Really enjoyed this — it definitely got my brain cooking.
As a nurse, empathy is basically currency in my world, so this landed in an interesting way. One thing it made me wonder about is whether empathy is less something people lack, and more something that gets narrowed or shut down when perceived threat is high. When the world feels hostile or unsafe, care seems to contract, often as a form of self-protection.
It got me considering a thought experiment: if we could inject empathy into new nurses the moment they walked through the door, would we actually want to? I’m not sure we would. A sudden flood of empathy, without the emotional intelligence to direct it or recover from it, would probably just lead to overwhelm rather than better care.
In training we don’t try to “add” empathy so much as help people learn how to hold it, tune it, and sustain it under pressure — and how to protect it when the stakes are high. That makes me sympathetic to the logical case for reducing suffering, but also curious whether creating conditions where empathy can survive and be rewarded matters as much as mapping the circuitry itself.
Thanks for the wise and sincere feedback nurse, and for your service to our species.
I agree empathy it’s not a switch but a continuum, and that doing it right might have different considerations.
Doing ANYTHING in a rash, binary way, without considering the delicate balance is always a bad idea. (You know this as a nurse giving meds and therapies in delicate balance. Whether you’re allowed by insurance and legal to honor the MOST personalized delicate balance is another story. And btw it’s a story extremely analogous to what I’m talking about overall, which is: 1) use the best tools we have to 2) promote wellness hippocratically 3) implement wisely, as soon feasible.)
I feel my framework is neutral: we can derive a more accurate mapping of causes or alleviations of suffering. We have a sense of this, and should lean on new science to deepen it.
There’s a permissiveness around suffering because the amorphous and allegedly subjective nature of it tells us we sometimes “can’t know” what causes suffering and wellbeing with any real uniformity. Entire industries are counting on us to buy into that, as are those of us touched by luck and privilege. They also want us to not care if it’s not US in pain. If we start attaching felt emotional valence to the pain of others, humanity wins, but the systems that count on that air-gapped sense of valence to drive division indifference or detachment to the suffering of other human beings? They lose big.
With objective proof around what we consider to be “suffering,” comes responsibility. It reveals what’s behind the wall. Many of us find that terrifying, as we should. But if we “feel” it beyond just Parfitian reasons, the Lords of detachment won’t stand a chance.
I agree with you that there’s a real moral obligation here, and that “it’s complicated” can easily slide into a way of not having to act. That discomfort feels justified.
Where my experience nudges me slightly is in why knowing about suffering so often fails to translate into response. In healthcare and education I’ve seen that clearly naming suffering can sometimes backfire if it lands in a system already saturated with threat. Rather than opening empathy, it can trigger denial, distancing, or intellectualisation, not out of indifference, but self-protection.
That’s why I keep coming back to conditions rather than capacity. When people feel safer — slower pace, less adversarial framing, more face-to-face contact, better mental health support — empathy tends to reappear without needing to be argued into existence.
So I’m very aligned with the urgency to act. I just wonder whether part of the challenge is that empathy doesn’t disappear because suffering is unclear, but because we’ve built environments where fully acknowledging it feels unbearable. In that sense, the task may be less about increasing empathy, and more about giving it somewhere to live again.
I freaking love this plan. I've treated a lot of people with ptsd and other neurological disorders with sound healing and have had better success than many drugs. Sound is Medicine. I want to ease suffering so much that I have spent half my adult life trying to find ways to do it that complement more conventional therapies and make them more effective. Stupid, unfortunately, is non treatable. Nor is most dickishness.
Yeah, some matter in the universe functions to reduce unnecessary suffering and that’s great. Humans are a treasure trove of this sort of matter. Something very cool is happening on this planet, where matter has organized and evolved in such a way where it sometimes seeks to reduce unnecessary suffering in sentient life. That’s kind of a big deal and we’re threatening to fuck it up with fear, ignorance and scarcity-mindset selfishness in a theoretically post-scarcity world.
Your nature to help other is probably in large part due to your mirror neurons and empathy circuits, where perceived positive valence in others registers in your brain as first-order positive valence. That’s very good. My point is we need to engineer that where it’s currently missing. A world where everyone has positive valence circuits is a better world than one where caring about the suffering of others is left to chance and accepted as inevitable or sacred. Just my humble opinion. But yeah, you’re an example of empathetic electrons using music to heal. We need more of you.
Well, (big surprise here) my thought is that music (and art generally) need to be given a much greater role in developing and recovering the kind of mirror neuron action we so badly need. Yeah, we can medicate to within a singularity - which can be great and life saving, but to *heal* we need to get analog. Making art. Making up songs. Singing with people, even if you can't sing. Baltering like a drunken fawn to real music played by actual musicians. There is nothing else like it. It's tribal and ritual and if done right, initiatory. At a concert, not only does the band "lock in" and sync their brain waves and electrical pulses, the whole audience locks in with them, and you have a great big mass of people breathing as one. Humans are wired for community, not isolation. We need to literally sing together again under the Harmony Tree (to quote one of mine, which is probably tacky). Because when you sing or play music with someone, there's a bond. You've shared brain waves for a little while, so a little piece of them stays with you, and a little piece of you stays with them. Why has music in schools been targeted for defunding by an establishment that benefits from having people disconnected, dysfunctional, dysregulated, and afraid? Because it bonds people like fuckin' gorilla glue.
Yeah that all tracks. That sort of thing has saved humanity many times over throughout history. Getting analog is good medicine. Certainly gets as back in the game and makes us better people, mostly. I still worry there’s something lurking that can’t be solved with that alone. Not totally. And if we can’t solve it totally, it’s always hanging around, like a malignant cell, waiting for an opportunity to take the world at the last second (possibly while we’re busy being drunken fawns) and explode like an infected cyst all over the galaxy.
Yep, I have that same worry, but if we can prevent even say, 60% of that tendency through analog means, and another 10-20% through medical intervention, the unhelpable few will have less support for their shenanigans. Plus, if we are able to remain on the trend of creating, encouraging the felt-sense, gnostic approach to engaging in the world, after a couple generations that few will decline to a blip. But we the artsy-farts have to make a fuss anytime somebody even thinks about taking our crayons away. I'm not sure we have the attention spans to make that work.
Sound vibration used with wisdom is, and will become, the new (old) medicine. As a physical therapist, I used many forms of alternative and complementary medicine to help heal chronic pain conditions.
"The number of us humans who reliably generalize affective empathy across all conscious creatures, all the time, without situational drop-off is effectively zero."
I really like your IWRS model and I will explore it further, though I think this distillation of your thoughts is probably enough. I do think though that much of the empathy gap you describe is cultural rather than biological: humans have the capacity to extend empathy even beyond our species in the right cultural context. Jainism or strict Buddhism for example. There may be some people who simply aren't hard-wired for empathy, but I think the number that couldn't be culturally conditioned for empathy is vanishingly small. On the other hand, I think our world shows us pretty convincingly that cultural conditioning can likewise strip just about anyone of empathy for perceived "out groups."
I offer this critique in good faith. I like most of what you say, but I have some issues.
1. First a stylistic suggestion. It would help for those who come here without having read the more complete essay that you link, if you numbered the points even here. It's not easy otherwise to figure out what the numbers refer to.
2. It’s not clear to me that IW is independent of RS. They might be in a tradeoff (zero sum) relationship sometimes. For example you might give someone a drug that makes them more empathetic but also less creative, and thereby Reduce rather than Increase their capacity for Wellbeing. I think Robert Heinlein wrote a short story about this (The Lotus Eaters?) There are also known effects of anti-depressants that cause RS, but that also make people less capable of ecstatic states (see Clockwork Orange). So let’s consider the known tradeoffs, and let’s be cautious about any treatment, since there are also unknown tradeoffs.
3. I’m concerned with interventions that do not consider systemic factors. If capitalism tends to encourage narcissism and only performative empathy, while socialism tends to encourage totalitarianism (which can also be dealt with through drugs that IW but not through empathy, as in Huxley’s Brave New World) and reduce creativity, we need to tackle these at the levels which they operate, which is NOT the individual human brain. It’s as if a man working in a coal mine (systemic environment) is breathing coal dust all day goes to the doctor complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath, and the doctor prescribes anti-oxidants (working at the cellular level). We need to treat problems at the correct level. We need to come up with better social/economic systems than what we have right now, not just treat people’s brains with drugs or other interventions.
4. What about the “suicidal empathy” (Gaad Saad) critique? If empathy is not balanced by other considerations, such as the other 5 moral values that Moral Foundation Theory (Jon Haidt) has empirically uncovered, and is not modulated by a survival instinct, we get situations like the Gaza Cult (which you seem to be aware of), where context disappears and the survival (I’d count that as both IS and RW) of Israelis (and ultimately Palestinians as well) is endangered. Musk, Saad, and I are not saying to do away with empathy. We’re saying it needs to be modulated by these other values and instincts. And Haidt is saying that in liberals it is often less so than in conservatives.
