Empathy Models/Empathy Model

The real action, according to the empathy model, is in the spaces between us; very little is completely within us. What connects us, and all higher animals, into a collaborative environment is the neurology that is the basis of our interactions: emotional connections. Everything happens in the spaces between us. The quantum model of physics is analogous: we are points of energy, surrounded by fields of energy. Individually we do very little, and as isolated individuals we suffer loneliness and become unhealthy.[1]

In this model, people are effectively "pointless" as the "activity" is in the spaces between us.

News

Counseling

There will soon be an attempt to apply the empathy model to counseling concepts, rather than as an evolutionary model, general advice for an easier life, and an activist's action manual. For this, a synopsis has been created that may become the framework for this document. Important components of the model are recently added, and direct implementation is less that six months old. Most components have been developed well enough to compare with, or perhaps envelope, accepted psychological components.

Finally, someone agrees

Relational synapse of the mirror neuron system

Jessica Boyatt talks about the mirror neuron system as a "relation synapse" that is part of the relational psychoanalysis (Boyatt, 2009). The mirror neurons enable a connection that is in "the physical and experiential space" (p.2) in between people who are communicating, such as a therapist and client. It can also be the space surrounding the members of crowd, or what she calls a social "bubble." What emerges from the "bubble" becomes part of eveyone's experience, and is the cause for more communication, and more experience construction. The quality of the experience, I imagine, would depend on its context and the emotions experienced in the "bubble."

"Conscious verbal articulation" Boyatt says, "is the tip of the iceberg." There is "implicit, nonconscious communication" in the bubble that is derived from experience. This reminds me of the constructivist "community of knowledge" where "knowledge is a complex of meanings continually negotiated" (Constructivism and education). Boyatt calls communication within her system "languaging" and she says that it operates at a much higher speed than normal articulated langauge. She describes in the context of the therapist/client relationship, but I would probably see it more explicitly in romance, and hence highly more emtional--perhaps emotional communication.

Boyatt, J. (2009). Relational Synapse: Recognition, Thirdness, and the Mirror Neuron System. Washington, District of Columbia, US: American Psychological Association.

Recent months have been especially fruitful for the empathy model; research into underlying meanings of human empathy combined with attempts to reinforce the model with in real-life have shown relationships between paranoia and hate in a historical context that provides a therapeutic path to help restore empathy as human guidance.

I very recently had yet another experience with a corrupt person in authority whom I was able to "turn around" by describing to him, forcefully and in front of a reasonably-sized group, that the problems we face come purely from those in the structure above with relevant and accurate local history. The man, a state official, stopped "blaming the victim," as I assume he had been instructed to do, and adopted a reasonable approach from then forward. His relation to me changed from insulting and hostile, not to mention slanderous, to agreeable and supportive of change. I don't believe that the man changed internally, but his approach did for the duration. My experimental approach is confrontational, but not "blaming." It is an extension of the paranoia/hate learning from the Wikipedia that, in these experiments, focuses successfully on the victimization and not the "conspiracy." Two of the twenty people in the room openly "combatted" me in threatening tones (one confirmed that she is a corporate manager), but surprisingly the authority figure "shut them down." Most in the room showed relief, and some poured forth their own anecdotes. Two in twenty is 10%, far below the standard of 20% "difficulty ratio," minus, of course, the authority figure who was a separate component figure of this experiment. This type is experiment in no way resembles the typical social experiment comprising a few questions or pictures on a piece of paper; these experiments involve numbers of people having complex reactions in mid- and large-scale social environments.

The paranoia/hate component of the model has also recently been applied to international conflict to show that paraonia, and with it fear, can be manipulated many ways to create hateful injustice, and even genocide (article, supporting notes, discussion). Mitigating paranoia and identifying its sources can prevent cultural and military conflict (article). The event that gave the text connecting paranoia and hate started innocently enough as an attempt at humor, decayed quickly to actions that enhance understanding of predatory cooperation, and then continued so long as stalking event as to cement a specific emotional communication disorder, OCD, to predatory cooperation, and what presents itself as a political manifestation of anti-empathy: contemporary Libertarianism. Along similar lines, a survey of the Socratic oligarchic culture through IF Stone's writing, easily predicted the more serious emotional communication dysfunctions of narcissism and "ingenuineousness." In fact, the model predicted the disorders so easily that the proof seemed suspicious; an attempt at disproving not only confirmed the proof, but added another layer showing examples anti-empathy in the anti-oligarchs of Athenian democracy who opposed the Socratics. They Capital exploitation used to build Athens as the first great Western capital in a way that angered Sparta, triggering the Peloponnese war further cementing the empathy model to its sister document, Capital Structure.

As important as this learning is, it may take a while to implement it into the model. Beneficial results from the use of the recently-learned information has been encouraging and will probably support the model's other components. The circumstances surrounding the initiation of the "paranoia" component are on-going, and also online. So there may be more to come, the information will be well defined as the Internet tends to be self-documenting.

The Internet, as a component of the modern Information Society, is different from most of humanity's experience in so many obvious ways that it is forcing even further extension of the model to find motivations for, say, predatory activity, in terms of gained resources when there are no obvious resources to be stolen. This may go to explain motivations for predatory actions such as sadism where, likewise, there is no obvious resource. The "resource" in these cases may be intangibles that have to do with pleasurable glandular responses which may be the resource, or in behavioral terms, the reward. Glandular responses, what respondents sometimes refer to as endorphins, act as a sort of "mediator" to translate the benefits of resource accumulation to thinking and feeling processes in many people. This would also include sexual predators, bringing them into the model as well, as traditional resource hunters. And it may give light to dangerous narcotic abuse.

Inception

This model is based on the simple idea that the problems of the world are due to a lack of empathy, and--given the new knowledge about mirror and spindle neurons--this lack is due to a lack of functioning empathic neural constructs in many people. When I finished my empathy overview, Spiritual Darwinism, I wanted to create an action research manual for the empathy discussion group that helped me with my empathy research and proofreading.

Activity in the discussion group declined because the contention between new neurological perspective and the behavioral schools (as well as other schools such as the psychics) often became verbally violent.[5] The group failed to make the transition I hoped for from empathy research discussion to an implementation of empathy in social action. None-the-less, the group had done a huge service by sorting through all the radically new topics about empathy coming to light because of newly discovered empathic neurons: spindle and mirror cells. These neurons comprise the neural constructs necssary for humanity's higher empathy, and are specific. And, ironically, not having these neurons is not necessarily a disability in our society--unless there is another neurological disability to accompany the loss of empathic neurons. Then the condition is described as autism, or something similar.

This document took on a life of its own as I started implement the ideas as a new criteria for making decisions in life based on empathy. And as it happens, a new approach that specifically seeks to fathom a person's connectivity with the surrounding environment actually enabled me to connect specific illness with anti-empathic action in the environment around me.

The first anti-empathic situation I encountered after I had committed to understanding the phenomena involved bipolar disorder in a co-worker at a concrete batch plant who got promoted to be the batch plant manager simply, it seemed, because he could be so harsh to other workers if they did not perform as he thought they should. His promotion mystified me because such poor treatment of workers would guarantee that they flee to another employer. He would be friendly and communicative at times and then suddenly become distant and harsh in a cyclic pattern. This cyclic pattern would cause me to suddenly think he is OK, so that I would open up to him, only to get verbally abused invariably for imagined reasons. Many of my friends at the time were in health and humanities fields, and confirmed for me that he is bipolar. In the end, management reluctantly returned him to his position as a driver after his illness caused him to melt down--literally--every motor in the plant resulting in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars of losses. Beyond psychological curiosity, a major question for me was more economic: why was management was so interested in promoting someone who was so obviously and self-admittedly broken--and tended to destroy equipment!?[6] It seemed to me that no good could possibly come from his promotion, but management was certain in its decision. Towards the end of my life there he dumped several thousand gallons of toxic substance at a loss of several more thousand dollars (which I cleaned up), yet he remained a valued employee to this large family-owned corporation. I was mystified, and I have since attempted to approach this as a topic in Capital Structure.

