My inquiries into consciousness in religious scriptures confirmed for me that each major religion has its mystical wing, and scriptures from each such wing describe a state of pure consciousness having no content.
This commonality in such diverse settings changed my attitude toward finding intimations of truth in scripture. I came to conjecture that when a view is universally shared by religions, it offers a hypothesis as to how humans might be, but where religions took antithetical positions, such as on what to eat or what to wear, the diversity indicated accidents of history and culture rather than suggestions of universal truth. So, although my primary interest was in consciousness, I found myself noticing other concepts as candidates for universality.
The concept of compassion was as common as mystical pure consciousness, and more common than that of a personal God. I resolved to return to it.
Recently, a good friend urged upon me the importance of empathy. As with most males, or so I am told, I supposedly suffer from helper-itis. When my friend describes a problem he is having, my first impulse and overt behavior is to try to solve it.
My friend, ungrateful lout that he is, often informs me he needs not help but empathy. I censor the expletive that comes to mind, put my helper mechanism into neutral, and try to give him what he wants, even if I am not convinced it is what he needs. To suggest how hard this is I quote a departed friend, Daphne Reed, who used to say, “Dick doesn’t tell you what you want to hear, he tells you what you need to hear.”
So now I have two concepts that appear to be related, compassion and empathy, that need exploring. What are they?
Singer and Klimecki, in “Current Biology, Vol. 24,” report that empathy is the capacity to share the feelings of others, and that in feeling empathy we know that our emotion is resonating with that of another person. They also indicate a risk of empathy is losing the self-other distinction, producing emotion contagion.
They mention late 20th-century social and developmental psychology research suggesting an empathic response to suffering can result either in personal distress, called empathic distress; or compassion, referred to as empathic concern or sympathy. Empathic distress entails “a strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings.”
On the other hand, compassion is a feeling of concern for the other’s suffering, together with motivation to help.
They report Batson and Eisenberg confirmed that people who feel compassion in a given situation help more often than people who suffer from empathic distress. They also report research indicating that compassion can be learned and produce more frequent helping behavior.
Singer and Klemecki illustrate how functional magnetic resonance imaging shows that empathizing with another person’s feelings relates to the activation of neural networks that supposedly support first-person experience of such feelings.
“Several days of empathy training led to an activation increase in insula and anterior middle cingulate cortex, as well as to an increase in self-reported negative affect. In contrast, subsequent compassion training in the same participants could reverse this effect by decreasing negative affect and increasing positive affect.”
I question the notion that one person shares the experience of another. There’s no way to show that activity in the “same” brain locations for two different people indicates the “same” experience for both. We don’t know how the brain could produce an experience and cannot confirm that another person even has experience at all, much less confirm that one person’s experience is the same as another’s.
The question “what is it like to be another human” is fundamentally on the same footing as Thomas Nagel’s question “What is it like to be a bat?” We can be sure there is something it is like, but ignorant of what that can be.
Despite the foregoing, I find the idea that we can approximate the feelings of others, and the indirect evidence supporting that idea, a strikingly beautiful, almost magical conjecture about what it is to be a person.
Now, with respect to my demanding friend and his villainous urging me to risk empathic distress when my impulse toward healthy, wholesome compassion moves me to help, I say forbid it almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me compassion or give me empathic feeling plus helpful action.
Richard S. Bogartz is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.