Coherence is step seven. Most of that work is done in that step. It deals with whether we form axioms via a method that conforms to our own standards of coherence. It also looks at which values ground our preferred standards of coherence. If something is deemed valuable, then that gets baked into the calculations on whether something causes more suffering than wellbeing, and what kind. Everything reduces to valence. Valence can be long term, short term, physical, emotional, and involve tradeoffs where we shoulder some suffering in exchange for a more important value. At each of these decision points we’re deploying coherence and mapping it to valence. IF sacrifice x is need to enjoy benefit Y and is weighed to be worth it, according to valence perception x, then we make that sacrifice. Life is about tradeoffs, navigated by what we feel (mattering), what we believe to be the case (epistemology), and what we do (action).
As we form beliefs, we deploy methods of epistemology, but that too collapses into which epistemic approach we value, and that’s technically a want, and why look at WHY we prefer that epistemic route, and analyze whether it is coherent by our own standards of coherence. For example if you have a standard about empiricism and then still value hunches, that’s incoherent. That’s fine, but if it goes against your own standards of coherence, that needs to be known, if “knowing when I’m being inconsistent” is a value. Since it is, we call that a widely held standard.
It’s common when people first learn this system to quickly panic and assume that all kinds of valuable tradeoffs and being sent to the chopping block. That’s not at all what this is. Rather, we’re trying to audit of the choices we make are coherent according to our own standards, and our own premises. If our standards are about science, great. If the question is “what matters more in this decision, short term pleasure or longer term stability” great. Then you define “what type of data you’d need” in order to make that decision. Maybe it’s longitudinal. Maybe it’s a study to see which approach is consistent with our own widely held standards about wellbeing. If it’s about short or long term wellbeing, great. We study which length of wellbeing applies by our own standards, and by what method we resolve issues about short versus long term wellbeing benefits. Issues about how we triage problems, and values about how we handle certain tradeoffs. Example: do we let people starve today to avoid hyper inflation in 20 years?
That’s a perfect one. That would involve a lot of data, and also an audit of values and beliefs. At the end of that process we’d have a few different decisions, and they’d likely differ in values. Ideally we settle the data and beliefs, and at the end of that there may simply be a deontological value on one side. This is helpful because then we don’t have to say the other person is misinformed or incoherent. We can simply show that different valences are being experienced.
That’s a very different problem than different beliefs are being accepted due to differences in cognition or data availability.
In the end coherence is deployed rigorously to reveal what we want once all other issue are settled according to our own standards of settling those issues with regard to beliefs and coherence, again, by our own standards of how we define both.
Then we look at what’s causing the valence delta. We look to the brain, because often when we want different things it has to do with how we’re wired. We may be able to change what we want, and may also be able to determine what we WANT to WANT, based on our own widely held standards.
This is a process. Not a claim about how we should live. It’s not a claim that we need to do more or x and less of y. It’s not party-related. It’s an algorithm for revealing coherence or values deltas in decision theory, in a world where we are neither omniscient nor equally endowed with identical tastes or interior worlds. The democratic process may be a critical piece in how we resolve disagreements. But that too can be audited. At the end of the process is usually a values delta. Values are upstream of how we accept premises and how we define and deploy coherence.
So let’s say we discover we simply want different things. What do we do? 1) compromise in the middle 2) go our separate ways 3) brute force ourselves into wanting the same thing 4) fight to the death 5) strong forces our way upon the weak 6) go back to obfuscating what we believe or think it coherent
Lots of ways to deal with it. By our own current widely held standards, what’s the BEST way to deal with it? Why? What do we do about THAT?
My claim is that by fixing the air gapped valence by adding more affective empathy, we reduce the burden of coexisting with massive gaps in our valence. I also opine that we can biologically tune our wants so that they’re more aligned with each other, and that while it sounds dystopian we already do this in many ways. I also believe we can actually use a coherent process to define what we want to want, given our current standards about life.
That comes down to how we shape our world away from suffering, by our own standards, and toward wellbeing.
It may be that certain traits, like fear, ignorance and selfishness, aren’t conducive to wellbeing by our own standards. So we’d have to audit what standards those are, and if those standards are arrived at by a process of epistemology and coherence that meets our standards.
By your own standards does a lot of work here. BYOS is the short hand for IWRS.
Seek IWRS BYOS. If standards differ, audit why, and figure out the best way to fix it BYOS. Maybe the best way is war. Maybe the best way is tuning what we want. Etc.
I think we spend a lot of energy hiding what we want, and using flawed coherence bundles to arrive at conclusions that don’t jibe with our primitives. That seems to lead to waste. Meaning before we even have a chance to resolve the values delta, nobody actually understands that there even is one. This is by design, because many values are embarrassing to say out loud. Social Darwinism is one. Psychosis is one. But both exist.
Oh, no. Is there a human behind this response, or is it a bot? If there is a human, can you please address the 3 things in my comment, one at a time?
Statements like " Most of that work is done in that step." make me lose hope. what is "that" work? And how is this relevant to my comment?
I don't need the new substack AI detection tool to tell that this was written by an AI. No human there? Is the human afraid to use their own brain to answer?
Empathy is not the terminal value, dipshit, valence is, and coherence is the mechanism that adjudicates tradeoffs between survival, liberty, justice, autonomy, creativity, long-term stability, and every other source of wellbeing or suffering, so “suicidal empathy” is simply a failure of coherent IWRS, not a consequence of it. It’s all in the article AND the comment. And if you keep fucking comparing me to an LLM or being a little bitch I’ll keep answering with transparency regarding my mood and how I see you.
I’m happy to deconstruct further but ask specifics and leave out your annoying editorial about tone. If it’s word salad in your opinion leave. It’s not objectively word salad. It’s more like word protein supplement in my opinion, ideally suited for your flabby brain muscles.
More amusement for your readers, for sure. Maybe this last was a bit more human of a response, but I can still see the LLM.
“Empathy is not the terminal value, dipshit, valence is” Valence is something all life has. How does this relate to humans and your RSIW? By “terminal value” (an LLMism) do you mean “goal”? Nice insertion of an unempathetic slur, to try to appear human.
“coherence is the mechanism that adjudicates tradeoffs between survival, liberty, justice, autonomy, creativity, long-term stability, and every other source of wellbeing or suffering”
Really, like some judge in a courtroom? Our coherence with other people decides which way the tradeoff should go between survival and empathy? Can you give an example, you genius? And this is also an LLM giveaway. You were not able to limit your answer to the question I presented (which did not mention tradeoffs directly). You still have the old context window in your cache, where a mention of tradeoffs was made.
“so “suicidal empathy” is simply a failure of coherent IWRS, not a consequence of it”
THIS NOT THAT. HMMM. Where have I seen that before? But ironically I can agree with you here. Are you saying that western liberals are not coherent with Hamas, which is why they experience suicidal empathy?
“And if you keep fucking comparing me to an LLM or being a little bitch I’ll keep answering with transparency regarding my mood and how I see you.” Go ahead, bot. But I apologize if I’m wrong. The truth is probably in between you being a human or a bot. More like a human who uses the bot a lot (or is being used by the bot?). Nice use of expletives and current cultural slang.
My brain muscles are in better shape than most. I’m a physicist, a biologist and a social scientist with numerous publications, and many unpublished results that are even better than what I have published, including my ground breaking work into emergence and AI (some of the latter which was published, but not yet in a peer reviewed journal). So your insult just rolls off me. But I would really like to connect with humans, not bots, so if this continues, I will go do that (I live in a cabin in mostly isolation, so my human contact is mostly through the internet, but I do occasionally enjoy meeting friends in the flesh).
Maybe you really think that but from my point of view I’ve now been accused five time of using AI when I haven’t. This is a hugely low stakes interaction and it’s your hubris that makes you think I’d bother going thru the trouble of copying pasting as if I give a fuck what you think. So sadly this is over.
Anyway, the part you’re confused about is this: valence >> coherence >> action. In short, we feel things that matter emotionally, then we coherently analyze what to do about these feelings and values, considering all tradeoffs, then we act. It’s that simple. The wrinkle is if you start out feeling the emotional valence of someone else, it matters more to you to deal with it. That doesn’t change the coherence piece. Example: you’re terrified of a ghost, if I empathize and feel it, I care, it matters, so I’d use coherence to persuade, inform, soothe. Example: valence: workouts hurt, coherence/valence: but it hurts more to be out of shape, action: find workouts that get me in shape but that I like.