Shortly thereafter, I engaged in an online discussion relationship with a woman who told me that she believed that sympathy for wild animals is "sentimental hogwash," and that she, for this reason, supported the types of real estate development that destroy forests, and she specifically told me she tested positive for aspergers. She confirmed much of what she had said by telling me how horses she had owned died with notable frequently. Eventually she invited me to her house so that I could help her obtain another horse by driving the truck carrying it. I could see in her treatment of the animal as she bought it that she viewed her animals as objects, and not as beings with feelings. It struck me that her previous horses had probably died because of her indifferent approach to them; that they had died because of neglect.

I had, at this point, identified specific diseases that related to emotional indifference that could result in abuse or suffering; in effect, I had what I felt were two distinct data points. I then learned by observing a friend who admitted to being diagnosed as bipolar how bipolar cycles range between very short and very long, and that a bipolar person could present almost completely different personalities during the different portions of the cycles. During some parts of her bipolar cycles I would see that she was emotionally connected, responsible, and concerned--warm and caring, and at other parts show a disconnected, cold, and indifferent person. A times she was predictably scheming and manipulative: Machiavellian. She had had a continuing relationship with a man who is spending many years in prison for several heinous crimes, and I also felt, sadly, that she had been involved in the crime that sent the man to prison. I concluded that her emotional detachment or disconnection caused her to have these negative attributes, but when she was emotionally connective, she could be a remarkably nice person. To me it seemed that there must be a relationship between emotional connectivity and responsibility. Now I had a third data point, but this time with a lot more associated information, and I felt I could construct the first part of the model that described emotional connective-ness as the key component of societal interaction, and, conversely, linked emotional disconnection to the types of indifference that I believe are so damaging to society.

I attempted to further grasp the situation by looking at available material, but I found too many conflicting descriptions of these diseases. Further when I attempted to learn from people who had been diagnosed, or their families, I found a profound inability by professionals to consistently make correct diagnoses! As a result, I quickly became shy of using psychological or psychiatric terms to categorize my observations, and decided to attempt to define human activity purely in the terms that I had developed for my work, that is, purely in terms of emotional connection or disconnection: empathy as normality, un-empathy as disconnection--and anti-empathy as predatory behavior. (In the end I found that un-empathy and anti-empathy will combine, as the un-empathic lack the ability to collaborate to help create the vital resources that we all need for comfort, and will ultimately have to resort to anti-empathic behavior to obtain them.)

My decision to take a "mono-diet" approach to empathy based on neurological connective-ness was also because of my concern that if my writing becomes widely read, that no matter how strong my desire to see people treated only in positive ways, my writing might be used to accuse and then punish a person for indifference because of a combination of misdiagnosis and misrepresentation of my writing. For instance, someone who may have some kind of communication disorder might be said to be cruel because their isolating condition might be said to be a form of indifference, when, in fact, they may simply be unable to communicate in ways that normal people do, or they may have isolated themselves as a self-imposed response to trauma.

It is important to understand, that in terms of diagnostic labels, I only listened to the person himself describing his situation or problems, and I made no attempt at diagnosis, nor trusted any third person's diagnosis or opinions; I only used information I was told by the person whose approach to life I was attempting to grasp. Over time, I found that there are other diseases that I felt I could link through external behavior and self-descriptions to show that they may cause, or may be the cause of, the emotional disconnection that leads to indifference, and hence cruelty: two of them were obsessive and attention-deficit disorders. Both, interestingly, were usually seen as skills rather than liabilities by the sufferers.

With time came knowledge about a most important disease: narcissism--what Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, and the like had in its "malignant" form. This condition is pretty-well confirmed as a common cause of major problems in the World, and I learned that therapists are usually at a total loss when attempting to work with narcissists. All that narcissists can see is themselves; they look at you and see mirror reflections of themselves. There is no question in my mind that cocaine and similar drugs are simply powdered forms of narcissism, and that users can quickly reach malignant levels.

Applying the empathy model as a mono-diet requires that we see our value as human beings is so based on the streams of emotional communication between us with others that empathy actually exists in the spaces surrounding us. This may be analogous to the physicists' conception that matter includes charged fields between bits of matter. This space doesn't separate us, but provides the environment for vital communication, so much so that life itself exists in these spaces between us, rather than within us. The model states that our inner spaces are basically worthless in terms of our humanity, and also our health. We may retreat to our inner space at times to concentrate, or perhaps meditate, but isolation ceases to be beneficial after more than a few days as loneliness sets in, and with it, depression. Prolonged disconnection from humanity damages our inner humanity, and with it our health--and reconnection instantly repairs it.

With this new criteria, that empathy is necessary for successful humanity, I saw the possibility that good people can easily make many self-damaging missteps based the misconception that they can positively influence people who lack empathic constructs. By believing that they can change disconnected people, they can hence benefit from relationships with them; in other words, change bad people to good as part of making a circle of friends, and perhaps developing a career. This may even apply to family; one might attempt to cement relationships with relations for the understandable desire to have a good family environment, when in fact there is no possibility of meaningful relationships because the underlying empathic neurons, and with them empathic constructs constructs are either damaged, or never existed. One may attempt to create helpful relationships with family members who are abusive to attempt to reconstruct a damaged family environment by creating a misconceived perception of that person that is comforting; what I think of as "painting a pretty picture" of the situation. Creating and defining this false alternative perception is understandable as the family environment is so very important, and it may actually temporarily improve the environment by making temporary changes through a process of mapping, sometimes called neuroplasticity. But the attempt will ultimately fail leading to disappointment, and possibly peril, because the damaged underlying neurology that is causing the abuse will revert to its broken state, as it probably cannot be fixed. A person attempting this process may again, and yet again, revive the false but positive perception, or "repaint the pretty picture," to make things better--only to be disappointed.

I think of this as a positive cognitive disorder, such as fear of flying is, but in reverse. Creating a positive perception of a negative situation, I learned, can be dangerous, yet I feel it is promoted by Humanists who advocate teaching kindness as a solution, and religious forces that expect unconditional respect for family, elders, and church leaders irrespective of their actions. Humanists tell us that our problems with the indifferent can be solved by therapy and encounter; religion tells us they can be solved with faith and prayer. There is no solution; even when empathic neurons can be repaired, and constructs restored, the repair effort must happen with the consent and support of the sufferer, be constant, and go on for years. There is a probability that the constructs never existed in the first place, or are so damaged as to never be repaired. The overly-optimistic misconception that empathy can necessarily be found deep in an anti-empathic person and be brought out has created pathways, and even sometimes vehicles, has assured that exploitative abuse, especially in families, may go on for very long periods.

If the emotional connectedness that defines empathy is missing, then according to the model, it necessarily follows that the empathic constructs, along with their component neurons, are not available. Most likely the neurons have been damaged where their regeneration, if it can happen, will take many years, or are simply missing, where there is no hope of repair, an hence no hope of empathy or natural morality.

Despite my being both Humanist and religious, I find it difficult to accept that compassion is a solution to indifference; that empathy can be taught to the indifferent. In fact, the model hinges on this because it sees perfectly functioning empathic neurons and constructs that we see in the majority of people as the foundation for human collaboration. As in the previous paragraph about on-going family abuse, I feel that forgiveness as a concept is often abused because there is a tendency to "rubber stamp" forgiveness as part of compassionate processes without requiring a genuine emotional response, such as remorse. There is, however, a political form of forgiveness that allows even the most guilty to survive, but it is only used as a stopgap in extreme situations that may lead, for instance, to genocide; this was applied to Idi Amin, and could (or should) have been applied to Saddam Hussein.

Nature's solution vs. the social solution

At first pass, the solution to the World's empathy issues appear to be a restoration of the natural response that every higher organism has to other organisms that treat them indifferently. In nature, animals that work against the community, that don't share in the food-gathering and child-caring responsibilities, and instead mistreat the community by hurting its members and stealing its resources, are in variably marginalized, and hence discouraged from reproducing. In human communities, the response is often nearly the opposite because of the intellectual nature of human empathy; there is a belief, perhaps faith, that through kindness we can repair the problem, but, against our best wishes, we often inadvertently extend the problem.

As early human communities left the forests to become farmers, they very likely marginalized the anti-empathic pushing them back into the forests to remain as hunters. This seems to have been a mistake (Mumford, Technics and Civilization), as the hunters very likely organized into hunter packs that did not limit their hunting to animals, but also hunted each other and no doubt attacked the farmer communities that had stored resources (Kurosawa, Seven Samurai). By marginalizing the anti-empathic, humanity created a crime wave. In human culture, the natural marginalization strategy does not work, but neither does faith in kindness. Either way, humanity has had to deal with an organized anti-empathic minority fully capable of domination through violence. Mumford links these forest "gangs" to the inception of the nearly-immeasurable military violence of later ages. Despite empathic strategies ranging from equally violent self-defense to organized morality, the violence-based system of the anti-empathic has become so integrated into society as to now absorb the vast majority of its resources.

