EMPATHY IS NOT BIOLOGICALLY POSSIBLE: VOLUME 2

I have come up with a completely different way of understanding the human personality via individual human perspective. My ideas are derived from a biological standpoint as opposed to a psychological, philosophical, or spiritual standpoint.

Humans are born with a sensory motor system that feeds into their nervous system for one purpose and one purpose only: to allow humans to make predictions moment to moment for what to do next. Interpreting sensory information that flows into us in order to make predictions for what to do next is the only active role we humans play in our biological existences.

We do nothing to take in information through our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or skin. All our biological system needs from us is a prediction to look right and left while crossing the street. If we make that prediction, our body does all the rest of the work for us. If our eyes register a car in our visual field, we make the prediction to stop, and our muscles stand down. Reproduction, digestion, elimination, circulation, and respiration, are all activities that happen automatically.  The evolutionary driver of human biology is the need to make good predictions, not the need to reproduce.  We do nothing to cause a woman's body to nurture a fetus in her womb. The only necessary ingredient a woman needs for reproduction to occur is to make a prediction about wanting intimacy or a baby. Successful and efficient predicting, not reproduction is the evolutionary driver of the human race in my estimation. 

The single activity we are required to do to make our biologies hum along is to make predictions. At first this notion seems simplistic. It is not. If you sit and think about what you do all day everyday, you will find  you simply interpret the information that flows into you to make predictions for what to do next. Your body takes care of literally everything else.

Cut to the entire field of psychology and/or psychiatry. These two fields have trouble defining themselves and each other, which makes sense because all  research and conclusions stemming from both fields are every bit as predicated upon faith based philosophies as religions are. Because all research and conclusions stemming from psychology and psychiatry originate from foundational concepts predicated on faith based philosophical definitions, the diagnostic information they espouse is not valid.  For example, these two fields have no mutually agreed upon working definition of the human personality. Every conclusion they promote makes claims about the human personality without them ever having defined what it is. 

Psychiatry and psychology promote arbitrary ideas about human personality and behavior that have nothing to do with human biology and everything to do with the promotion of agendas from the personal perspectives of the people in these fields.

The psychologically driven term "empathy" is defined as the ability to take the perspective of another human being. The notion of one human being having the ability  to take the perspective of another in order to "empathize" with that person is the same as saying one human can see with the eyes on another person's head or feel with her skin or hear with her ears. We cannot think with another person's brain any more than we can feel with their skin or feel their emotions the way they do inside their body.The notion of empathy makes absolutely no biological sense, particularly the way the term is bandied about from any psychologist given the authority to define who has it and who doesn't. It is one of many arbitrary, relativistic psychological terms used to wield power and intellectual might over all modern humans.

Giving a psychologist or psychiatrist the authority to diagnose a condition they made up is exactly the same as giving a priest the authority to determine who is sinning and how they need to stop. The concept of empathy is as arbitrary and relative as the concept of sin.

We all know too painfully the consequences of granting special authority to individuals who have "earned the credentials" to possess a higher degree of intelligence about human nature.  We totally believed priests who had received the call from God to study at the seminary would emerge from the seminary with elevated levels of goodness, holiness, and authority for shaping people's "souls" to become more like "God." We believed priests to have divinely inspired abilities to rise above their human natures, and we granted them unchecked authority over our catholic schools and churches.

We have learned many lessons about granting "special authority" to human beings who have convinced us they have special super human credentials. But we have not yet learned enough. Psychologists and psychiatrists have free reign to diagnose whose existence is disordered and whose is normal. We believe they can transcend their own perspectives high enough to be able to know the perspectives of others.

This is a biological impossibility. We can never take the perspective of another human being or intuit how another human should think and behave according to how we think and behave from our perspective whether we are a priest, a parent, a doctor, a psychiatrist, a teacher, a receptionist, or a laborer.   

Each individual human is wired to make predictions that make sense for his individual survival. Each individual makes predictions that make sense to her intellect because her intellect is perfectly calibrated to work with and for her unique predictive mechanisms and abilities within her sensory motor and nervous system.

No matter what kind of intellect you are born with on the IQ chart, your intellect matches your predictive mechanisms. They are a team. They MUST work together in ways that make sense for you. When people with special authority get to decide whose systems are OK and whose are not, we strip the individuals deemed not OK of all human dignity and we put them in a sub class of people. All modern humans live with the potential of being put in this sub class if born with atypical or out of the ordinary sensory motor and nervous systems.