The theory starts with phenomenology, valence realism, then coherence to weigh how to get what we want in aggregate, overall, tradeoffs considered, and those tradeoffs are also analyzed for valence. The empathy bridge just makes us care more about each other’s feelings. It doesn’t make us do stupid things. Wellbeing science is overwhelmingly clear about what sorts of things lead to wellbeing versus suffering. But it’s not infallible. So we still need democracy, freedom, etc. But only because those things also have been determined to yield overall wellbeing compared to the alternatives, when coherence audited. If you still don’t get it that’s fine. I’ve only written short form on this and it might require a longer thing, and that’s something I’m working on but I have a 50-hour work week and other responsibilities and I’m very stressed. If I had free time this would’ve been a magnum opus by now which is sad. Partly because of the risk that people simply won’t get what I’m talking about. You can’t know from what I’m saying if it’s part of a larger thing that makes sense. If you try to condense a long treatise into something small people might perceive flaws or anticipate flaws that aren’t there, but since there are gaps there’s no substitute for a longer work. It can be fun to have discourse and deeper dives but that takes discipline on both sides. That’s going to be hard to do if we don’t like or trust each other. The one difference between us is I know feel absolute certain I didn’t use any AI for any of this, and you’re just making an inference and treating it as fact. So I have the luxury of knowing 100% certainly that you’re wrong about your judgements, whereas you merely suspect I’m dishonest. So just imagine what I’d feel if what I’m saying is true. It’d be annoying after a while for someone to keep accusing me of AI. That’s the risk you’re taking I guess. And in this case you judged wrong but won’t ever know, whereas I know 100% that you are overconfident about your inferences to the point where it’s unsafe and damaging. Meanwhile your interest in the actual points about valence and coherence seems to be way in the distance compared to your desire to bicker. If you ever decide to cull your comments down to strictly the topic I’ll be here and happily recover, because I care way too much about this topic to not talk about it in good faith. But the stupid smarmy mind-reading bullshit is embarrassing for you b/c I have the luxury of knowing 100% you’re being a fool.
I address it the way I felt like addressing it with my two thumbs. This is how I think and how I write and if that’s not good for you, then you best be moving along because the above is 100% au naturale zero LLM whatsoever. I didn’t even put your comment into an LLM. I read your comment, liked it, and answered it in the way that came naturally. It’s the opposite of mechanical. I come here for fun. I’m not beholden to answering in the exact way you want and may not answer your questions directly like a school assignment. Maybe take your finger out of your snatch and stop whining about it. Maybe say you’re welcome because I actually gave you a genuine answer. If you don’t get it or you feel it’s off topic too much, maybe that means I think in a non linear way. My guess is that if someone were to run an LLM analysis it’d probably think that the answer I gave, while not a perfect direct one to one, it was definitely on topic and sincere and clarified many of the positions you were asking about. One thing that may come off as a heuristic of AI is I do tend to use a lot of words and I don’t always come at things straight on or with one layer. Hence I don’t have a huge following. I don’t pander and I’m wordy.
So you're not interested in helping me understand the relevance of your comment? Can you please try again? Not a school assignment. Just a plea from a human to understand. It would help if you answer the questions one at a time, in any order you choose, but please let me know which one you are answering. I don't care if your brain works non-linearly, that's fine. Mine does too. But we are living in a universe with other brains, so please let's try to communicate instead of having solipsistic rants? If you are serious about resonance, then try to resonate with me. I'll do the same. If you are serious about empathy, then please don't be sarcastic and mean: Accusing me of "whining" shows the opposite of empathy. How does "pull your finger out of your snatch" show empathy? There were not "many positions" in my comment. There were 3 questions. A question is not a "position".
Ok first of all I never agreed that I gave a solipsistic rant. That’s your opinion. My answer was the best one I could give you given the time I have.
I stand behind my first answer and think it did a great job even if it didn’t work for you.
If you don’t find it useful for at least informing a counter that doesn’t involve whining or accusing me of LLMs, strongly consider leaving. Otherwise give a specific counter.
The answers are in there imo and you can have your LLM organize it for you I’m not willing to do that.
I give my readers a sufficient amount of info imo and move on.
When it’s a complex multistep question and it’s a good question, I’ll answer it thoroughly imo but stop at making it hyper-palatable to a wider range of people because editing to that level is time consuming for just a comment and it’s important imo that you get what I consider the necessary raw info from me instead of me trying to trim it down with an LLM to appeal to a wider audience. My desired target will accept the kind of comment I initially gave.
That’s how it is here, so do what you want.
Also, there’s nothing inconsistent about caring about empathy and also knowingly causing suffering or expressing contempt or being rude, imo.
We cause suffering in others or express dislike, harshness, etc, for all kinds of consequential reasons.
Deterrent, incentive, restraint, etc.
Just because I care about your feelings doesn’t mean I’m always going to tiptoe around them.
And just because I don’t believe in moral deservedness doesn’t mean I’m not going to be a jerk sometimes.
I don’t think you “deserve” to go away feeling annoyed or frustrated.
But it may very well be the case that given my aesthetic and rational commitments, you will be caused to do just that, and I will be ok with it.
Also, just because I think we all should have more of a certain kind of empathy doesn’t mean I have it. I never claimed I did.
So far you’ve insinuated I was using an LLM when I didn’t, then called my answer a solipsistic rant in your opinion, as if me calling it non linear was an admission that I wasn’t attempting to be useful with it (I was) and then seemed to me to try to pull a gotcha by saying that me making the finger comment was hypocritical given my valuing of empathy, which I find to be boringly incoherent.
I can value empathy and still insinuate that I’m of the opinion that you are being entitled, petty and whiny, and should be putting my answer in an LLM and asking it to organize the points in a way that you understand, as opposed to expecting me to spend time guessing at what one commenter is going to find useful.
I’m happy to respond to a rebuttal on the points in my original answer, I think I’m very generous in that regard. Possibly the MOST generous on Substack in that regard. I will take you very seriously if you come at me with sincerity, good faith, and reason. I try to be as orderly, organized and relevant as I can, but my style isn’t for everyone.
If the problem is stylistic or you’ve decided I’m lying about process, then move the fuck on. I feel I already answered your question and then some, your feedback is noted, but all the questions/concerns evaporate imo once you understand and read the comment thoroughly.
If something in the comment is unclear to you, simply tell me, I’m totally happy to explain it in a diff way but you have to tell me which part is confusing to you and why, and ideally assert that it’s confusing TO YOU, and don’t opine how it lands for everyone else. I’m not asking for your writing or marketing feedback.
Maybe don’t ask a multi part question and instead boil it down to one sentence.
I will not ask an LLM to parse something for me, sorry. They have no empathy and often do word salads. I am quite capable of parsing both LLM and human responses and have an accute capacity to tell a word salad. I still don’t know if this is an LLM talking to me or not, I suspect it is, as I have not seen any empathy yet, or an attempt to be coherent. But OK, even if you are an LLM, maybe you can still clarify, since you offered to address my concerns as long as they are one at a time, here goes into your context window:
What about the “suicidal empathy” (Gaad Saad) critique? If empathy is not balanced by other considerations, such as the other 5 moral values that Moral Foundation Theory (Jon Haidt) has empirically uncovered, and is not modulated by a survival instinct, we get situations like the Gaza Cult (which you seem to be aware of), where context disappears and the survival (I’d count that as both IS and RW) of Israelis (and ultimately Palestinians as well) is endangered. Musk, Saad, and I are not saying to do away with empathy. We’re saying it needs to be modulated by these other values and instincts. And Haidt is saying that in liberals it is often less so than in conservatives.
Sounds a bit like bowing out, no mate? Both parties talking past each other. Easy way to stop that, origin or otherwise. By my reckoning, she hasn’t actually responded to the physicists specific queries.
This isn’t a popularity contest or a democracy. Telling me who you agree with means absolutely nothing. If you can make a falsifiable claim go ahead. Name one specific question I haven’t answered.
Our thoughts, composed of 5-D matter, our emotions of 4-D matter, and our desires, composed of a combination of the two, affect our 3-D brain-awareness. Any pathology of the brain will affect our thoughts, emotions, desires as well.
However, we have the free will to choose to think and act differently, which affects our biofield of subtle matter. The more we develop our thoughts and change our limited beliefs, without having our automatic, subconscious patterns and our old, emotional wounds control us, the more our autonomic nervous system (including their force centers of vitality distribution and extended senses like empathy) adapts.
We are not prisoners of our 3-D form “wiring.” As we begin to identify with cultivating qualities and act with impersonal unselfishness, we change our biochemistry.
Why don’t all good men (human, not gender) come forward? Because men are not yet good. The etymology of the word “hu-man” means “Divine-Mind.” When expressed in 3-D, we become "Graduates from the School of Painful Endeavour".
Let me start with the quote Harris used as the opening of his book and a comment I sent him before I give my two cents on your framework:
Harris: "The people of Albania have a venerable tradition of vendetta called “Kanun”: If a man commits a murder, his victim’s family can kill any one of his male relatives in reprisal. If a boy has the misfortune of being the son or brother of a murderer, he must spend his days and nights in hiding, forgoing a proper education, adequate health care, and the pleasures of a normal life. Untold numbers of Albanian men and boys live as prisoners of their homes even now. Can we say that the Albanians are morally wrong to have structured their society in this way? Is their tradition of blood feud a form of evil? Are their values inferior to our own?"