None-the-less, the majority of people who live entirely in empathically shared spaces have rights that go beyond self-preservation from organized violence so that they can continue developing the textural meaning of their environments so that they can feel meaningfulness in their lives from their contributions to their communities(Ruth Benedict, Synergy). They have a right to protection from humans who are alien in the sense that these other humans don't exist in the shared space to collaborate; these other humans occupy the space solely to exploit often using the rationale that the damage caused by their exploitation is beneficial because it forces increased resource development. Durant rationalizes Roman cruelty in these terms by saying that it ultimately led to Renaissance. Exploitative people usually resort to bizarre and dangerous behaviors to achieve personal ends that seem normal to them. They don't fit the definition of a human in the humane sense, and hence don't necessarily have the rights that normal humans have; these dangerous humans often lose their rights as they go to prison, but the force that puts them there, such as a justice system, usually does not have the human characteristics that define healthy society. In fact, justice systems almost never do; justice is emotionally blind, and because of this, the people who operate these systems are chosen for their positions and, and hence promoted, because they, likewise, are emotionally blind; they are anti-empathic. As we see, the avenues of escape for the emotionally blind are intelligence, luck, and resources. With exceptional luck, they can bring their exploitation above the law, and even make the justice system theirs.

The percentage of humans effectively collaborating appears to be about 80%, with 20% of humanity functioning in emotionally isolated states either within society to exploit it--the lucky intelligent, or in isolation--often to kill humans on behalf of their luckier anti-empathic counterparts[7]. Those in isolation cannot work mutually in the shared space to collaborate to create the types of benefits we need to make life comfortable. They have to take them through one of the many control processes that they have created to harness society. These people occupy the middle and upper sections of Plato's Republic: the guardians and the elite; people who are not productive, but, because they can give other people a hard time by implementing control conspiracies, have access to the lion's share of the society's vast effort. This describes an unhealthy condition for which there has been no solution. There have been many attempts at a solution, some with extreme bloodshed, but they only bring society back to the same unhealthy condition.

The value of the empathy model is in that it creates new criteria by which individuals can assure that their immediate relationships are ultimately beneficial, and that they can mitigate these age-old problems. It explains, as psychology so often does, that what we have that is so valuable in terms of what is missing in others. This introduction is inspired by a conversation with a friend who admires the writing in the model, but initially took it from an entirely different perspective than I expected anyone would. Because the model attempts to create health in terms of emotional communication, especially in terms of how other feel about our actions, he understood the model to mean that he should think and act in terms of how others feel about him--purely in their private space, so to speak. This approach may be a successful social strategy in certain situations to help us obtain desired results, but the empathy model does not mean for anybody to do anything in particular; it only attempts to describe social health in terms of our streams of emotional communication with surrounding society and the natural environment. I described the connecting media itself to him as our "shared space," and that seemed to work for him. As examples, I suggested that when we can collaborate to make good things with the people we interact with, we are happy. Conversely, when we suffer from a depressed economy, we are all depressed primarily because we cannot develop resources to contribute to the community. He told me that he implemented the idea immediately in his work, which is to enable the handicapped at their jobs. Here the empathy model parallels the Constructivist's idea of a "community of knowledge," that describes knowledge is a complex map of shared and personal information that hovers over the physical community to give it structure and meaning. The empathy model extends this "cloud" by adding to it the highly complex streams of emotional information that define humanity, or society, as empathic, or emotional, organization.

Supporting documents

Spiritual Darwinism

Capital Structure: Our economic environment

Capital Punishment: Americans kill, so what is the best way?

Rattlesnake Rebellion: Contemporary change in a traditional format

Organismic Fate

Art Production Environment A collaborative art environment as a production solution

Reference material and citations for these documents

The Model

A few years into its conception, the model is predicting behavior with alarming accuracy, especially with respect to the sequential mind and dominant behavior [8]. In the early stages of development, the discovery of the idea of common crime as rules-based system highly dependent on rationale (probably originating with slavery and serfdom) is contradicted by accuracy of the model that now requires an adherence to its rules as a mono-diet to effectively obtain benefits from it. Any deviation allows for the anthropomorphism of humans who lack humane characteristics either intermittently or full-time. Misplaced trust ensues, and depending on what "rules" are being applied by the sufferer, there may be disappointment, or even trauma. Seeing another's approach solely from their point as a component of empathy seems sympathetic, and hence beneficial. But when done in the absence of a relationship to the surrounding environment we find that sympathy is in no way empathy; it is often its opposite. Sympathy is such an internal feeling as to be potentially selfish, and is hence not a component of the spaces between us that define the empathic environment.

Models in general are meant be abstractions or conceptualizations of environments meant to be constructed and implemented for beneficial results. As such, they predict behavior, and their merit usually lies solely in their ability to do so. They may be as large as the World's weather, or they may be as simple as a child's conceptualization of the World developed during the walk to school. Modeling is fundamentally different from the Scientific Method in that a model is a whole systems view where individual components are not so important as to collapse the entire model if a few of them are misconceived. Conversely the scientific method (from Aristotle) determines what is fact by linking hypothesis through proof and peer review to theory (which is fact), where any errors eliminate the hypothesis. The scientific method does not provide a pathway to knowledge construction. The modeling approach begins with a generalized structure based on the vast set of givens that we use to describe an environment, then extends the model by experimentally developing new ideas to further strengthen or expand it. If the inclusion of a new idea appears to give benefits, such as creating more profit as in a business model, then the model stays; if not, then out it goes! Logistical accuracy is not as important as an overall benefit from the use of the model. Since a model may produce benefits at its outset, risk is accepted as part of innovation, where, hopefully, side-steps are far outnumbered by steps taken forward. As a model produces increasing benefits, there are exponentially increasing in opportunities to further develop its accuracy; a model can gel very quickly when it reaches a state of usefulness.

Models differ from the Scientific Method in another way. Because models are looking for a single, reliable output, such as weather prediction from a weather model or profit form a business model, there is far more reliance on the effectiveness of its aggregated components than on documented support material such as in the Scientific Method. Challenges of its underlying assumptions can be taken for what they are worth, as they are not a threat to the perceived validity of the model; the model's value is purely in its effectiveness. For this reason, modelers can easily ignore harassment, criticisms, or accusations as the strength of their model is measured by its ability to produce benefits.

When limited to the Scientific Method, as most of "cold" science is, one is left adrift in a sea of facts developed (usually from funded studies or doctoral dissertations) that are detached and useless in of themselves. As the facts are connected, the scientific method is applied recursively to increasingly larger hypotheses effectively preventing implementation in a useful time-frame. The results are often "spaghetti structures" of otherwise disconnected facts glued together only with prose. Once implemented, these structures that are often called models tend break with changing conditions and are difficult to modify. (This "spaghetti" problem is paralleled in computer systems design, and is the strongest argument for objected-oriented approaches.) Further there is no criteria in the Scientific Method for an environmental connection, and hence a criteria for morality; the only criteria is that the data development follow the prescribed method. This is especially important in empathy studies; it is entirely possible, even probable, that a scientist studying empathy is animals has no ability to conceptualize the topic, or even an ability to conceptualize at all as he himself may lack empathy, and hence empathic neurons and constructs. The Scientific Method has no requirement for conceptual-ability, and hence no resistance to schisms created by those who may have the types of disorders described by the empathy model!

Models begin as generalized approximations of an environment, and then become abstracted with increasing complexity. This can be unfortunate, because abstraction tends to separate the information supporting the model from people who hope to benefit from it, as they are forced to take much of the model for granted. The empathy model hopes to avoid this by remaining as transparent as possible, and by using material that can easily be confirmed by anyone using the model.

A stack of neural, personal, and societal layers: and adaptation of the IP network stack

An interesting and useful abstraction that is a key component of the modern Information Society, the Internet, is the network stack, which is sometimes called the IP stack or the OSI model. It describes all the different components Internet communication as an abstraction in terms of all its widely different components: our interactions with it, the means that data is manipulated and routed to other machines and hence other people, and the atomic level that describes the actual electrons travelling as "square waves".

