EMPATHY AND COMPASSION A Neurophenomenological Approach Evan Thompson

EMPATHY AND COMPASSION A Neurophenomenological Approach Evan Thompson

Core Idea: Our individual human minds emerge from an embodied and intersubjective space of perception, action, emotion, and imagination. Human minds are embodied, emergent, and intersubjective, and therefore can’t be reductively identified simply with neural processes inside the head.

Connection to empathy: ‘Empathy’ in its widest sense describes sensorimotor and affective processes that constitute this embodiedintersubjective space; and from which ‘self’ and ‘other’ coemerge

Neurophenomenology Francisco Varela 1946 -2001

Neurophenomenology: Phenomenological accounts of experience and their counterparts in cognitive science relate to each other through reciprocal constraints (Varela 1996).

Structure for the Rest of this Talk 1. Dimensions of Embodiment 2. Typology of Empathy 3. Compassionate Empathy: A Mahayana Buddhist Perspective

Dimensions of Embodiment Sensorimotor embodiment Imaginative embodiment Affective/emotional embodiment Intersubjective embodiment

Sensorimotor Embodiment Sensory and motor processes aren’t separate input and output systems, but interdependently linked (e. g. , sensorimotor coding of space)

Imaginative Embodiment Sensorimotor processes underwrite mental imagery (e. g. , many types of imagery involve increased activity in cortical and cerebellar structures concerned with motor control)

Relationship between Perception and Imagination? Essentially the same process, the distinction between them being a matter of the degree to which sensory stimulation determines one’s current experience. Imagination = off-line sensorimotor activity Perception = imagination constrained by online sensorimotor activity

Affective Embodiment Emotion/affect is a paradigmatic wholeorganism event: • Large-scale brain event • Psychosomatic (immune, neural, endocrine) • Motor/behavioural (facial expression, approach/withdrawal) • Cognitive (appraisal) • Subjective (felt valence, personal meaning)

Sentience • Feeling of being alive • Not organized according to sensory modality • Grounded in homeodynamic processes of life-regulation and emotion • Inescapable affective backdrop, such that sensorimotor & imaginative procesess are always affectively saturated

Upshot: the conscious mind isn’t exclusively in the brain, as opposed to the rest of the body. Consciousness is an emergent and distributed process that characterizes the whole organism, not a property tucked away inside the brain.

Intersubjective Embodiment Embedding of the bodily subject in an intersubjective space, out of which self/other emerge. Empathy as a study case, in which sensorimotor, affective, imaginative aspects intertwine in intersubjective embodiment

Structure 1. Dimensions of Embodiment 2. Typology of Empathy 3. Compassionate Empathy: A Mahayana Buddhist Perspective

What do I mean by ‘empathy’? Empathy not as ‘mindreading’, but as embodied mind-making

Phenomenology of Empathy Edmund Husserl Edith Stein

Empathy 1. Passive (involuntary) association (coupling) of my lived body with your lived body 2. Imaginative movement of myself to your place 3. Understanding of you as an other to me, and me as an other to you 4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a person

Empathy 1. Passive (involuntary) association (coupling) of my lived body with your lived body 2. Imaginative movement of myself to your place 3. Understanding of you as an other to me, and me as an other to you 4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a person

Mirror Neurons

Facial Imitation in Infants

Empathy as Bodily Coupling Associative bonding of living bodies of self and other at the level of body schema & body image Sensorimotor/affective aspect: infant imitation & protoconversation (Trevarthyn, Meltzoff), mirror neurons & intersubjective sensori-neuronal-motor manifold (Gallese) Imaginative aspect: indirect activation of perceptuo-motor processes by off-line imagery; phenomenology of memory/emotion consolidation/imagery sedimented in lived body = “habit body”

Empathy 1. Passive (involuntary) association (coupling) of my lived body with your lived body 2. Imaginative movement of myself to your place 3. Understanding of you as an other to me, and me as an other to you 4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a person

Empathy as Imaginative Transposition Phenomenology: dynamic spatial transposition of perspectives as vehicle of exchange of mental perspectives (I move to your place/you to mine) Developmental psychology: builds on emergence of joint attentional abilities (Tomasello) Ethology: consolation behaviour, tailored helping behaviour (de Waal)