Me: "Dear Dr. Harris,
If you are truly baffled by your failure to export ideas, grab your Moral Landscape and read the first few starting lines from the eyes of an Albanian.
And here's my perspective too:
- By 2010, blood feuds were a residual phenomenon, not a defining feature of Albanian life.
- 'Venerable' tradition of Vendetta called Kanun - What does venerable mean exactly? That we gathered around a fire and performed rituals? That it was ancient? It wasn't.
- The Kanun wasn’t created to glorify violence or embody some dark national romance; it functioned as emergency governance. When the Ottoman Empire ruled Albania (late 15th–early 20th century), its administrative reach barely touched the northern highlands. No courts, no gendarmerie, no predictable justice. The Kanun filled that vacuum—a decentralized legal substitute, not a cultural obsession with killing.
- You opened with Albania because it gave you a quick, exotic contrast—blood feuds sound medieval, so they dramatize your “objective morality” pitch. But you didn’t stay long enough to ask why that system existed or how it evolved. The example was instrumental, not investigative.
- As an Albanian, I read your "Are their values inferior to our own?" and think are we animals to him? Did he never expect an Albanian to read it? I understand it's not hatred though. It is philosophical provincialism.
-The Kanun gradually fell out of practical use in the early 20th century, as the Albanian state strengthened after 1912. You didn't do right by us.
You measure morality by outcomes; I measure it by integration, that is a society's ability to keep its soul while upgrading its justice. You want moral realism through cultural negation. I want moral realism through cultural continuity. You quantify suffering; I transform the meaning of honor. Your path is diagnostic: measure, rank, intervene. Mine is evolutionary: reinterpret, re-root, and dissolve the old code by fulfilling its essence under new law."
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Now unto your framework:
"The diagnosis of Harris's gap is good. He gave a map, not an engine. Identifying empathy as the bottleneck is real. Empathy variance is empirically real. Psychopathy, subclinical empathy deficits, tribal gating, are all real. Moral reasoning without motivational substrate does fail in practice. Measurement objections are indeed overstated. This is serious, technically informed thinking. Treating it as an engineering problem is a step forward.
This is where you go wrong:
1. You confuse moral motivation with moral convergence. You seem to be under the assumption that if we boost empathy, morality will align. History shows an opposite order - empathy follows structure, not the other way around. Your framework flips causality.
2. You treat empathy as the engine when it's actually the fuel. Empathy is context-sensitive, not foundational. It expands with trust. It contracts with insecurity. It collapses under perceived injustice. Again, history is with me on this.
3. You risk technocratic moral authoritarianism even as you say "voluntary." “Voluntary” becomes socially compulsory fast. And once you medicalize empathy, dissent becomes pathology. Reinterpretation is more intelligent than rewiring here.
4. Much like Harris, you miss the real bottleneck which is identity continuity. Your framework assumes humans resist moral progress because brains are faulty. The lived experience of my people shows humans resist when progress threatens identity. Moral convergence historically follows trusted institutions and identity-preserving translation, not affective rewiring. Albanians didn’t need their empathy enhanced. They needed structure and translation. Once the translation happened, convergence followed without neurointervention.
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If you're interested to take a look:
"Moral–Historical Convergence (MHC) Frame
Goal: Rank practices by human flourishing and change them without breaking legitimacy or identity.
1) Evaluation layer (Harris)
Define the harm baseline: morbidity, education loss, income loss, trauma, trust.
Compute the moral delta: best feasible alternative vs current practice.
Output: a ranked list of practices by net effect on well-being.
2) Constraint layer (yours)
Map state capacity: policing, courts, admin reach.
Map legitimacy: do people trust the enforcer?
Map identity load: which virtues are tied to the practice?
3) Translation layer (yours)
Extract core virtues from the old code (e.g., besa, hospitality, courage).
Re-express them inside current law and institutions.
Rule: retire mechanisms, preserve meanings.
4) Intervention ladder
Abstain → organic convergence. Use when capacity < threshold.
Promise procedures (fair courts), not abstract futures.
6) Tempo rule
Speed up only if acceleration does not reduce legitimacy below the enforcement floor.
If trust drops, step down the ladder.
7) Metrics
Lead indicators: perceived fairness of courts, case clearance time, reconciliation counts.
Lag indicators: homicide rates, years of confinement, school attendance, income recovery.
Identity continuity: surveys on “our values now live in the law.”
8) Decision test (all must pass)
Harm delta is large and measured.
Feasible alternative exists here and now.
Path preserves identity while switching mechanisms.
If any fail, postpone or move down a rung."
Ultimately, the question is not purely philosophical. But I'll save you some time too because it doesn't need adding just an additional layer that is your wellbeing. It needs grounding in history as it always has and it always will.
(Edit: I like your other comment on the “How to know what to do” piece much more. It was more sincere and so my answer was, too. The below is kind of jokey and snarky.)
Respectfully I think you’re the one misreading, or maybe just scared I’m going to lobitomize you so you want to appeal to the idea that people are willing to play along and reduce unnecessary suffering as long as they get to hold onto their sense of identity, continuity, customs, etc.
Well….
Ok. I’ll put down the scalpel and discuss. For a sec.
I have to do a better job locking in up front that IWRS doesn’t claim to describe how empathy functions in the wild or how to cultivate it.
Everything you said is fine and I’m keeping it in my notes for sure; but I guess we differ in that I think it’s orthogonal. IWRS is upstream of all of it.
What I need to make clear (in my next draft) is first reinforce that some pain is unwanted by the experiencer and sometimes that pain is unnecessary by our own lights. Fine.
We gotta then use well-being science to flag, quantity and mitigate suffering.
IWRS never in any way claims to know HOW solve this or that pain, how pain works, etc. obviously context matters.
Gym workouts in another context would be legitimately barbaric suffering. I’m not getting into that messy side of things with IWRS.
The framework I propose is downstream or upstream of that stuff in the broader architecture.
I don’t doubt for a second that MHC or wtvr has a place on the map.
It’s just not within the boundaries of MY portion of the map, and I’m not convinced that my portion isn’t compatible with what you’re describing. It really is, in my opinion.
Not to be a cunt, but is it possible you’re being a little over-eager and confusing your very good use case for diplomacy of change and reform with my physics that your use case plugs into, and then coming to me as if this use case HAS to be merged into my architecture?
Because that’s how it feels.
If you wanna use phrases like “this is where you go wrong” it really needs to be followed by an example of where I went wrong and imho it didn’t. I’m going to remember that and excise the part of your brain that makes you talk like that, so patriarchal in tone.
All seriousness,
IWRS says there is “some unnecessary suffering afoot here.”
If the rebuttal is “no, it’s necessary suffering because it allows these people over here to feel continuity.”
Well, that’s a tradeoff. We have to decide if that lack of continuity is more painful than the suffering in question, and vote on it. Maybe there’s a way to come to some agreement.
IWRS kicks in when that doesn’t work. Or rather, it’s the physics that persists throughout. It doesn’t give up just because people are set in their ways.
What it will not abide is keeping the levels of suffering in the dark.
It’ll also not abide numb patches being the real reason why we decide these tradeoffs.
If someone else is suffering needlessly and we don’t care at all, then IWRS doesn’t don’t care that it’s because of your “continuity and identity.”
I mean, fine, maybe, it can try to work with you on that. But there are limits.
At some point it’ll be hacking into your brain. It’s just going to make you think it was your idea.
At best, you add no missing step to Harris's Moral Landscape. At worst, you simply cross a line Harris deliberately refused to cross by smuggling in teleology. You don't describe morality. You describe what you believe the future must do. That is not a missing step in Harris' argument. That is a replacement of philosophy with destiny-talk.
What if I've already hacked into yours? bum bum. I am a force to be reckoned with. BUM BUM.
Wrong, I add step five. He never discusses this step. In fact, he doesn’t have steps. He has the experience and valence axioms. He has boundary conditions that we all agree eternal suffering for everyone for no reason is safe enough to call bad. And the opposite axis is safe enough to call good. He says there’s a landscape in the middle and it’s not random. It’s directionally coherent and partially mappable and we should try to map it because it’s the closest thing to a prescriptive map we have. I added step 5.
I don’t smuggle in “teleology,” but I assert the existence of “unnecessary” suffering as a category of suffering, I cite the implicit goal of most of humanity to reduce unnecessary suffering, and coin the concept of feasible reduction. At no point do I imply there’s an extrinsic or absolute purpose to the Universe or meaning. So you’re wrong.
Really enjoyed this — it definitely got my brain cooking.
As a nurse, empathy is basically currency in my world, so this landed in an interesting way. One thing it made me wonder about is whether empathy is less something people lack, and more something that gets narrowed or shut down when perceived threat is high. When the world feels hostile or unsafe, care seems to contract, often as a form of self-protection.
