Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Great question. The thing that got me interested in confronting philosophical questions through science as a kid was about human suffering. I guess I would want a way to help make empathy possible. Right now, it’s very hard to know what somebody’s feeling in their mind. We use language to try to convey that, but it doesn’t quite seal the deal. That’s one of the reasons, some people think, why there’s so much conflict: that you can’t understand the internal state of somebody else at a true level. What if I could read out what happens in my mind, and somebody else could experience that literal state, and vice versa? This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about that I would like to work on long term, but obviously it has a lot of basic research to go into before we’re even close to ready for that. I worry sometimes that would make things worse. I think of people on Twitter: they see what each other have to say; they like each other less. There’s some partial evidence that, if you try to mentally put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you realize that what they think conflicts with your values, and you may be less inclined to agree with them. Is it possible we have too much empathy, and we should just be more objective, more Spockian, rational calculators? It also might be that we have to think of empathy in a new way. As we talked about earlier, suppose that what we are consciously aware of is being generated by some unconscious processes that happen right beforehand. Maybe when we are trying to experience empathy at a certain point in time, there are other processes in the brain that occurred beforehand that we don’t have access to. But if we could access those processes, we could have a greater kind of empathy. Some of this language is used in meditative and consciousness-oriented and mindfulness practices that try to understand compassion and empathy in a greater way. But I wonder if there’s a precise neuroscientific way to tackle such things.…

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