Each "transaction" on the Internet strikes each of these layers simultaneously as a single action, but but each sub-activity exists only in terms of the actions required on its level, and has nothing to do with any other layer, expect that it is a component of the entire stack, and hence each action by an Interent user.

No layer in the stack, with it subsidiary actions, resembles any other layer in any way. Each has its own nature and purpose, yet each layer operates as a component of every action. As a teacher in an autistic school, I saw how the layer approach could be adapted to show that all the interrelating components of each emotional action can be abstracted, from the neural layers (which are analogous to circuits in many ways), up through the emotional layers, out to the surrounding environment (where emotional actions influence others), and ultimately upward to influence to the nature of human society[9][10]. Healthy thoughts arise from well-functioning neurons, and positively influence the surrounding environment. Unhealthy thoughts come from badly-functioning neurons, create a bad surrounding environment, and if they happen in important places, can have exceptionally bad results for the world.

This is a novel implementation of technical abstraction, but with a little familiarity it is not beyond most peoples' grasp. A Wikiversian, CQ, noticed my writing and presented the network stack and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which describes self-esteem and -actualization, for a remarkable comparison on my talk page . Information is clearly the common thread throughout the Universe, was we see similarities between the "cold" Internet Protocol, and the exceedingly warm Humanist approach. And we live in the Information Age.

How wikis naturally develop new information

Wikis build information from the information brought to them, an extension of the idea of meta-data. Sometimes the knowledge built from the information brought to the wiki is surprising. In the case of this wiki, a surprising finding is the idea that the rules-based system is so significant in this model, and in a negative way. Aside from the obvious social rules and guidelines found in human society that we take for granted, I found that another type of rules-based system exists in isolated, or unempathic, minds that can be punitive and corrupt.

A self-admitted obsessive helped me understand this type of rules-based system. If you go to his house, he told me, you will find that everything is in its place, and any deviation from strict object placement in his environment is a violation of his basic rule; there will be consequences if there is any deviation. When I tried to bond with him, he flatly stated that he is not my friend and that we only work together. None-the-less he opened to me enough to share his rules-based system. He was proud of his system (which he self-admittedly built upon obsessive disorder), as he said he feels it gives him strength. It is significant in this discussion to say that he also stole; we worked together in a retail store and he stole from the sum of accidental cash overage that many stores get occasionally; there were many other missing cash incidents.

The significance is strong because the vast majority of people are not obsessed with rules, and won't let arbitrary rules impact their lives in negative ways. These findings within the wiki seemed insignificant because they are found in a manman whose importance is less significant than most. Yet the way a wiki can naturally accumulate and structure information, giving each aspect equal significance, it can show the relationships between isolated facts and how they influence the greater whole. A wiki can show a relationship between rules and exploitation giving the possibility that many of society's controlling factors may be the constructs of lesser minds--intelligent perhaps, but lacking in emotional communication abilities, and hence reliant on self-made rules as a substitute for natural or God-given morality.[11]

Components of the model

A useful working model that can be applied by anyone to help develop benefits

Initially introduces as a template for creating successful action research
It is complex, but not overly complex (Einstein)
As a model, it relies less on cited support material than the real-life application of its components with hoped for benefits
Size, bias, love, and resources: Because the model is complex not every component has yet been installed; three missing are size, bias, and what Darwin called "natural affection," or love.
- Size is important; empathy is directly proportional to the distance from the bottom to the top of a control pyramid (Micheal Moore, Roger and Me).
- Bias is equally important; obviously so looking when looking at photographs of lynchings. But in my experience the most common bias is bias against bias, where the most common example is that any American suffering from job loss who complains about it is immediately branded a racist. Bias is viral.
- Resources as a topic--obtaining or creating resources-- is central to organismic life, and complex life is supported by collaboration; it is empathic, or fits the emotional model. The taking of resources is not collaborative, it is cooperative; violent robberies by gangs is typically predatory cooperation.
- Another important topic is the "blood model" of human evolution, which is easily opposed by the "love model," of evolution that shows that empathic interrelations are based on empathic neurons, and empathic neurons have evolved to be nearly the same in different species that occupy different evolutionary branches.
It is to be used to develop learning into beneficial action in ways that have developed through natural and historical human evolution
- Empathy
- Empathy Action discussion group on Care2.com
- Recent evolutionary neurological research by de Wall
- Empathy_Model/Reference_material Other Empathy citations
Very important are the works defining Synergy by Ruth Benedict, and the experiences of Native Americans during the Colonization/Immigration of North America by Cynthia C. Wesley-Esquimaux [12]
Carl Rogers brought empathy to psychology and to the policy-making parts of society
A valuable tool for applying the empathy ideas of emotional communication] is found in computer communication: the "network layer stack." The "network layer stack" abstracts all the concepts of computer communications, and allows them to coincide on different layers simultaneously in a especially the "network layer stack" that can be applied to help abstract emotional communication concepts. But the key complexities of organismic conceptualization, especially in the evolution of communication neurons, are far beyond technology
Beyond this writing is the dark, or emotionally defective, side of humanity, or perhaps all organismic life. "Anti-empathy" is described in the writing about recently convicted murderer, Hans Reiser. Reiser is important because he is a connection into today's Information Society, and he is presently virtually on a microscope slide. He shows the contradictions of the modern Information Society. The Information Society's collaborative roots are in the e-mutualism of the free software community, which helps define emotional communication. Reiser was an important e-mutualist leader, and creator of important file-system software, yet he symbolizes the Information Society's psychological digital nature, and its failure to be part of, or genuinely benefit, normal society. (Christopher May, [13] [14]).
The model defines a fairly distinct line between evolutionary success, which is described in terms of humaneness, (though isn't necessary limited to humans), and evolutionary failure in individual, or perhaps "clumps" of individuals, who have been cheated the gift of evolution, which is empathy. Taking in all the manifestations of this failure, described as anti- or un-empathy, the ration of the "cheated" to the normal may be as much as 20%. In nature the percentages are many factors smaller, as animal social groups tend to marginalize threatening members, reducing reproduction. Experiences, for instance, in car driving, imply that the ratio may even be higher, thought that may simply be a perception caused by the over-all effects on society. Sufferers tend to think of themselves as "different," and hence marginalized and threatened, yet in being different, they are all effectively the same. It is the gift of empathy that allows normal humans to be unique, to self-actualize. Those lacking empathic neurology, lack the ability to construct their being in their own way, and hence are unable to construct within the spaces between people; they cannot work collaboratively to contribute resources; they can only exploit them.

Empathic neurons

Humans and other primates, elephants [15], and whales
- Spindle Neurons that join emotional and analytic parts of the brain to allow for conceptualization
- Mirror Neurons
  - Emotional connections between empathic organisms through these neurons
  - Across distances as a sympathy developed into a form of Empathy supported by imagination
- Whales have neurons and neural constructs that humans, primates, and elephants do not: "modular organization of certain cells into 'islands'"[16]
Other animals such as pets, including birds, with whom we have emotional connections

Because there are two neurons described in human empathy (and another described for whales), empathic manifestations might be sub-divided, but empathy, like general mental health, seems to be a single interrelation of systems allowing an person, or other higher organism, to have a focused life and constructive. In the opposite approach, that of anti-empathic disorders, the effect seems to be negative as the healthy effect is wholly positive, but the specific manifestations, or perhaps behavioral symptoms, are different.

Communication

Digital

Character-based
Rules-based
- Ingenuine, or optionally truthful based on rules
  - Beck's dishonesty with patients through the misuse of empathy in cognitive therapy [17]
  - Disingenuous implies a lack of genius when deceiving others in order to obtain resources

Cooperative
- Predatory cooperation
  - Humboldt squid, cooperative hunt using binary digital communication through controllable colored skin cells, or chromatophores. What we are learning from the Humboldt giant squid, is that empathic neurons are in no way necessary for predatory cooperation; actually neither is intelligence. All that is necessary is rudimentary binary communication. And they consume each other, not much different than human organ-harvesters[18].

Research continues about this squid, with much of it released through television. Researchers who dive also report other opposite behaviors of this squid that seems to resemble affection.