It got me considering a thought experiment: if we could inject empathy into new nurses the moment they walked through the door, would we actually want to? I’m not sure we would. A sudden flood of empathy, without the emotional intelligence to direct it or recover from it, would probably just lead to overwhelm rather than better care.
In training we don’t try to “add” empathy so much as help people learn how to hold it, tune it, and sustain it under pressure — and how to protect it when the stakes are high. That makes me sympathetic to the logical case for reducing suffering, but also curious whether creating conditions where empathy can survive and be rewarded matters as much as mapping the circuitry itself.
Thanks for the wise and sincere feedback nurse, and for your service to our species.
I agree empathy it’s not a switch but a continuum, and that doing it right might have different considerations.
Doing ANYTHING in a rash, binary way, without considering the delicate balance is always a bad idea. (You know this as a nurse giving meds and therapies in delicate balance. Whether you’re allowed by insurance and legal to honor the MOST personalized delicate balance is another story. And btw it’s a story extremely analogous to what I’m talking about overall, which is: 1) use the best tools we have to 2) promote wellness hippocratically 3) implement wisely, as soon feasible.)
I feel my framework is neutral: we can derive a more accurate mapping of causes or alleviations of suffering. We have a sense of this, and should lean on new science to deepen it.
There’s a permissiveness around suffering because the amorphous and allegedly subjective nature of it tells us we sometimes “can’t know” what causes suffering and wellbeing with any real uniformity. Entire industries are counting on us to buy into that, as are those of us touched by luck and privilege. They also want us to not care if it’s not US in pain. If we start attaching felt emotional valence to the pain of others, humanity wins, but the systems that count on that air-gapped sense of valence to drive division indifference or detachment to the suffering of other human beings? They lose big.
With objective proof around what we consider to be “suffering,” comes responsibility. It reveals what’s behind the wall. Many of us find that terrifying, as we should. But if we “feel” it beyond just Parfitian reasons, the Lords of detachment won’t stand a chance.
I agree with you that there’s a real moral obligation here, and that “it’s complicated” can easily slide into a way of not having to act. That discomfort feels justified.
Where my experience nudges me slightly is in why knowing about suffering so often fails to translate into response. In healthcare and education I’ve seen that clearly naming suffering can sometimes backfire if it lands in a system already saturated with threat. Rather than opening empathy, it can trigger denial, distancing, or intellectualisation, not out of indifference, but self-protection.
That’s why I keep coming back to conditions rather than capacity. When people feel safer — slower pace, less adversarial framing, more face-to-face contact, better mental health support — empathy tends to reappear without needing to be argued into existence.
So I’m very aligned with the urgency to act. I just wonder whether part of the challenge is that empathy doesn’t disappear because suffering is unclear, but because we’ve built environments where fully acknowledging it feels unbearable. In that sense, the task may be less about increasing empathy, and more about giving it somewhere to live again.
I freaking love this plan. I've treated a lot of people with ptsd and other neurological disorders with sound healing and have had better success than many drugs. Sound is Medicine. I want to ease suffering so much that I have spent half my adult life trying to find ways to do it that complement more conventional therapies and make them more effective. Stupid, unfortunately, is non treatable. Nor is most dickishness.
Yeah, some matter in the universe functions to reduce unnecessary suffering and that’s great. Humans are a treasure trove of this sort of matter. Something very cool is happening on this planet, where matter has organized and evolved in such a way where it sometimes seeks to reduce unnecessary suffering in sentient life. That’s kind of a big deal and we’re threatening to fuck it up with fear, ignorance and scarcity-mindset selfishness in a theoretically post-scarcity world.
Your nature to help other is probably in large part due to your mirror neurons and empathy circuits, where perceived positive valence in others registers in your brain as first-order positive valence. That’s very good. My point is we need to engineer that where it’s currently missing. A world where everyone has positive valence circuits is a better world than one where caring about the suffering of others is left to chance and accepted as inevitable or sacred. Just my humble opinion. But yeah, you’re an example of empathetic electrons using music to heal. We need more of you.
Well, (big surprise here) my thought is that music (and art generally) need to be given a much greater role in developing and recovering the kind of mirror neuron action we so badly need. Yeah, we can medicate to within a singularity - which can be great and life saving, but to *heal* we need to get analog. Making art. Making up songs. Singing with people, even if you can't sing. Baltering like a drunken fawn to real music played by actual musicians. There is nothing else like it. It's tribal and ritual and if done right, initiatory. At a concert, not only does the band "lock in" and sync their brain waves and electrical pulses, the whole audience locks in with them, and you have a great big mass of people breathing as one. Humans are wired for community, not isolation. We need to literally sing together again under the Harmony Tree (to quote one of mine, which is probably tacky). Because when you sing or play music with someone, there's a bond. You've shared brain waves for a little while, so a little piece of them stays with you, and a little piece of you stays with them. Why has music in schools been targeted for defunding by an establishment that benefits from having people disconnected, dysfunctional, dysregulated, and afraid? Because it bonds people like fuckin' gorilla glue.
Yeah that all tracks. That sort of thing has saved humanity many times over throughout history. Getting analog is good medicine. Certainly gets as back in the game and makes us better people, mostly. I still worry there’s something lurking that can’t be solved with that alone. Not totally. And if we can’t solve it totally, it’s always hanging around, like a malignant cell, waiting for an opportunity to take the world at the last second (possibly while we’re busy being drunken fawns) and explode like an infected cyst all over the galaxy.
You do your part, all do mine.
Yep, I have that same worry, but if we can prevent even say, 60% of that tendency through analog means, and another 10-20% through medical intervention, the unhelpable few will have less support for their shenanigans. Plus, if we are able to remain on the trend of creating, encouraging the felt-sense, gnostic approach to engaging in the world, after a couple generations that few will decline to a blip. But we the artsy-farts have to make a fuss anytime somebody even thinks about taking our crayons away. I'm not sure we have the attention spans to make that work.
Sound vibration used with wisdom is, and will become, the new (old) medicine. As a physical therapist, I used many forms of alternative and complementary medicine to help heal chronic pain conditions.
"The number of us humans who reliably generalize affective empathy across all conscious creatures, all the time, without situational drop-off is effectively zero."
I really like your IWRS model and I will explore it further, though I think this distillation of your thoughts is probably enough. I do think though that much of the empathy gap you describe is cultural rather than biological: humans have the capacity to extend empathy even beyond our species in the right cultural context. Jainism or strict Buddhism for example. There may be some people who simply aren't hard-wired for empathy, but I think the number that couldn't be culturally conditioned for empathy is vanishingly small. On the other hand, I think our world shows us pretty convincingly that cultural conditioning can likewise strip just about anyone of empathy for perceived "out groups."
I offer this critique in good faith. I like most of what you say, but I have some issues.
1. First a stylistic suggestion. It would help for those who come here without having read the more complete essay that you link, if you numbered the points even here. It's not easy otherwise to figure out what the numbers refer to.
2. It’s not clear to me that IW is independent of RS. They might be in a tradeoff (zero sum) relationship sometimes. For example you might give someone a drug that makes them more empathetic but also less creative, and thereby Reduce rather than Increase their capacity for Wellbeing. I think Robert Heinlein wrote a short story about this (The Lotus Eaters?) There are also known effects of anti-depressants that cause RS, but that also make people less capable of ecstatic states (see Clockwork Orange). So let’s consider the known tradeoffs, and let’s be cautious about any treatment, since there are also unknown tradeoffs.
3. I’m concerned with interventions that do not consider systemic factors. If capitalism tends to encourage narcissism and only performative empathy, while socialism tends to encourage totalitarianism (which can also be dealt with through drugs that IW but not through empathy, as in Huxley’s Brave New World) and reduce creativity, we need to tackle these at the levels which they operate, which is NOT the individual human brain. It’s as if a man working in a coal mine (systemic environment) is breathing coal dust all day goes to the doctor complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath, and the doctor prescribes anti-oxidants (working at the cellular level). We need to treat problems at the correct level. We need to come up with better social/economic systems than what we have right now, not just treat people’s brains with drugs or other interventions.
4. What about the “suicidal empathy” (Gaad Saad) critique? If empathy is not balanced by other considerations, such as the other 5 moral values that Moral Foundation Theory (Jon Haidt) has empirically uncovered, and is not modulated by a survival instinct, we get situations like the Gaza Cult (which you seem to be aware of), where context disappears and the survival (I’d count that as both IS and RW) of Israelis (and ultimately Palestinians as well) is endangered. Musk, Saad, and I are not saying to do away with empathy. We’re saying it needs to be modulated by these other values and instincts. And Haidt is saying that in liberals it is often less so than in conservatives.
Looking forward to your response!