Empathy is one of many relative terms promoted by psychology and psychiatry  that cannot exist biologically. Sympathy can exist. If a woman has a sad experience similar to one I have experienced, I can make my best guess about how she might be feeling to try and be sympathetic towards her when I interact with her. If my son has no cognitive framework to intellectually understand that same woman's sad experience, he cannot make any guess at all about how she is feeling. He cannot take her perspective into consideration because he has no cognitive constructs in his head to do so. His lack of sympathy towards her reflects his cognitive limitations about what she is experiencing. We can only sympathize with people for whom we share cognitive constructs. We can never empathize because we can never completely think or feel from another persons brain or body.

Shockingly, "lack of empathy" is one of the main symptoms used by "special authorities" to diagnose most personality disorders, including autism spectrum disorder and Asperger syndrome.  We are diagnosing people with personality disorders for not being able to do something nobody can do, which is to take the perspective of another human being. 

Individuals diagnosed with autism disorder are being told the biological system they were born with is disordered. The only thing a human does actively is make predictions. When you are told your personality is disordered, you are literally being told your  predictions are disordered. This means the manifestation of who you are is negated and your inalienable right to exist as yourself the way you were biologically designed to is literally taken from you.  A person with "autism" is born the same as the rest of us. He is born with an intellect that matches and is suppose to work in tandem with his sensory motor and nervous system in order to maximize the efficiency and success of predictions he makes in ways that can make sense for his intellect. 

The person with "autism" is not only told he is disordered, he is also told he is really poor at thinking from the perspective of other people. It has never occurred to the psychologists that they are the ones very poor at thinking from the perspective of the person with autism. The psychologist truly believes the way he interprets the world through his personal perspective is the way all people should interpret the world. This is why people with autism are forced to make predictions in ways that will make sense to the perspectives of the special authorities. 

People with autism have wild chaotic behavior a lot because their sensory motor and nervous systems are constantly under siege by others telling them how they SHOULD think and how they SHOULD behave. They are not allowed to engage in the world the way they were designed to because they make people with very different sensory motor and nervous systems feel uncomfortable. We are uncomfortable when we cannot predict easily. If we cannot predict how somebody else is thinking and behaving, and we are in a position of authority, we try to modify that person's thinking and behavior to align with how we predict so we can feel comfortable.
 
Being human should feel comfortable for everyone regardless of their unique intellect and sensory motor and nervous system.  We should all be really good at being human. We are born to interpret information in our environments and predict the heck out of that information in ways that make sense for our individually integrated biological systems. We are biologically designed to make sense to ourselves from our personal perspective. We are not designed to make sense from the perspectives of other people.

We are not good at interpreting information and making predictions in ways that can make sense from the personal perspectives of other people and/or special authorities.  Some of us literally cannot intellectually do this at all. For those who cannot, their choice is to exist from a place that looks to others like insanity.  Insanity is not an illness, it is an adaptation. For those who cannot intellectually manage having their predictions being held accountable to the perspectives of others, insanity is the only choice other than death.

We are currently required to make sense to the perspectives of special authorities, be they parents, teachers, therapists, doctors, or spiritual leaders. Many of us have the intellectual might and flexibility to predict in ways that can make sense to the special authorities, even though it is uncomfortable and unpleasant to do so. The downside to this is since we've been required to make sense from the perspective of others, we learn to require others to make sense from our perspective. Perspective confusion creates a vicious cycle that destroys long lasting intimacy and chips away at family and societal success.

Psychologists are not alone in believing their personal perspective is the "correct" perspective. Humans are currently very confused about how 100 percent personal their perspectives are about everything they are able to think about. We cannot think from any other brain than our own. Each thought I have per second causes billions upon billions of interactions to cascade from my sensory motor to my nervous system and back. Nobody can ever come anywhere close to replicating the billions of interactions per second that occur inside of me in exactly the same way as I do. The notion we are all one sounds good on paper, but in reality the idea we are all one wreaks havoc on our ability to sustain lasting intimate relationships of any kind.  When we think we are all one, we expect other people to know how we think and feel. But nobody can every know how we think and feel, no matter how hard they want to or try to. When we think we are all one, we actually process other people as if they are existing from our own personal perspective and visa versa. Our personalities get turned inside out, which make us unbearably vulnerable and exposed.