Synthetic

If the reversal of the evolutionary base is synthetic in that it has been caused by humanity's departure from the natural course of life, then the solution should be natural, which is the social marginalization of the morally defective, or those missing the neurons that are the triumph of evolution.[19]

Viral adaption of bias
- Manipulative exploitation of empathy into bias [20]
- Anti-bias leveraged as bias
Exploitative
- Competition
- Hate
Capital
Intelligent in the sense of calculating

Emotional

Directly communicated
Genuine based on emotional communication connections and natural morality
Emotional trust
Collaborative
Adaptive
Natural
"Uncomfortable" emotional communication
- Anger [21]
- Avenging wrongs
Tribally Native
- Native relationship with the environment
- Synergy: Native society's construct
Wise in the sense of broadly applicable understanding

Synergy and Constructivism

Empathy for collaboration
Collaboration as innovation
Innovation as technology
Digital technology devoid of empathy

Synergy

(Ruth Benedict, Abe Maslow)

Collaboration
Generosity
Tribal society

Community of Knowledge

Leaving the family to entering into the community as a youngster
- Joining the community group as a novice
- Developing ideas that can be added to the community of knowledge
- Becoming expert
Entering a community as a newcomer
- Learning about the community
- Comparing experiences
- Bringing and contributing knowledge
- Gaining acceptance
- Joining extended families
Knowledge Construction
- Contributing information components
- Repairing existing components
Surrounding Environment
- Extended community of knowledge
- Knowledge shared among animals
- DNA as an information layer of the greater community of knowledge
Religion
- Community relationship with then environment
- Disciplined development of the relationship into Science

Family

Nurturing and support
Leaving the family for the community

Societal Models

Chronological Nearly geological

Native

Basic human society inherited from nature through evolution
Emotional relationship is with the environment
Community of knowledge extends into environment
Collaborative development of resources
Emotional Communication health

Capital

Development of capital families
- Family property, especially human and even family members
Resource exploitation
Violent annexation
- Cooperative predation
Detached relationships
- Emotional Communication defective operators
- Digital

Compassionate

Revolutionary
Restoration of historically natural communities of knowledge
Reconstruction of the constructed knowledge

Evolutionary Modern

Extends naturally constructed knowledge
Develops technology through collaboration
- Technology
- Modern Communication

Self-defense

Self-defense

Buddhist martial arts
- "No-sword" technique, Yagyu Munenori, The Life-giving Sword [22]

Cultural defense

National defense
Defense of the historical and natural community of knowledge

Religion and Science

Tribally native

Sacrifice I feel that sacrifice comes from the difficult relationship of the forest dweller with the animals that are within his the scope of his environment actually becoming his family, and he may have to eat them. Forest children keep the orphaned animals from the hunt as pets. Early innocent villagers whose animals evolved with him and are his friends, also sometimes has to eat them. [23]
Evolved into modern communities of families and individuals
Communities of Knowledge of a few to a few hundred people

Ancient empires

Roman
- Capital (Durant)
- Colonialism
- Capital construction
Egyptian
- Early Information Society (Mumford)
- Command and control
- Monument building

Compassionate and revolutionary

Buddhism
- Respect for life including animals
Christianity
- Equality under God
- Forgiveness vs. paranoia[24] Haters are constantly aware that retribution for the pain they have caused may be around the corner, and the paranoia that this fear causes may raise their level of hate exponentially. Christ's approach of forgiveness is to diffuse the paranoia that hate causes; to forgive the actions caused by it and to reassure the paranoiac, reducing the fear the paranoia causes, reducing the chances of further painful actions.Empathy Model/Forgiveness
- Love

Scientific method, or model

Single Phenomena
Unbiased
Community contribution and review

Empathy support

Creating technology to support empathy, collaboration, and innovation
Writing to get past the digital numerical and character barriers

Therapy

Emotional communication, or empathy, problems commonly come from three sources:

Mapping (neuroplasticity)
Neural damage from cocaine and similar drugs
Genetic defect

Problems may be interrelated; heavy and persistent cocaine use may result from pressure from the community or possibly family as is found often in the ghettos (mapping), but in the case of families, there may be an inherited gene that drives cocaine use giving multiple mutually damaging causes or the problem.

People who can emotionally communicate but don't--because their empathic constructs have been shut down by pressure in the surrounding environment--can easily reattach their neural constructs, and the reconnection can be especially quick with the help of friends. The therapy of re-mapping is as simple as having friendly conversations; the neural-level relationship between the sufferer and the therapist, or just friends, is automatic. The neural mapping of the therapist's constructs that are communicated to the sufferer helps the sufferer organize his own neural pathways into empathic constructs. Workplace experiences show that even complex neural constructs can be created in two weeks.

If the empathic neurons don't exist, then there is no hope for a mapping solution. The sufferer, who is more likely than not causing suffering, will simply respond to emotional communication as a behavioral reward: a resource. There may be beneficial low-level behavioral mapping, but that is not a goal; goals are reconstruction and resolution. As the sufferer likely has average or above intelligence, he may deliberately adapt to mapping and then revert depending how he perceives his best options of obtaining resources. The sufferer will very likely attempt to implement control as it is an obvious means to get resources, and when this happens the majority of normal people attempting to coexist with the sufferer are going to have to face a limited number of options. Often, unfortunately, a common solution is none at all; people may simply want to "go with the flow," letting the sufferer punish surrounding human society to get personal benefits. There may even be a misconception that by not resisting, the sufferer will learn to be nice to others by way of example; but this impossible, as the suffer lacks emotional communication facilities and simply will not "pick up" the hints, but will see friendliness as a "green light" of success.

The response will have to be societal, agreed upon, and coordinated if empathic neurons are damaged or don't exist.

If the sufferer has generally good intentions, that is he is not a sociopath, then kind yet persistent pressure from the surrounding community that gently forces the sufferer to find a role, or niche, in which he can contribute, and hence gain stature in the community where the affection of the community becomes a behavioral reward: synergy. With time, the society gains experience, and the collaborative response becomes automated.

If the sufferer has ill intent, that is, for whatever reason seeks to inflict pain, misconceive, and use control to obtain a reliable source for resources, then a much less tolerant response is necessary, and the probable solution will be to isolate the sufferer to prevent him from doing damage. He will use any conceit he can think of to confuse the society. If the control attempt is well developed, then deceit will very likely happen on the political level; it behooves a culture to have democratic action solidly in place it if wants to resist an oligarchy of the empathically ill!

In the end, when control by the anti-empathic is mitigated, society will find that none of the normal majority population wants control, or to control; normal people simply seek exercise their empathic neurons to collaborate to develop resources and to interrelate on other more emotionally pleasing levels.

Emotional communication dysfunction (ECD)

This section attempts to define ECD in terms of existing illnesses. I am loath to do so because many if not most diagnosis are wrong, and that people "labeled" with a disorder, such as aspergers, may not have it at all, and my ideas here may be improperly used to someone's detriment. I attempt to define empathy issues in terms of emotional communication connective-ness or isolation, as the connection is a lifeline for people whose minds are so misconceived as to cause them to appear irrational; if they can connect the multiple "bandwidths" of empathy, they can use the conceptions of others to bring their own thinking, and feeling, back to normalcy.

Mental isolation
Cruelty resulting from a disassociation from social reality resembling a thinking disorder
Socially controlling

Hybrid Emotional Communication dysfunctions

Less common

Part-time emotional communication isolation

Narcissism

Excess self-love is caused by isolation from the surrounding environment, which is caused by broken empathic neurons.
Everything is in terms of self, the surrounding environment is as it would in a mirror, as the mirror neurons are missing. (The mirror cells may be misnamed.)

Bipolar

Hybrid isolation; the empathic constructs turn on an off in long or short cycles, giving the effect of two personalities: one kind, one cruel. Empathy is part-time, along with anti-empathy. The first anti-empathic disorder I observed; I questioned why a company would promote a bipolar sufferer to management level. He was able to be friendly, and then hostile, leveraging trust earned by the friendliness for the benefit of the corporation. His mental illness caused him to destroy large amounts of equipment resulting in his eventual demotion.