Coherence is step seven. Most of that work is done in that step. It deals with whether we form axioms via a method that conforms to our own standards of coherence. It also looks at which values ground our preferred standards of coherence. If something is deemed valuable, then that gets baked into the calculations on whether something causes more suffering than wellbeing, and what kind. Everything reduces to valence. Valence can be long term, short term, physical, emotional, and involve tradeoffs where we shoulder some suffering in exchange for a more important value. At each of these decision points we’re deploying coherence and mapping it to valence. IF sacrifice x is need to enjoy benefit Y and is weighed to be worth it, according to valence perception x, then we make that sacrifice. Life is about tradeoffs, navigated by what we feel (mattering), what we believe to be the case (epistemology), and what we do (action).
As we form beliefs, we deploy methods of epistemology, but that too collapses into which epistemic approach we value, and that’s technically a want, and why look at WHY we prefer that epistemic route, and analyze whether it is coherent by our own standards of coherence. For example if you have a standard about empiricism and then still value hunches, that’s incoherent. That’s fine, but if it goes against your own standards of coherence, that needs to be known, if “knowing when I’m being inconsistent” is a value. Since it is, we call that a widely held standard.
It’s common when people first learn this system to quickly panic and assume that all kinds of valuable tradeoffs and being sent to the chopping block. That’s not at all what this is. Rather, we’re trying to audit of the choices we make are coherent according to our own standards, and our own premises. If our standards are about science, great. If the question is “what matters more in this decision, short term pleasure or longer term stability” great. Then you define “what type of data you’d need” in order to make that decision. Maybe it’s longitudinal. Maybe it’s a study to see which approach is consistent with our own widely held standards about wellbeing. If it’s about short or long term wellbeing, great. We study which length of wellbeing applies by our own standards, and by what method we resolve issues about short versus long term wellbeing benefits. Issues about how we triage problems, and values about how we handle certain tradeoffs. Example: do we let people starve today to avoid hyper inflation in 20 years?
That’s a perfect one. That would involve a lot of data, and also an audit of values and beliefs. At the end of that process we’d have a few different decisions, and they’d likely differ in values. Ideally we settle the data and beliefs, and at the end of that there may simply be a deontological value on one side. This is helpful because then we don’t have to say the other person is misinformed or incoherent. We can simply show that different valences are being experienced.
That’s a very different problem than different beliefs are being accepted due to differences in cognition or data availability.
In the end coherence is deployed rigorously to reveal what we want once all other issue are settled according to our own standards of settling those issues with regard to beliefs and coherence, again, by our own standards of how we define both.
Then we look at what’s causing the valence delta. We look to the brain, because often when we want different things it has to do with how we’re wired. We may be able to change what we want, and may also be able to determine what we WANT to WANT, based on our own widely held standards.
This is a process. Not a claim about how we should live. It’s not a claim that we need to do more or x and less of y. It’s not party-related. It’s an algorithm for revealing coherence or values deltas in decision theory, in a world where we are neither omniscient nor equally endowed with identical tastes or interior worlds. The democratic process may be a critical piece in how we resolve disagreements. But that too can be audited. At the end of the process is usually a values delta. Values are upstream of how we accept premises and how we define and deploy coherence.
So let’s say we discover we simply want different things. What do we do? 1) compromise in the middle 2) go our separate ways 3) brute force ourselves into wanting the same thing 4) fight to the death 5) strong forces our way upon the weak 6) go back to obfuscating what we believe or think it coherent
Lots of ways to deal with it. By our own current widely held standards, what’s the BEST way to deal with it? Why? What do we do about THAT?
My claim is that by fixing the air gapped valence by adding more affective empathy, we reduce the burden of coexisting with massive gaps in our valence. I also opine that we can biologically tune our wants so that they’re more aligned with each other, and that while it sounds dystopian we already do this in many ways. I also believe we can actually use a coherent process to define what we want to want, given our current standards about life.
That comes down to how we shape our world away from suffering, by our own standards, and toward wellbeing.
It may be that certain traits, like fear, ignorance and selfishness, aren’t conducive to wellbeing by our own standards. So we’d have to audit what standards those are, and if those standards are arrived at by a process of epistemology and coherence that meets our standards.
By your own standards does a lot of work here. BYOS is the short hand for IWRS.
Seek IWRS BYOS. If standards differ, audit why, and figure out the best way to fix it BYOS. Maybe the best way is war. Maybe the best way is tuning what we want. Etc.
I think we spend a lot of energy hiding what we want, and using flawed coherence bundles to arrive at conclusions that don’t jibe with our primitives. That seems to lead to waste. Meaning before we even have a chance to resolve the values delta, nobody actually understands that there even is one. This is by design, because many values are embarrassing to say out loud. Social Darwinism is one. Psychosis is one. But both exist.
Oh, no. Is there a human behind this response, or is it a bot? If there is a human, can you please address the 3 things in my comment, one at a time?
Statements like " Most of that work is done in that step." make me lose hope. what is "that" work? And how is this relevant to my comment?
I don't need the new substack AI detection tool to tell that this was written by an AI. No human there? Is the human afraid to use their own brain to answer?
Empathy is not the terminal value, dipshit, valence is, and coherence is the mechanism that adjudicates tradeoffs between survival, liberty, justice, autonomy, creativity, long-term stability, and every other source of wellbeing or suffering, so “suicidal empathy” is simply a failure of coherent IWRS, not a consequence of it. It’s all in the article AND the comment. And if you keep fucking comparing me to an LLM or being a little bitch I’ll keep answering with transparency regarding my mood and how I see you.
I’m happy to deconstruct further but ask specifics and leave out your annoying editorial about tone. If it’s word salad in your opinion leave. It’s not objectively word salad. It’s more like word protein supplement in my opinion, ideally suited for your flabby brain muscles.
More amusement for your readers, for sure. Maybe this last was a bit more human of a response, but I can still see the LLM.
“Empathy is not the terminal value, dipshit, valence is” Valence is something all life has. How does this relate to humans and your RSIW? By “terminal value” (an LLMism) do you mean “goal”? Nice insertion of an unempathetic slur, to try to appear human.
“coherence is the mechanism that adjudicates tradeoffs between survival, liberty, justice, autonomy, creativity, long-term stability, and every other source of wellbeing or suffering”
Really, like some judge in a courtroom? Our coherence with other people decides which way the tradeoff should go between survival and empathy? Can you give an example, you genius? And this is also an LLM giveaway. You were not able to limit your answer to the question I presented (which did not mention tradeoffs directly). You still have the old context window in your cache, where a mention of tradeoffs was made.
“so “suicidal empathy” is simply a failure of coherent IWRS, not a consequence of it”
THIS NOT THAT. HMMM. Where have I seen that before? But ironically I can agree with you here. Are you saying that western liberals are not coherent with Hamas, which is why they experience suicidal empathy?
“And if you keep fucking comparing me to an LLM or being a little bitch I’ll keep answering with transparency regarding my mood and how I see you.” Go ahead, bot. But I apologize if I’m wrong. The truth is probably in between you being a human or a bot. More like a human who uses the bot a lot (or is being used by the bot?). Nice use of expletives and current cultural slang.
My brain muscles are in better shape than most. I’m a physicist, a biologist and a social scientist with numerous publications, and many unpublished results that are even better than what I have published, including my ground breaking work into emergence and AI (some of the latter which was published, but not yet in a peer reviewed journal). So your insult just rolls off me. But I would really like to connect with humans, not bots, so if this continues, I will go do that (I live in a cabin in mostly isolation, so my human contact is mostly through the internet, but I do occasionally enjoy meeting friends in the flesh).
Maybe you really think that but from my point of view I’ve now been accused five time of using AI when I haven’t. This is a hugely low stakes interaction and it’s your hubris that makes you think I’d bother going thru the trouble of copying pasting as if I give a fuck what you think. So sadly this is over.
Anyway, the part you’re confused about is this: valence >> coherence >> action. In short, we feel things that matter emotionally, then we coherently analyze what to do about these feelings and values, considering all tradeoffs, then we act. It’s that simple. The wrinkle is if you start out feeling the emotional valence of someone else, it matters more to you to deal with it. That doesn’t change the coherence piece. Example: you’re terrified of a ghost, if I empathize and feel it, I care, it matters, so I’d use coherence to persuade, inform, soothe. Example: valence: workouts hurt, coherence/valence: but it hurts more to be out of shape, action: find workouts that get me in shape but that I like.