We are designed to interpret our environment from our personal perspective. We were not designed to use a world view or a religious view or other people's perspectives  to guide our predictions. We were designed to rely upon our own sensory motor and nervous systems to be our guides.  Our GPS, our manual, our map, is provided for us hook, line, and sinker via  the efforts of our sensory motor system as it works in tandem with our nervous system. We are a complete biological package, engineered to run on a dime if allowed to do so.

All human problems can be traced to impairing an individual human's ability to freely run his predictive mechanisms, as it is our sole role as human organisms. Impairing a human's ability to predict is at the epicenter of all rage, violence, depression, anxiety, addiction, and insanity, not out of whack psychological states. We impair predictive mechanisms when we constantly expect other people to make decisions that make sense from our perspective by processing their decisions from our predictive mechanisms and reacting to their decisions as if they originated from us.

Currently, we attribute human anxiety, rage, and depression to a variety of psychological weaknesses.  Look under the hood of our human biology. You will find zero psychological mechanisms in our biology. We do not have a "psychology of mind." We do not possess "psychological states." A psychological state is another example of a faith based foundational concept promoted by psychologists that has no verifiable definition. Everything pertaining to psychology is not just wrong, it is beyond being able to be proven wrong. None of its tenets can be falsified, so they cannot be proven wrong or right, the first and foremost requirement of a scientific tenet. Psychology has wiggled its foundational constructs into a place of unquestioned protective custody.

There is no psyche or subconscious floating around our skulls and bodies playing hide and seek with our brain and making our appetites run wild and out of control. The concept of a "subconscious" is a total unverifiable fallacy. The subconscious was fabricated to replace the idea of humans as sinners with a notion more palatable to secularists. And psychologists put themselves in the role of parent figures to replace the priests so they could take over "helping" the flock of innocents get control of their out of control human natures.  As long as humans believe they have a subconscious making them do things they don't want to do, secretly making their appetites run wild, and overall running the show, then humans will feel the need to depend on the "parent therapist" to help get themselves under control.

We humans have been sold many a bill of goods, but none so damaging as the idea we are strapped with a subconscious we have no control over turning us into perpetual children in need of parental guidance from therapists.

We have a biologically integrated system designed to make predictions perfectly suited for us as an individual human. When the way we interpret information to make predictions is invalidated, criticized, or shamed, in any way, we have terrible biological reactions that have zero to do with a psyche or a subconscious. We are wired to protect and defend our predictions at all costs. Since prediction is the only active role we play in our existences, attacks to our predictions make our bodies feel under siege. Attacking predictions is the single stressor for human beings.

None of us are immune to having our predictions attacked whether we are yogis, priests, therapists, or ad agency executives. Most humans make valiant efforts to manage the siege to our prediction systems so we don't go into chaos every time it happens. We manage by withdrawing, numbing, taking control away from others by bullying to promote our perspective, or subscribing to a religious, spiritual, or fundamentalist world view that takes away our vulnerability from the predictions we make. We should not have to "manage" our anxiety, rage, or despair all the time. Being human should feel easy and practically effortless on account of us being specifically designed to do really good jobs at being human. Dogs are good at being dogs, fish are awesome at being fish, and cats rock at acting very cat-like. Humans should be just as good at being human as all the other animals are in the animal kingdom. We humans make things so hard for ourselves because we do not understand the  life and death significance individual perspective plays in the life of each individual human.

Every single thing we do as humans has to do with making predictions or protecting our ability to make predictions, whether that means taking an offensive and/or a defensive tact. Everything about human behavior can be analyzed through this lens. Through this lens, everything about humans makes sense and decoding human behavior becomes easy. It turns out, humans are not complicated at all. We are sophisticated, but not complicated.

It is my hope to continue writing about the biology of human perspective. My goal is to problem solve for how to safeguard human perspective at the individual level so we can optimize our individual and collective success in this human race and so we can minimize anxiety, rage, addiction, depression, violence, and insanity. We currently view these human travails with a resigned acceptance; our only hope the magic medications the pharmaceutical companies are all too hungry to sell us. Our biologies are not wrong. They are perfectly designed to work for us if we let them do their work uninhibited and unchained.