Aspergers

The classic anti-empathic disorder caused by such an extreme absence of empathic neurons that the sufferer is at an evolutionary level below that of empathic animals such as mammals, birds, and even possibly some invertebrates such as the octopus.
High intelligence can save the sufferer, as he is able to comprehend the meaning of his deficiency and emulate empathy, and hence responsibility. Unburdened by the ability to feel the feelings of others, he can easily implement strategies that cause pain with only retribution of victims as the potential cost Possibly through the predatory cooperation, society has been organized to prevent retribution, creating clear avenues for exploitation and abuse.
Low intelligence may doom a sufferer to being described as a sociopath, because his attempts at resource accumulation are ingenious. A true sociopathic disorder may be a multiple-disorder, or a spectrum disorder like autism, in that it combines a thinking disorder, such as psychosis, with an emotional communication dysfunction preventing the "lifeline" of an emotional attachment to others in the environment, or perhaps the environmental community of knowledge.

"There is a very fine line between the House of Lords and the Old Baily." Oh, Lucky Man

OCD

Rules

In the context of the model, this is a rules-based behavior: cooperative rules in the sense of law, and individual rules before cooperative exploitation, or after a cooperative breakdown. An OCD sufferer very often has all their belongings in specific places at home and work, and any changes to their location is a violation of their personal rules. OCD activities may resemble or accompany bipolar and aspergers activities in that OCD sufferers cannot feel or conceive of the effects of their actions; often their actions are at the expense of others.

Addiction

Drug addiction is obsessive; heroin addicts go through "cold turkey" withdrawal usually several times a week, yet return to heroin after the withdrawal symptoms have passed. There is something that drives them to addiction, and it is obsessive. It is as if there is a "hole" that needs to be filled to provide a sense of well-being; a need has to be fulfilled. The effects of the extreme drugs, which are usually anti-empathic, are preceded by a need, that is likewise anti-empathic.

Obsessive consumption

These needs may be fulfilled in other ways than drugs: extreme consumption of food, or resources ranging from gasoline to land to diamonds. They may be compounded by other odd conditions, such as the attraction to random reinforcement such as found in gambling. The control factor as part of resource exploitation raises control itself to level of a comforting activity; but only comforting for the controller; the controlled are being exploited, of course.

Capital

A paradox of earning a living is often, if not usually, a reliance on these obsessive drives in others: entrepreneurs and other bosses. The history of capital is so founded in these drives that only those with these conditions can lead the pursuit of resources making all others who follow them, those who provide them with the supporting collaboration to create resources, subject to their mapping.

ADD

This one is a surprise, but was so compelling it could not be ignored. Two associates of mine, one on Wall Street and the other an on-line magazine editor have both admitted to ADD, and both are so uniquely narcissistic that I view them as virtually the same person. Both have a hunger to succeed that is both enviable yet seemingly self-defeating. Both are pro-global. Both fit Beck's model of organizers that resist "real" information, information that would cause them to change their courses of action. Neither are what I would call bad people, but both are marginally dishonest, and unquestionably use the "rules" to their personal benefits. Specifically one has a tendency to completely infuriate and demoralize with endless minor lies, and then say "get over it," and then justify his actions with a paycheck, and the other seems to have those tendencies as well according to other people who have worked with him.

While I find it hard to define their issues as having to do this attention deficit, they are self-admitted ADD sufferers, and fit this model as anti-empathic so cleanly that their self-descriptions cannot be ignored.

Other related illnesses

Mental trauma

common (victims of ECD)

PTSD, al-Qaeda attacks on military targets

Thinking disorders

Schizophrenia
Psychosis

It is possible to think of a thinking disorder in terms of misconception; someone suffering from a thinking disorder has such a misconceived conception that they are unable to function normally. Usually this is caused by something like hallucinations. But if you can think of thinking disorder purely in terms of misconceptions that may be caused by any disease, then a lack of understanding of how others feel about ones actions, especially if they are hurtful (as many capital actions are) and show an inability to conceive of the long-term effects of those actions, then they can be thought of as thinking disorders.

Thinking disorders can then be thought of as misconceived thoughts resulting from an inability to understand the effects that one is having, even if the sufferer does not show typical thinking order symptoms that are seen in psychotics and schizophrenics. What is missing then is an ability to feel one's effects on others (which is one of the two descriptions of disease in the model), and an inability to see their long-term effects (which is the other of the two descriptions).

Bipolar disorder can resemble psychosis (and they respond to similar medications such as Abilify), whereas asperger's sufferers usually appear to be in control of their actions (unless they suffer from another disorder or want you to think they do). Their part-time disconnection then appears to be more damaging to the their sense of control than the full-time disconnection does for aspergers sufferers. From this perspective of the model, this may result from the bipolar sufferer's inability to control the cycles between emotional connection and isolation.

Depression

Glandular
Environmental
Trauma

Social disruption and empathic layers

People interrelate into their community by constructing knowledge. That knowledge is connective and largely shared, and it makes life meaningful. Social disruption causes hardship; without the social context there loneliness and desperation.

Community destruction

Communities that have been disrupted often remain physically, even though the people of the community have been displaced, or eradicated. With the elimination of local peoples is the erasure of the community of knowledge. The natural context is replaced with a governance structure, where what remains of the original culture lives desperately under repression.

Digital facade

An information facade of synthetic emotional and societal constructs usually replaces the natural community of knowledge in the modern real estate development model. Often fictional representations of locally destroyed communities are represented to entertain those who have replaced them.

Social fracturing and the loss of health

As the quality of life decays, especially at the end of life, modern synthesis, especially medicine, is used to rationalize the social fracturing, by prolonging life through chemistry as in the case of medicine. As natural nurturing disappears so does the fundamental meaning of life, and with it the quality of life.

Exploitation and destruction of culture

Every emotional component of the original and natural community of knowledge disappears, except those that can easily be exploited. Historical structures are destroyed, though examples of culture may be preserved in museums.

The severing of the social connection with nature by resource "annexers"

With the disconnection from the environment, local humans loose their natural connection to their historical and evolutionary pasts. The very first step in the annexation of resources by invading outsiders is always the destruction of this connection.

Psychological layer

The psychological layer of this erasure model challenges the empathy model because emotionally connecting constructs are missing: nurturing, emotional communication, the construction of knowledge and the emotional aspects of communities of knowledge. Uncomfortable components are introduced: anger and vengeance. Some strong people turn inwards meditatively. The anti-empathic adapt virally and act through predatory cooperation. Those who have been displaced, or worse, may rebel violently; they are labeled violent and punished, or worse, by the most violent, the capital annexers. Meanings are reversed; the formerly invading outsiders become the genteel insiders, the former insiders become marginalized, and are forced to emulate the former outsiders.

Neural layer

Neural damage from the continual stress of societal erasure cannot be good; there cannot be any benefit from it despite the adage "what does not kill us makes us stronger." An alternate saying was created for the animated series, Eon Flux: "what does not kill us makes us stranger." While the results of trauma rarely lead to anti-empathy, though society's doctors have recently started to pretend it does after an eternity of ignoring the psychological effects of trauma, the initial information and other data of the natural community of knowledge will very likely be lost for all time, even if artifacts are preserved.

Cocaine and meth

Anti-empathic drugs: cocaine, meth, similar stimulants

To relive the pain of trauma drugs are used, and as it happens cocaine instantly relives the pain of the panic disorder suffered by those victimized with trauma, yet cocaine also destroys empathic neuron functionality, adding in recent years to the ironic aspects of the lives of the displaced whose communities of knowledge have been erased.

Political layer

In the case of criminals, the money they receive gives them unlimited access to the drugs that enable their crime by destroying their empathic neurons. The destructive effect becomes recursive; they can through drug use and toxic mapping extend the destruction into the environment around them, with the support of others doing the same activity. With the destruction of their empathy, they achieve what they perceive as a freedom from empathy through the destruction of their emotional communication facilities to allow them to continue, or increase, their heinous activity. On the political layer, this of freedom is type of freedom that allows for the hurting of others, presumably to obtain resources (IF Stone, and others).

Empathy Acronyms

E Empathy

Emotional relationships between higher organisms using advance neurons, including communication between higher species

EC Emotional Communication

As differentiated from digital, or optionally genuine, communication

ECD Emotional Communication dysfunction (defect, or defective)

Failure in higher animal communication neurons or neural constructs preventing emotional communication

hECD Hybrid Emotional Communication dysfunction

Part-time dysfunction that shuts down emotional communication neurons cyclically for days, hours, or minutes

ECDPP Emotional Communication dysfunction per population

Every organism lives for resources

This is a big "to do" that I neglected on the recent pass; every organism lives for resources. What corporations mean by "human resources" is not, as I originally thought, the development of the resources of its employees, but the exploitation of humans specifically as resource, and not an asset.