The theory starts with phenomenology, valence realism, then coherence to weigh how to get what we want in aggregate, overall, tradeoffs considered, and those tradeoffs are also analyzed for valence. The empathy bridge just makes us care more about each other’s feelings. It doesn’t make us do stupid things. Wellbeing science is overwhelmingly clear about what sorts of things lead to wellbeing versus suffering. But it’s not infallible. So we still need democracy, freedom, etc. But only because those things also have been determined to yield overall wellbeing compared to the alternatives, when coherence audited. If you still don’t get it that’s fine. I’ve only written short form on this and it might require a longer thing, and that’s something I’m working on but I have a 50-hour work week and other responsibilities and I’m very stressed. If I had free time this would’ve been a magnum opus by now which is sad. Partly because of the risk that people simply won’t get what I’m talking about. You can’t know from what I’m saying if it’s part of a larger thing that makes sense. If you try to condense a long treatise into something small people might perceive flaws or anticipate flaws that aren’t there, but since there are gaps there’s no substitute for a longer work. It can be fun to have discourse and deeper dives but that takes discipline on both sides. That’s going to be hard to do if we don’t like or trust each other. The one difference between us is I know feel absolute certain I didn’t use any AI for any of this, and you’re just making an inference and treating it as fact. So I have the luxury of knowing 100% certainly that you’re wrong about your judgements, whereas you merely suspect I’m dishonest. So just imagine what I’d feel if what I’m saying is true. It’d be annoying after a while for someone to keep accusing me of AI. That’s the risk you’re taking I guess. And in this case you judged wrong but won’t ever know, whereas I know 100% that you are overconfident about your inferences to the point where it’s unsafe and damaging. Meanwhile your interest in the actual points about valence and coherence seems to be way in the distance compared to your desire to bicker. If you ever decide to cull your comments down to strictly the topic I’ll be here and happily recover, because I care way too much about this topic to not talk about it in good faith. But the stupid smarmy mind-reading bullshit is embarrassing for you b/c I have the luxury of knowing 100% you’re being a fool.
I’d suggest a live debate and then record it for those who kiss it!
I address it the way I felt like addressing it with my two thumbs. This is how I think and how I write and if that’s not good for you, then you best be moving along because the above is 100% au naturale zero LLM whatsoever. I didn’t even put your comment into an LLM. I read your comment, liked it, and answered it in the way that came naturally. It’s the opposite of mechanical. I come here for fun. I’m not beholden to answering in the exact way you want and may not answer your questions directly like a school assignment. Maybe take your finger out of your snatch and stop whining about it. Maybe say you’re welcome because I actually gave you a genuine answer. If you don’t get it or you feel it’s off topic too much, maybe that means I think in a non linear way. My guess is that if someone were to run an LLM analysis it’d probably think that the answer I gave, while not a perfect direct one to one, it was definitely on topic and sincere and clarified many of the positions you were asking about. One thing that may come off as a heuristic of AI is I do tend to use a lot of words and I don’t always come at things straight on or with one layer. Hence I don’t have a huge following. I don’t pander and I’m wordy.
So you're not interested in helping me understand the relevance of your comment? Can you please try again? Not a school assignment. Just a plea from a human to understand. It would help if you answer the questions one at a time, in any order you choose, but please let me know which one you are answering. I don't care if your brain works non-linearly, that's fine. Mine does too. But we are living in a universe with other brains, so please let's try to communicate instead of having solipsistic rants? If you are serious about resonance, then try to resonate with me. I'll do the same. If you are serious about empathy, then please don't be sarcastic and mean: Accusing me of "whining" shows the opposite of empathy. How does "pull your finger out of your snatch" show empathy? There were not "many positions" in my comment. There were 3 questions. A question is not a "position".
Ok first of all I never agreed that I gave a solipsistic rant. That’s your opinion. My answer was the best one I could give you given the time I have.
I stand behind my first answer and think it did a great job even if it didn’t work for you.
If you don’t find it useful for at least informing a counter that doesn’t involve whining or accusing me of LLMs, strongly consider leaving. Otherwise give a specific counter.
The answers are in there imo and you can have your LLM organize it for you I’m not willing to do that.
I give my readers a sufficient amount of info imo and move on.
When it’s a complex multistep question and it’s a good question, I’ll answer it thoroughly imo but stop at making it hyper-palatable to a wider range of people because editing to that level is time consuming for just a comment and it’s important imo that you get what I consider the necessary raw info from me instead of me trying to trim it down with an LLM to appeal to a wider audience. My desired target will accept the kind of comment I initially gave.
That’s how it is here, so do what you want.
Also, there’s nothing inconsistent about caring about empathy and also knowingly causing suffering or expressing contempt or being rude, imo.
We cause suffering in others or express dislike, harshness, etc, for all kinds of consequential reasons.
Deterrent, incentive, restraint, etc.
Just because I care about your feelings doesn’t mean I’m always going to tiptoe around them.
And just because I don’t believe in moral deservedness doesn’t mean I’m not going to be a jerk sometimes.
I don’t think you “deserve” to go away feeling annoyed or frustrated.
But it may very well be the case that given my aesthetic and rational commitments, you will be caused to do just that, and I will be ok with it.
Also, just because I think we all should have more of a certain kind of empathy doesn’t mean I have it. I never claimed I did.
So far you’ve insinuated I was using an LLM when I didn’t, then called my answer a solipsistic rant in your opinion, as if me calling it non linear was an admission that I wasn’t attempting to be useful with it (I was) and then seemed to me to try to pull a gotcha by saying that me making the finger comment was hypocritical given my valuing of empathy, which I find to be boringly incoherent.
I can value empathy and still insinuate that I’m of the opinion that you are being entitled, petty and whiny, and should be putting my answer in an LLM and asking it to organize the points in a way that you understand, as opposed to expecting me to spend time guessing at what one commenter is going to find useful.
I’m happy to respond to a rebuttal on the points in my original answer, I think I’m very generous in that regard. Possibly the MOST generous on Substack in that regard. I will take you very seriously if you come at me with sincerity, good faith, and reason. I try to be as orderly, organized and relevant as I can, but my style isn’t for everyone.
If the problem is stylistic or you’ve decided I’m lying about process, then move the fuck on. I feel I already answered your question and then some, your feedback is noted, but all the questions/concerns evaporate imo once you understand and read the comment thoroughly.
If something in the comment is unclear to you, simply tell me, I’m totally happy to explain it in a diff way but you have to tell me which part is confusing to you and why, and ideally assert that it’s confusing TO YOU, and don’t opine how it lands for everyone else. I’m not asking for your writing or marketing feedback.
Maybe don’t ask a multi part question and instead boil it down to one sentence.
I will not ask an LLM to parse something for me, sorry. They have no empathy and often do word salads. I am quite capable of parsing both LLM and human responses and have an accute capacity to tell a word salad. I still don’t know if this is an LLM talking to me or not, I suspect it is, as I have not seen any empathy yet, or an attempt to be coherent. But OK, even if you are an LLM, maybe you can still clarify, since you offered to address my concerns as long as they are one at a time, here goes into your context window:
What about the “suicidal empathy” (Gaad Saad) critique? If empathy is not balanced by other considerations, such as the other 5 moral values that Moral Foundation Theory (Jon Haidt) has empirically uncovered, and is not modulated by a survival instinct, we get situations like the Gaza Cult (which you seem to be aware of), where context disappears and the survival (I’d count that as both IS and RW) of Israelis (and ultimately Palestinians as well) is endangered. Musk, Saad, and I are not saying to do away with empathy. We’re saying it needs to be modulated by these other values and instincts. And Haidt is saying that in liberals it is often less so than in conservatives.
Sounds a bit like bowing out, no mate? Both parties talking past each other. Easy way to stop that, origin or otherwise. By my reckoning, she hasn’t actually responded to the physicists specific queries.
Who is she? You mean me?
This isn’t a popularity contest or a democracy. Telling me who you agree with means absolutely nothing. If you can make a falsifiable claim go ahead. Name one specific question I haven’t answered.
Our thoughts, composed of 5-D matter, our emotions of 4-D matter, and our desires, composed of a combination of the two, affect our 3-D brain-awareness. Any pathology of the brain will affect our thoughts, emotions, desires as well.
However, we have the free will to choose to think and act differently, which affects our biofield of subtle matter. The more we develop our thoughts and change our limited beliefs, without having our automatic, subconscious patterns and our old, emotional wounds control us, the more our autonomic nervous system (including their force centers of vitality distribution and extended senses like empathy) adapts.
We are not prisoners of our 3-D form “wiring.” As we begin to identify with cultivating qualities and act with impersonal unselfishness, we change our biochemistry.
Why don’t all good men (human, not gender) come forward? Because men are not yet good. The etymology of the word “hu-man” means “Divine-Mind.” When expressed in 3-D, we become "Graduates from the School of Painful Endeavour".
I love your passion ♥️
A great read
Let me start with the quote Harris used as the opening of his book and a comment I sent him before I give my two cents on your framework:
Harris: "The people of Albania have a venerable tradition of vendetta called “Kanun”: If a man commits a murder, his victim’s family can kill any one of his male relatives in reprisal. If a boy has the misfortune of being the son or brother of a murderer, he must spend his days and nights in hiding, forgoing a proper education, adequate health care, and the pleasures of a normal life. Untold numbers of Albanian men and boys live as prisoners of their homes even now. Can we say that the Albanians are morally wrong to have structured their society in this way? Is their tradition of blood feud a form of evil? Are their values inferior to our own?"
