature, I can appreciate and understand the spirit of the lion on a hunt just as I can appreciate and understand the spirit of a wildebeest being hunted. I know the ruthless determination and social collaboration in the pursuit of a goal that will feed myself and my family at the expense of someone else's survival; played in many soccer and hockey tournaments. I know the feeling of fight or flight as adrenalin pumps through my veins while trying to come up with possibilities, strategies and make decisions on the fly, while feeling pursued by a relentless attacker. I once had a relationship with a woman that reached a point where it felt like this almost every day...yow! That's where I learned not to be controlled by fight or flight or the anxiety beneath it. I learned to break my automatic defensive reactions, find inner calm, channel the information into a growth and learning process and to generate new action possibilities to choose from. The point here is that if there is no place inside yourself that you cannot go, then there is no experience, personal or empathic, that you cannot embrace, grow and learn from. If we push away the dark experiences and anxious feelings, we push away half a world of information. The reality is, when we don't allow the dark side of life all the way inside, all we do is blind ourselves to it and we continue to expose ourselves to the dangers we are blind to. It is healthy to hold a commitment to our awareness and understanding of all that is real more deeply than our fear of what is real. I illustrated this point to my son one winter when he was 8. He threw some snowballs at me. In a sense of playfulness I tossed some back at him. I noticed that he just closed his eyes and hoped I would miss. I didn't, so he started to get scared and wanted to pull away from the game. Using empathy, I could sense what was going on inside him. I held that sense inside me while automatically projecting in my imagination what I would have done in his shoes to see another possible way of responding. I would have kept my eyes open, hearing the lessons from my past to keep my eye on the ball, and I would have used what I could see to inform my understanding of the moment, my choices and my actions. I encouraged my son to keep his eye on the snowball and try moving out of the way. He went from being hit every time to never being hit. I get this. One of the darkest experiences we can have as beings who have a conditional existence is the sense of non-existence. I find it interesting how easily we accept all the time prior to our coming into existence without triggering anxiety but our going out of existence, or deep empathy for someone or something else going out of existence, disturbs us. I can see how someone could be so compelled to believe in a continuation of the spirit after death, without the body. While I can empathize with this view, I don't share it. Everything I have come to understand about reality says that the organized flow of energy we call spirit can only maintain it's form within the structure created by the body. You get this feeling when you gaze at the stars. I think this is part of what is meant by AR's sense of a benevolent universe. It's a feeling of being connected to a universe that feeds our needs, our existence. It's a sense that the universe is something good rather than something to be feared. There is more to a sense of a benevolent universe though. Can you get this feeling while sitting in a busy food court people watching in the middle of a shopping mall? Both people and stars are part of our universe. For a truly benevolent sense of the universe we need to be able to live openly without fear in both the social and the physical realms. Yes, there is inevitable suffering and sadness entailed in existence. I pulled my back. Right now it's killing me as I sit here writing but I know how to deal with it and make it temporary. But what if it's not temporary. My sister has a degenerative bone disease that has her in chronic pain. She has days where she can tolerate it and function and days where she cannot move. Because of the addictive, numbing and awareness lowering effects of the pain killers she was prescribed, she does not use medication. She uses the power of her mind and meditation to coexist with the pain. Through all this she very much has a benevolent sense of life. As NB suggests in the above link, she has learned she is more than any particular thought or feeling. Her definition of self goes deeper than her feeling of pain. She is her "unifying centre of consciousness." She has developed methods of dealing with and controlling how the universe flows through her without blocking the flow. She has learned that the pain and darkness that is resisted is the pain and darkness that controls and consumes her, so she doesn't resist it. She could be bitter but that would only give her a darker universe feeding back to her. At the height of her pain she cocoons and meditates, not allowing her negative to flow into the world around her while finding a level of peace inside. When her pain lowers, she brings thoughtfulness, caring and understanding to the world and people around her, while keeping those who allow darkness to define them out. This is how she creates and maintains her sense of a benevolent universe while living with pain every day. A key point to note here: creating a benevolent sense of the universe requires being master of one's own insides, allowing the healthy flow of our experience through us, and being the master of who we allow and how we allow others into our inner world. Maintaining a healthy connection to our empathic self requires that we recognize the difference between those who are consumed by a darkness of of spirit and those who define themselves by a benevolence of spirit and making life choices based on this knowledge. Even more so, healthy empathy requires we see the darkness of spirit and the benevolence of spirit in all the people in our lives. We need this knowledge to define the context of our relationships; to define the limits between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. We define the limits of every relationship in our lives. We can do so consciously or unconsciously. This is never more important than when we are raising children but applies to every relationship we have. Doing this consciously with understanding of how our limits shape the way the universe flows back to us is how we shape a benevolent social universe. I too often try to look at if from this perspective: everything being connected with everything. Maybe our descendants in future times will be able 'lift the veil' more and more, with phenomena like e. g. quantum entanglement no longer being a mystery to them. The time is now. We are in the middle of this process. It's happening all around us if we can just tune into it. And you are quite right, it brings with it information that can provide insights into quantum entanglement. The universe behaves in ways that feel like everything is connected by strings or webs. I love playing with models of a physical universe where this can be understood as possible. It requires going beyond the epistemic limitations defined by the Copenhagen interpretation though. It requires embracing and further developing our intuitive models of causality and the physical universe. Physics in the 20th century did quite a job of invalidating this capacity within us. Einstein tried to fight the invalidation of causality while embracing the invalidation of physically intuitive modelling that died with the Michelson-Morley experiment and the invalidation of ether theory. Einsteins vision of causality was wrong and ether theory, built on the same model of causality as Einstein's model, was wrong. One answer, the Copenhagen interpretation, is that causality is an illusion and intuitive modelling cannot make sense of the quantum universe. Another possibility is that we need to develop a more complex and deeper understanding of causality that can shape a different physical model of the universe from ether theory. The political domination of the Copenhagen interpretation has stopped this from happening but, IMO, it's just a matter of time now that attempts to control the flow of information are overpowered by the free flow of info on internet media. The flow of ideas is now bypassing the stagnancy, resistance and control systems of previously entrenched establishments in many areas.