Emotionally communicating people collaborate to create resources initially by farming, and then through ingenious development that eventually becomes technology.

Digitally communicating people can only work to exploit resources as they lack the neural ability to contribute in a collaborative way. Cooperation is the digital analogy to collaboration; using rules, they can combine efforts to resources cooperatively. If cooperation ceases to be the path of least resistance of exploitation, the group effort ceases, and the effort becomes "every man for himself." As destructive as predatory cooperation can be, it can easily be disabled into a "free for all."

Interestingly the word development is most widely used in conjunction with private or retail property: real estate development. But real estate development is pure exploitation, both of humanity (illegal immigration) the environment (habitat destruction), and the economy (unsustainable consumption through debt without balancing production). The use of the word development, which is a collaborative process, to mean exploitation demonstrates the viral nature of the digitally communication.

Conceptual vs serial (or sequential)

How empathic neural constructs are the basis for matrices of interrelated thoughts, which create affection and then extend to create morality. They also allow for conceptualization which helps us understand the effects of our actions, and hence gives us the ability to be responsible for our them, and also to perceive the effects of present-day conditions far into the future.

Serial thought attempts to mimic conceptional constructs by creating complex calculations such as are found in physics examples. The complexity of life is far beyond physics examples; invariably decisions based on serial calculations lead to failure, and in the case of policy making decisions, usually lead to vast disaster measured in cyclic failure.

Society today is serial. One drives down American highways seeing seemingly repeated patterns of the same signs. Underneath the signs are identical copies of stores found under previously seen signs. The people within the stores are allowed minimal, if any, personal identity or expression, and the people visiting these stores expect a homogenized humanity. Most people participating in this serialized culture, which can only be called a system, have adapted to it, and some thrive. Since the human existence is so abbreviated, then the people who feel comfortable and derive benefits from this system must themselves be limited: they suffer anti-empathic disorders.

It is not surprising that this culture, or system, has created an atmosphere that promotes serial killing.

Causes of Emotional Communication Dysfunction, or ECD

Three common causes:

Genetic neurological dysfunction
Mapping
Cocaine or methedrine use

Missing or damaged DNA code

This is a probable cause, if the defects are permanent. Dormant neurons can be reactivated with nurturing. A genetic explanation is a historical, and probably catalyzing, cause of lost empathy resulting in social disruptions, whose global summation is resulting in a present-day meltdown.

Mapping

It may be that a manipulative person can use mapping, or neuroplasticity, to reduce another person's feelings and thoughts by altering the neural pathways that define empathic constructs. If so, there is no reason that a group of manipulative people cannot disable empathy in groups through such mapping; this may be a key to cult-type control. Psychic mapping, thus described, can be thought of as a low-level or behavioral component of didactic teaching. Behaviorism is a low layer in the psychic strata; there are no moral, organizational, responsibility components, or even teaching components associated with it, except with respect to social rules, which can be either societal or criminal.

Cocaine and meth

Cocaine causes narcissism, what I term an key unempathic disorder (Saddam Hussien was said to be malignantly narcissist). This tells me that cocaine is a major cause of un-empapthy, and it is everywhere, most recently Africa. The other, and more catalyzing cause I believe to be a genetic defect that eliminates it 100%. Unempathic people may have intelligence, but their lack of feeling--usually below that of a normal pet or wild animal--causes them their thinking to suffer. This is why un-empathy is a thinking disorder, as opposed to emotional or traumatic disorder.

Included also is methedrine, a more extreme stimulant than cocaine, and possibly much more damaging to empathic neurons. Not included is heroin, which is far less damaging to neurons, and marijuana is especially not included, as it appears to increase sensitivity to others, though that would seem impossible as only DNA and healing improve neurons.

Mapping vs. nurturing

According to research, nurturing is so connected to empathy development that it may actually cause neurons to form; I find this difficult because nurturing does not cause limbs to grow, DNA does. From this I feel it safe to assume that poor or missing nurturing in a childhood may result in unused but still possibly accessible empathic neurons, accessible through therapy.

Mapping is another important environmental effect, and I believe that it usually works against empathy development, that mapping in children has the opposite effect. Mapping in normal society can be extremely detrimental, where a mean person who cannot receive emotional communication, communicates along emotional channels to disrupt an intended victim's normal emotional well-being. So much so that those using mapping as a disruptive strategy look for emotional well-being, and hence healthy emotional communication channels to affect an attack. And it always goes back to resources, including the protection of annexed resources as in the example of mapping Goleman gives in Social Intelligence: the nasty security guard.

Nurturing is the cure for effective mapping; consolance by a family member undoes the damage of societies appointed controllers.

Mapping vs. ECD

I think this may be the last component of the model within its present scope. When is apparent ECD, or anti-empathy, the result of mapping? Goleman in Social Intelligence shows how an experience with a hateful person who is "acting out," results in exceeding frustration. (He gives the example of the mean security guard, who in all likely-hood rationalizes, successfully, his ill will as "doing his job.") The response to such an experience is usually a bad feeling followed by an attempt to restore the "true and healthy" mapping. This is probably best done by relaxing, possibly by stopping at the local bar for a "quick nip." The more "liberated" might use a small "puff" of marijuana to achieve the same effect, but without the toxicity, addictiveness, or loss of coordination caused by alcohol.

However the bad mapping inflicted by the wrong-doer may persist, especially if the hateful mapping is continually administered. This can be shown easily by looking at the mistreatment of animals, and mistreated animals become exceedingly defensive, or "fearful."

This type of mapping is clearly a part of the control strategies of malicious social structures, such as slavery, where pain and fear are used to exploit resources, such as "free" labor.

The question becomes "does hateful mapping, especially if it cannot be resisted, cause the person, or organism, being mapped to become hateful himself?" In other words "does the infliction of hateful mapping cause a permanent or semi-permanent change to the empathic constructs or the empathic neurons?" This may or may not happen, or it may happen only rarely. It may be that the majority of the victims of hateful mapping may easily recover through therapy, but a few, perhaps the young, may be permanent victims. Another question to ask is whether some of the victims, say in a group, may have had an EC disorder beforehand, and the mapping only reinforced ECD behaviors.

When looking at issues like this, one most look to see of others have drawn conclusions, conclusions of the type that may not be normally documented, such as "street use" of mapping, which results in epidemic misinformation, and hence a potential collapse of the Information Society in poor cultures. Is there a presumption that hateful mapping may be a cause of hate by people who utilize such mapping, such as Goleman's security guard, and may this presumption be total misinformation that may ultimately result in a rebellion against the hate. This guard may need to know this if this is so, as he may experience "payback" if his victim, say Goleman++, decides in his state of extreme frustration, to take the "law into his own hands."

(++Just kidding Goleman is a dove.)

The key word here is "rebellion," which, on the societal level is revolution and on the psychological level is a reaction to extreme frustration, many result in dangerously expedient actions. Certainly rebellion is necessary to end the extreme hate of, say, pogrom or slavery, and possibly even the milder variety of human control that is common to most societies. The real question for humanity is how to channel change so that the same types of hateful "assholes" don't wind up in power again. Using Russia as an example, the Czars' system was incredibly unjust easily seen in its method of disease control was human extermination. But what replaced it through exceedingly violent means resulted in forms of collectivism that killed tens of millions with starvation, and eventually Stalin-ism, which ultimately caused the solution to become as hateful, or more hateful, than the initial problem, which was ECD within the royal system.

Empathy vs emotional communication

Empathy initially attracts anti-empathy

As I began to construct this model, experiences that contributed to the ideas of the model directly contradicted the premises of empathy, especially as it defines compassion. The most surprising learning was that the action group (on Care2.com) actually initially attracted people who have been deprived of empathy by fate, as they have diseases that can be described as caused by missing empathic neurology. More surprising was the confidence with which many of these "sufferers" installed themselves as group leaders, even so much as to offer therapeutic services online as group moderators. In private email conversation, the first to step forward admitted to recently having a intimate relationship in which he admittedly destroyed the self-esteem of his partner, and the second, in phone conversation, became verbally abusive. The empathy action research group was a apparently a magnet for people incapable of empathy! The first confirmed he had aspergers syndrome (which is the obvious anti-empathic disorder as the disease defines missing empathic constructs), and the second confirmed she is bipolar (the first anti-empathic disorder I investigated in the person of an abusive manager in the often lethal concrete business).