Empathy 1. Passive (involuntary) association (coupling) of my lived body with your lived body 2. Imaginative movement of myself to your place 3. Understanding of you as an other to me, and me as an other to you 4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a person

I don’t simply imagine myself in your place, but grasp myself as an other to you. That is, I empathetically imagine your empathetic experience of me, and you empathetically imagine my empathetic experience of you. This involves a complicated exchange of pespectives:

Reiterated Empathy i. I have my own first-person egocentric perspective on myself. ii. From this egocentric perspective, I see you over there = adopting a third- person allocentric perspective on you iii. But I also imagine being in your place and experiencing things from your first-person egocentric perspective = adopting a thirdperson egocentric perspective on you iv. In addition, I imagine myself as an other seen from your first person egocentric perspective = adopting a first-person allocentric perspective on myself

Ambiguity of the Lived Body If one’s lived body were to appear only from the first-person perspective, it wouldn’t be possible to have a full nonegocentric understanding of ‘I’ as an embodied individual in a public world that transcends the self Such understanding requires an alterego perspective on oneself; this happens in joint-attentional scenes through reiterated empathy

Empathy 1. Passive (involuntary) association (coupling) of my lived body with your lived body 2. Imaginative movement of myself to your place 3. Understanding of you as an other to me, and me as an other to you 4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a person

Empathy as Moral Perception Capacity underlying moral sentiments (sympathy, compassion, love) Entry point into moral domain: “Aid to others in need would never be internalized as a duty without the fellowfeeling that drives people to take an interest in one another. Moral sentiments came first; moral principles second” (Frans de Waal, 1996, p. 87).

the Kantian imperative always to treat others (and oneself) as ends-in-themselves has no practical meaning independent of our imaginatively taking up the place of the other. Contrary, to Kant’s explicit claims, we cannot know what it means to treat someone as an end-in-himself, in any concrete way, unless we can imagine his experience, feelings, plans, goals, and hopes. We cannot know what respect for others demands of us, unless we participate imaginatively in their experience of the world. --Mark Johnson 1993, p. 200

Structure 1. Dimensions of Embodiment 2. Typology of Empathy 3. Compassionate Empathy: A Mahayana Buddhist Perspective

Shantideva, c. 8 th century CE v. Meditation on the equality of self and other v. Meditation on the exchange of self and other (Way of the Bodhisattva, Chapter 8) Mahayana Buddhism (Madhyamaka)

Although they have no ultimate grounds for doing so, all beings think in terms of “I” and “mine. ” Because of this, they conceive of “other, ” fixing on it as something alien, although this too is unfounded. Aside from being mental imputations, “I” and “other” are totally unreal. They are both illusory. Moreover, when the nonexistence of “I” is realized, the notion of “other” also disappears, for the simple reason that the two terms are posited only in relation to each other. Just as it is impossible to cut the sky in two with a knife, likewise, when the spacelike quality of egolessness is realized; it is no longer possible to make a separation between “I” and “other, ” and there arises an attitude of wanting to protect others as oneself, and to protect all that belongs to them with the same care as if it were one’s own. As it is said, “Whoever casts aside the ordinary, trivial view of ‘self’ will discover the profound meaning of great ‘selfhood. ’ [19 th century Tibetan commentary]

Meditation on Equality of Self and Other By applying the name “I” to the whole collection of beings, and by entertaining and habituating oneself to thought “They are myself, ” the thought of “I” will in fact arise with regard to them; and one will come to care for them as much as one now cares for onself. . .

Exchange of self and other = 1 st person method of reiterated empathy Jealousy Self Rivalry Pride Superior Equal Inferior

Meditations combine disciplined first-person practices of: v. Attentional stability (shamatha) v. Insightful awareness (vipashyana) v. Visualization and mental imagery v. Self-regulation of emotion

Buddhist Psychology and Husserlian Phenomenology both disclose the nonegocentric openness of consciousness v. Buddhism: self and other as dependently originated v. Phenomenology: dynamic self-othering of empathy, recollection, reflection, imagination, and bodily experience