Me: "Dear Dr. Harris,
If you are truly baffled by your failure to export ideas, grab your Moral Landscape and read the first few starting lines from the eyes of an Albanian.
And here's my perspective too:
- By 2010, blood feuds were a residual phenomenon, not a defining feature of Albanian life.
- 'Venerable' tradition of Vendetta called Kanun - What does venerable mean exactly? That we gathered around a fire and performed rituals? That it was ancient? It wasn't.
- The Kanun wasn’t created to glorify violence or embody some dark national romance; it functioned as emergency governance. When the Ottoman Empire ruled Albania (late 15th–early 20th century), its administrative reach barely touched the northern highlands. No courts, no gendarmerie, no predictable justice. The Kanun filled that vacuum—a decentralized legal substitute, not a cultural obsession with killing.
- You opened with Albania because it gave you a quick, exotic contrast—blood feuds sound medieval, so they dramatize your “objective morality” pitch. But you didn’t stay long enough to ask why that system existed or how it evolved. The example was instrumental, not investigative.
- As an Albanian, I read your "Are their values inferior to our own?" and think are we animals to him? Did he never expect an Albanian to read it? I understand it's not hatred though. It is philosophical provincialism.
-The Kanun gradually fell out of practical use in the early 20th century, as the Albanian state strengthened after 1912. You didn't do right by us.
You measure morality by outcomes; I measure it by integration, that is a society's ability to keep its soul while upgrading its justice. You want moral realism through cultural negation. I want moral realism through cultural continuity. You quantify suffering; I transform the meaning of honor. Your path is diagnostic: measure, rank, intervene. Mine is evolutionary: reinterpret, re-root, and dissolve the old code by fulfilling its essence under new law."
----
Now unto your framework:
"The diagnosis of Harris's gap is good. He gave a map, not an engine. Identifying empathy as the bottleneck is real. Empathy variance is empirically real. Psychopathy, subclinical empathy deficits, tribal gating, are all real. Moral reasoning without motivational substrate does fail in practice. Measurement objections are indeed overstated. This is serious, technically informed thinking. Treating it as an engineering problem is a step forward.
This is where you go wrong:
1. You confuse moral motivation with moral convergence. You seem to be under the assumption that if we boost empathy, morality will align. History shows an opposite order - empathy follows structure, not the other way around. Your framework flips causality.
2. You treat empathy as the engine when it's actually the fuel. Empathy is context-sensitive, not foundational. It expands with trust. It contracts with insecurity. It collapses under perceived injustice. Again, history is with me on this.
3. You risk technocratic moral authoritarianism even as you say "voluntary." “Voluntary” becomes socially compulsory fast. And once you medicalize empathy, dissent becomes pathology. Reinterpretation is more intelligent than rewiring here.
4. Much like Harris, you miss the real bottleneck which is identity continuity. Your framework assumes humans resist moral progress because brains are faulty. The lived experience of my people shows humans resist when progress threatens identity. Moral convergence historically follows trusted institutions and identity-preserving translation, not affective rewiring. Albanians didn’t need their empathy enhanced. They needed structure and translation. Once the translation happened, convergence followed without neurointervention.
----
If you're interested to take a look:
"Moral–Historical Convergence (MHC) Frame
Goal: Rank practices by human flourishing and change them without breaking legitimacy or identity.
1) Evaluation layer (Harris)
Define the harm baseline: morbidity, education loss, income loss, trauma, trust.
Compute the moral delta: best feasible alternative vs current practice.
Output: a ranked list of practices by net effect on well-being.
2) Constraint layer (yours)
Map state capacity: policing, courts, admin reach.
Map legitimacy: do people trust the enforcer?
Map identity load: which virtues are tied to the practice?
3) Translation layer (yours)
Extract core virtues from the old code (e.g., besa, hospitality, courage).
Re-express them inside current law and institutions.
Rule: retire mechanisms, preserve meanings.
4) Intervention ladder
Abstain → organic convergence. Use when capacity < threshold.
Accompany → reconciliation, amnesties, visible fairness, storytelling.
Align → policy reform, incentives, local champions.
Impose → coercion only when capacity + legitimacy are both high and harm is extreme.
Always pick the lowest rung that achieves the moral delta.
5) Rhetoric protocol
Internal voice first. Outsiders benchmark quietly.
Speak in virtues, not insults.
Promise procedures (fair courts), not abstract futures.
6) Tempo rule
Speed up only if acceleration does not reduce legitimacy below the enforcement floor.
If trust drops, step down the ladder.
7) Metrics
Lead indicators: perceived fairness of courts, case clearance time, reconciliation counts.
Lag indicators: homicide rates, years of confinement, school attendance, income recovery.
Identity continuity: surveys on “our values now live in the law.”
8) Decision test (all must pass)
Harm delta is large and measured.
Feasible alternative exists here and now.
Path preserves identity while switching mechanisms.
If any fail, postpone or move down a rung."
Ultimately, the question is not purely philosophical. But I'll save you some time too because it doesn't need adding just an additional layer that is your wellbeing. It needs grounding in history as it always has and it always will.
Thanks Professor. No seriously, it’s fine.
I’ve read through your reply a few times.
(Edit: I like your other comment on the “How to know what to do” piece much more. It was more sincere and so my answer was, too. The below is kind of jokey and snarky.)
Respectfully I think you’re the one misreading, or maybe just scared I’m going to lobitomize you so you want to appeal to the idea that people are willing to play along and reduce unnecessary suffering as long as they get to hold onto their sense of identity, continuity, customs, etc.
Well….
Ok. I’ll put down the scalpel and discuss. For a sec.
I have to do a better job locking in up front that IWRS doesn’t claim to describe how empathy functions in the wild or how to cultivate it.
Everything you said is fine and I’m keeping it in my notes for sure; but I guess we differ in that I think it’s orthogonal. IWRS is upstream of all of it.
What I need to make clear (in my next draft) is first reinforce that some pain is unwanted by the experiencer and sometimes that pain is unnecessary by our own lights. Fine.
We gotta then use well-being science to flag, quantity and mitigate suffering.
IWRS never in any way claims to know HOW solve this or that pain, how pain works, etc. obviously context matters.
Gym workouts in another context would be legitimately barbaric suffering. I’m not getting into that messy side of things with IWRS.
The framework I propose is downstream or upstream of that stuff in the broader architecture.
I don’t doubt for a second that MHC or wtvr has a place on the map.
It’s just not within the boundaries of MY portion of the map, and I’m not convinced that my portion isn’t compatible with what you’re describing. It really is, in my opinion.
Not to be a cunt, but is it possible you’re being a little over-eager and confusing your very good use case for diplomacy of change and reform with my physics that your use case plugs into, and then coming to me as if this use case HAS to be merged into my architecture?
Because that’s how it feels.
If you wanna use phrases like “this is where you go wrong” it really needs to be followed by an example of where I went wrong and imho it didn’t. I’m going to remember that and excise the part of your brain that makes you talk like that, so patriarchal in tone.
All seriousness,
IWRS says there is “some unnecessary suffering afoot here.”
If the rebuttal is “no, it’s necessary suffering because it allows these people over here to feel continuity.”
Well, that’s a tradeoff. We have to decide if that lack of continuity is more painful than the suffering in question, and vote on it. Maybe there’s a way to come to some agreement.
IWRS kicks in when that doesn’t work. Or rather, it’s the physics that persists throughout. It doesn’t give up just because people are set in their ways.
What it will not abide is keeping the levels of suffering in the dark.
It’ll also not abide numb patches being the real reason why we decide these tradeoffs.
If someone else is suffering needlessly and we don’t care at all, then IWRS doesn’t don’t care that it’s because of your “continuity and identity.”
I mean, fine, maybe, it can try to work with you on that. But there are limits.
At some point it’ll be hacking into your brain. It’s just going to make you think it was your idea.
Trust me, it’s better this way.
At best, you add no missing step to Harris's Moral Landscape. At worst, you simply cross a line Harris deliberately refused to cross by smuggling in teleology. You don't describe morality. You describe what you believe the future must do. That is not a missing step in Harris' argument. That is a replacement of philosophy with destiny-talk.
What if I've already hacked into yours? bum bum. I am a force to be reckoned with. BUM BUM.
Wrong, I add step five. He never discusses this step. In fact, he doesn’t have steps. He has the experience and valence axioms. He has boundary conditions that we all agree eternal suffering for everyone for no reason is safe enough to call bad. And the opposite axis is safe enough to call good. He says there’s a landscape in the middle and it’s not random. It’s directionally coherent and partially mappable and we should try to map it because it’s the closest thing to a prescriptive map we have. I added step 5.
I don’t smuggle in “teleology,” but I assert the existence of “unnecessary” suffering as a category of suffering, I cite the implicit goal of most of humanity to reduce unnecessary suffering, and coin the concept of feasible reduction. At no point do I imply there’s an extrinsic or absolute purpose to the Universe or meaning. So you’re wrong.