Alexei comments on Not By Empathy Alone - Less Wrong

19 Post author: gwern 05 October 2011 12:36AM

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Comment author: Alexei 05 October 2011 06:39:15PM 2 points [-]

Lacking self-empathy sound a bit like Alexithymia

Comment author: false_vacuum 05 October 2011 07:37:08PM *  2 points [-]

Interesting. But one could have the awareness, understanding, and ability to describe, but also an attitude of not caring, with regard to one's own emotions. Or at least some of them, sometimes.

On the other hand, I'm not sure the word 'emotions' means the same thing to everyone. I'm not even sure that what I take it to mean hasn't changed substantially.

ETA: Here I seem to be defining 'empathy' in yet another way. It's odd how my intuition about what a word means can vary situationally. It seems to me right now that I would want to claim I usually think 'empathising with X' is '(accurately) modelling the internal state of X'. But perhaps in contexts where the distinction is irrelevant I may also have been identifying the conjunct of '(accurately) modelling the internal state of X' and 'caring about the result' as 'empathising with X'. And then here I took 'empathy' to be just the 'caring about the result' part.