Xray, Here is the original thread: http://www.objectivi...235 I hope to respond to other points shortly. Paul

A quick review of wiki suggests pantheism comes in a variety of forms. It can be divided into deterministic vs indeterministic, theistic vs atheistic and monistic vs dualistic. It says: "pantheism denotes the idea that 'God' is best seen as a process of relating to the Universe." My initial sense of it is that it is simply an alternative way of looking at our relationship to the universe. When we look at the universe one way we see light (or electrons) as having particle properties-- existing separately and acting locally, and when looked at another way we see it has wave-like characteristics, existing in a way that is connected to the whole and acting non-locally. Similarly with pantheism, we can see a universe in balance between how the behaviour of it's parts (ourselves) contribute to the identity and state of the whole and as a whole system influencing the behaviour of it's parts (us again). We can see ourselves as nodes in an intricate universe-web; both influencing and being influenced by our relationship to the web. I don't see this as being in conflict with the sense of separateness, independence and autonomy that may have drawn many of us to Objectivism. In fact, our separateness, independence and autonomy is strengthened by reflecting on and coming to better understand how we are influenced by our connectedness to larger systems and coming to see our own built in responses to forces that shape our options. I actually see this as the same principles as is found in quantum reality filtering their way through to our metaphysics. It's one universe with different ways of looking at it. We become weaker when we see conflict between different ways of looking at the world, when we act on the need to take sides and when we need to exclude ways of looking at the world. We damage our own tool kit for rationality, effectively throwing out one set of tools. It's like fighting over whether it's more right to consider light to be particles or waves and not discovering the richness of embracing both. We become richer and more informed by embracing paradoxical views and seeking a dialectical resolution. I would say I have a pantheistic lens that I can use when my context deems it appropriate. I have come to appreciate the idea that the energy we put into the universe tends to shape what we get back from the universe. I don't see this as some sort of supernatural phenomenon. People (and animals--see Dog Whisperer) read each other's energy signatures, as manifested in subliminal behavioral cues, and react to such cues according to individual genetic makeup and conditioning. With practice we can raise awareness to these subtle communications from others, break the reactive chains and choose alternate responses. We can also raise awareness to and come to understand the energy that flows through us and is expressed through our subtle communications, thus allowing us to take control of our flow. This is how we can empower our separateness, independence and autonomy by embracing our pantheistic connectedness lens. I tend to atheistic and monistic ends of the spectrum because of the metaphysical conclusions I have drawn. I fit neither the deterministic nor the indeterministic categories. I find this to be a false dichotomy. Rather, I tend towards proactive causation instead of reactive causation (determinism and indeterminism are subcategories of the latter).

Thanks Bob. I do recall reading a little on this just before I left the planet a few years ago. I'll check it out.Just read briefly on epigenetics. Interesting that it is suggestive of the possibility of a conservative form of Lamarckism where even DNA can be changed through feedback mechanisms and past to future generations. Although I do get the sense that this sort of idea is pushing the envelope of the evidence, it fits well with my own model of causality...satisfying.

Hey Mike, I don't think fear is the only basis for a belief in God. I have come to understand that the sense of spiritual connectedness, which comes from a place of seeing the universe through an empathic lens, tends to draw a lot of people towards a belief in God, even those who have discarded traditional church and religion. They see God as becoming closer to a metaphor for universal spirit or wholeness or connectedness, not too different from Einstein's notion of God, but a belief in supernatural existence remains. Personally, I've never had a need for a God to create a causal explanation for internal or external events. I have always believed my sense of inner spirit and connectedness has a physical explanation that is congruent with the principles that explain the rest of the physical universe, not a supernatural explanation. Part of my view of identity/causality is that there are no unextended entities or disembodied actions. This leaves no room for gods or ghosts. I see a sense of spirit and connectedness growing from our capacity for self-awareness and empathy rather than seeing the existence of a supernatural realm. There is no need for supernatural explanations. There is no need for entering into the dualism that arises from a belief in the supernatural.