I didn’t want to but you made me quote Humanize because he put it way better than I could.
I understand what you are saying and I agree this process is relevant for some people. It may even be relevant for most people or at least most curious philosophically-inclined people. But there is a problem with it too.
The fact that other people have told us things are true when in fact those things are not true, does not justify us to then assume that everything everyone has ever told us is true is actually not true. That doesn’t follow. Likewise, the fact that some people sometimes have hallucinations does not mean that we should assume everything we experience is a hallucination. That conclusion simply does not follow from the premise.
I get what you are saying, though. Beginner epistemology needs to start somewhere. The problem is, once people start rejecting things BY DEFAULT they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater on a whole host of issues and claims. There is also a psychologist cost to this, and a risk of developing an arrogance with respect to claims and to one’s own experiences and even to one’s own epistemological potency regarding one’s own life. That risk is that a person gets used to the easy effortless way that doubt for its own sake allows them to dismiss claims made by others as if they were the arbiter of truth on the issue, when in fact they actually put in zero effort to examine the topic and simply dismissed it out of hand. Like with people who laugh when others say they believe in ghosts, aliens, etc. You might be one of those people who laugh, if you are then you are operating from a default position of doubt for its own sake which has become more than simply an intellectual basic beginner epistemological methodology to aid your philosophizing and learning about the world, it has actually become psychological for you at the level of your personality. That is a problem.
The other problem is that we end up trying to retroactively justify the claims we make, even claims we made that were not justified before hand. This applies to radical belief and to radical doubt. For example, if someone believes in free will, but they never really thought about it they just know that the idea of free will seems important and is meaningful to them and they feel emotionally attached to defending it, then when they claim “free will exists” and someone challenges them they are going to start making excuses for why free will exists. But are they really honestly trying to figure out if free will exists or not? No, they are trying to defend a position they’ve already taken. And that is putting the cart before the horse, because how can they know if free will exists before they even tried to figure out whether free will exists or not? The same is true for people who claim free will does not exist, and who are personally or emotionally or otherwise psychologically motivated to defend that position.
I’d rather we aimed for objectivity. Set aside any prior assumptions. I understand that is idealistic, but it is a good goal to aim for. In any case, I reject default doubt for the same reason I reject default belief. Your example could also go something like this, “Then I realized one day that what someone told me about something being true, actually WAS true! Therefore I decided to default believe in the things people tell me”. That would be as logically valid as your claim to start disbelieving things people tell you just because some of the things some people told you once were untrue.
You are saying that your form of empathy is coldly projecting yourself to others shoes. That is ONE form of the empathy of the EIGHT forms that was shown.
of course we can’t empirically prove that other attempts at empathy are an exact, 1:1 match to the other persons inner lives, but we (or at least I and others) can infer it through various ways. As the Demon said, you unfortunately lack this ability, as you are a sheldon/dawkins type of being.
In summary, since we share a genetic ancestry with other human beings, participating in the eight forms of empathy is not so challenging, if you are willing to abandon hyper-skepticism. On the other hand, what you said most definitely applies to empathy towards artificial intelligence, aliens, etc. as their experiences may be so alien to our own that in order to empathize we must first bridge a gap, by becoming cyborgs