As I organized the group, and did what I call the simple math--that is, assume that the cruelty problem of the World stems from lacking empathy, and hence defective empathic neurons of aspergers--the first person I mentioned above became very hostile, and asked me if "I knew anyone with aspergers," implying that I am biased against aspergers sufferers. He left the group as he admitted his condition, and then I received anonymous threats that I assumed came from him. While I believe that bipolar disorder has initiated most of the external stresses in my life, aspergers is the classic anti-empathic disorder, and is the focus to the autism "spectrum" disorder. As I was forming these ideas, the "Virginia Tech" killings took place where a very sick man launched a military attack on his fellow students. What was interesting is that the man's relatives stated that he had no affection for his mother as a child, saying he was autistic. What they meant was that he was devoid of empathy; he had no way to emotionally communicate natural (and ancient) mother/child love. He was also psychotic, but the important issue to me was that he had a disease that prevented him from having feelings for the effects he has on others, and hence allowed him to do the killings. This for me created a single secnario for all the misdeeds of humanity, and I brought the issue to an Internet forum on autism, as I was still a little misinformed as to labels. (Parents of the autistic on that forum straightened me out, while others on the forum attempted increase the misinformation especially with respect to this mass-killing incident.) Technically, I suppose, the killer would be said to have aspergers, but with new knowledge brought, or forced, by the discoveries of specifically empathic neurons in higher species, I think that this label is obsolete, especially when discussed as one of the "spectrum" disorders. The killer simply lacked empathy, as do most people guilty of heinous acts: an inability to feel the emotions of the the people they affect.

Psychology is deprecated, again

Psychology implies with the phrase "emotional problems" that malignant emotions cause people to do bad things, or as psychologists may say "act out with bad behaviors." The empathy model deprecates this idea by saying that "acting out" is either the result of an inability to feel the effects of ones actions on others because of a lack of emotional communication constructs, and is hence a emotional communication disorder, or is a reaction to some pain caused by someone who lacks the empathic ability. Going further, people who do bad things, in either overt or devious ways to hurt others, are victimizers, and are in fact the cause of many, if not most, of the problems that otherwise normal people would not have, such as the trauma of terror. So long as people with empathic dysfunction are "high functioning," it does not matter to psychologists what their effects on others are, so long as they don't get arrested. But then many within legal enforcement and judicial systems are likewise "cold," and find it easy to bring pain and suffering to others presumably because they themselves do not have the emotional communication constructs to feel the pain of others. Within the empathy model, there is question about all the labels in society of responsibility, control, and guilt. It has been only in the past two decades that psychology recognized trauma as a psychological disorder, and since 1994 that it recognized trauma in children, a fact that common people find amazing.

Society, laws, and "need to know" cognition

The law itself is in doubt in the empathy model, and the legal system's roots in human society can no longer be taken for granted and need investigation; the idea of didactically structured information, where children and citizens are educated on a "need to know basis," likewise comes into question, along with the ideas of cognitive and behavioral therapies--at least for people who may be having difficulties, but can emotionally communicate, at least when they are not traumatized. The best document on "need to know" information dissemination is Walden II by BF Skinner, the father of modern behaviorism, and enemy of humanists. Skinner describes a society based purely on didactically controlled cognition; he was encouraged to write Walden II by a heir of the Heinz factory system, which if you know industrial history, was not much different from Walden II: a paternally controlled environment where adults are effectively well-behaved children who function as parts of the Heinz food production machine.

Proving empathy is natural (and not synthetic)

With my empathy university cap-stone project Spiritual Darwinism, my professor gave me credit for proving to him that empathy is a natural construct that is given to every higher being, some more so than others, and not an intellectual construct that is formed by teaching and learning. By defining empathy as natural compassion built upon the moral bridges between us that are only possible because of emotional communication we cement the ideas that should help us function as a society. But a problem remains: what of the emotion of anger? What of the transport of feelings such as frustration and pain that are presumably caused by those who lack the ability to feel the pain they cause others? If person A hurts person B, and person B expresses the negativity of the pain in terms of itself, is person B being anti-empathic? The anti-empathic person A would definitely say so, and would no doubt call the police, and very possibly the good, hurt, and emotionally communicative person B would be arrested.

Empathy continually redefined to rationalize society's cruelty

Society, when confronted directly with its cruelty, will define empathy in ways that punish emotional communication. Self-preservation through personal self-defense is often punished even though self-defense is legal is in every country; on the international scale, economic self-defense is called "protectionism;" nations who attempt to protect themselves economically from what is today's globalism are termed racist, and are invariably accused of the types of strategies that lead to world war: pure and obvious lie by global capitalists who act as the most viscous mafiosi.

Self-defense is in our society anti-empathic, but it invariably uses emotional communication, and hence, despite all our best efforts, empathy and emotional communication are at the end of the day not just different, but sometimes at odds. Forced empathy, such as in religion, may in fact be the vehicle of evil, and this misconception of empathy may be the cause of the world's problem, an epidemic spread of emotional communication dysfunction. An example of forced-empathy is a societal requirement that empathy be applied to aspergers sufferers, which effectively defies the emotional communication approach to empathy as communication is necessarily bi-directional, and aspergers sufferers cannot possibly receive emotional information.

Examples are used by apsergers advocates describing abuse by emotionally defective people against aspergers sufferers because they are different. This model would more likely support aspergers sufferers who are bullies attacking a child who seems different, perhaps because he has a communication defect. They are able to attack because they have no way to receive and feel the emotional information of their victim's suffering. The misconception created is that emotionally normal people attack mentally different people, and that they, the normal people, have to be controlled, often violently through enforcement. This rationalization is often heard, but is difficult to find documented.

Perhaps it is better to simply erase all this information, along with its labels, that was accumulated prior to the discoveries of the empathic neurons as having been deliberately misconceived for some selfish reasons of dominating psychologists. We can now assume that the majority of dysfunctional, and especially malicious, activity results from a definable set of underlying dysfunctions that in turn are directly affected by specific healthy, broken, or missing neural constructs. In a week perhaps, those components can be defined through the observation of patients who dysfunctional activity can easily to these missing components. If kindness and interrelation can be found in a patient there is a path for healing, both mentally and physically; what we think of as eudiamonia, or healing by learning. Of course the same emotional path has to exist in the healers who deal directly with the patients. In my experience working with mental patients, that kind of direct care is rare--most of my issues were with co-workers who, in my experience, could be exceedingly sadistic. Even worse, some staff behaviorally reinforced sadism in the patients.

Model may be misnamed

This model is possibly misnamed; it should possibly be called Emotional Communication Model, or perhaps not. Perhaps empathy ideas need to be consolidated, and empathy itself needs to be further defined--along with psychology.

News

Counseling

Finally, someone agrees

Other recent articles

Inception

Nature's solution vs. the social solution

Supporting documents

The Model

A stack of neural, personal, and societal layers: and adaptation of the IP network stack

How wikis naturally develop new information

Components of the model

Empathic neurons

Communication

Digital

Emotional

Synergy and Constructivism

Synergy

Community of Knowledge

Family

Societal Models

Self-defense

Religion and Science

Empathy support

Therapy

Emotional communication dysfunction (ECD)

Hybrid Emotional Communication dysfunctions

Narcissism

Bipolar

Aspergers

OCD

Rules

Addiction

Obsessive consumption

Capital

ADD

Other related illnesses

Mental trauma

Thinking disorders

Depression

Social disruption and empathic layers

Community destruction

Digital facade

Social fracturing and the loss of health

Exploitation and destruction of culture

The severing of the social connection with nature by resource "annexers"

Psychological layer

Neural layer

Cocaine and meth

Political layer

Empathy Acronyms

Every organism lives for resources

Conceptual vs serial (or sequential)

Causes of Emotional Communication Dysfunction, or ECD

Missing or damaged DNA code

Mapping

Cocaine and meth

Mapping vs. nurturing

Mapping vs. ECD

Empathy vs emotional communication

Empathy initially attracts anti-empathy

Psychology is deprecated, again

Society, laws, and "need to know" cognition

Proving empathy is natural (and not synthetic)

Empathy continually redefined to rationalize society's cruelty

Model may be misnamed