This is something of a Buddhist concept but let’s see what we can do to relate it to everyday life.
A man walks down the street late at night and comes upon a group of thugs beating another man to death. He surveys the situation, weighs the pros and cons of trying to help the man, maybe he looks around for something that can be used as a weapon. Finally he decides maybe it’s best if he just finds a phone and calls the cops, maybe even anonymously. He walks away.
Same man. Next day. Working on a pitched rooftop high enough up that if he fell he’d most likely be killed. A temporary worker, just hired for the day, somebody he doesn’t know at all, is working beside him. The temporary worker slips and begins sliding rapidly towards the edge of the roof, certain to fall. Our man, unthinkingly grabs for the worker, losing his own balance in the process, and putting himself in as almost a precarious position as the worker, literally risking his life in an attempt to save a total stranger.
What happened here? What kind of an instinct do we see that, when time and the cold light of reason are absent, actually trumps the instinct of self-preservation?
Schopenhauer called this the recognition of one’s own essential being in another. In that split-second moment on the roof, without the distracting thoughts of a busy mind contemplating options, one pure idea and one idea alone, arrives – the idea that, in some sense, the two men are one and the same. The first man recognizes himself in the second man.
I think a psychologist or sociologist would have one, but I prefer the single being theory. Even in proto-cultures where language doesn’t factor, you seem the same behaviour.
The act appears spontaneous, but it is initiated after a series of calculated risks and orientations which increase the confidence in the execution of the act: a good balance, feeling comfortable at heights, four seconds before he reaches the edge, being accustomed to working on roofs, etc. If it wasn’t highly probable that the man succeed in saving him, he wouldn’t try. However, this information does not pass through conscious consideration, it is instead more of an instinctual premonition, a result of millions of bits of data being processed in that split-second. This is the orientation that precedes the effort to make the attempt to save him.
Now consider this.
If I was in an airplane and a guy sitting beside me fell out, I certainly wouldn’t jump out after him. This is because of my lack of familiarity with the circumstances…there is no estimating…my brain does not give the “go ahead” because in that split-second, it reached the conclusion that the probability of success is extremely low if not exempt.
On the roof, it is more likely under the given familiar circumstances and therefore his orientation would encourage him to try.
I agree with detrop, but there is still that spontaneous desire to save a life that must be accounted for.
I personally would rather leave it unexplained. Man deeply desires the preservation of his fellow man. I think that’s far more interesting than whatever it is that “seeing somebody else’s essence as your own” might mean. In this case the fact is more interesting than the explanation.
I don’t think it’s exactly “empathy” that leads a man to save another from falling off a roof. Empathy is to feel what some one else is feeling. But we can never really know what someone else is feeling. The guy falling off the building may be part of a death cult, and is in fact very happy about falling off the building. In that case, the man who saves him is not acting out of empathy, but out of a desire to save his fellow man.
I’m not a cognitive psychologist but my thoughts on what happens in a human decision-making in these situations is:
habitual response - reach out and grab the guy or become frozen or something else
emotional analogy - may be totally unanalogous to the present situation except in some convoluted associations.
I.e. The gang beating up the poor dude would stimulate memories of you getting mugged in high school Or it could remind you of a clint eastwood movie - or it could remind you of nothing (in which case - you’ll probably stand there and look frozen some more)
emotional response - with the analogy present and strong (or not present), you will be driven to respond to it … running away, jumping in, etc
intellectual response - finally your reasoning gets a say and you can make some educated guesses as to the outcomes of possible actions. I imagine for some people this doesnt happen until way after the incident because of the strength and length of the emotional response.
This is my rather uneducated hypothesis on what happens in these situations ;] Maybe we should wait for TheAlderian to jump in
I beg to differ, Anvildoc. I thought is was very well thought out and in a perfect chronological order.
I think what it comes down to is an interaction between a well programmed herd instinct and an improvisation with an unpredictable environment. The process you mentioned is organized hierarchically, and rightly so, I think. Sympathy being the default setting, which might be what incites the ‘spontaneous’ reaction, although the the following processes, forms of improvisation and calculated probabilties, happen as well, resulting in a hesitation. I suppose that if the latter processes resolve that ‘oneself is in danger,’ then those would over-ride the initial sympathy state and one would not subject themselves to danger in saving another.
This is really complicated because there are several variables in place here that affect the supposed efficiency of the program- such as this:
Would a person who was dying of cancer be more likely to respond to the sympathy instinct rather than the ‘danger probability’ of an attempt to save someone, if part of that ‘danger probability’ had in mind the fact that one was dying of cancer anyway? For instance, would my brain process this information within that spontaneous split-second:
“The chances of falling off the roof are slim, I could probably save him, but even that 1% chance of failing does not affect my judgement because I’ll be dead from cancer in three weeks anyway.”
Remember, this shit is happening extremely fast in the brain, so I wonder how ‘reasoning’ actually organizes itself with such things in mind.
The crux of this biscuit, given the fact that we can’t plot this brain activity with any precision, brings us to a sort of unintentional improvisation at the level of consciousness…a haphazordous ‘choice’ to go for it after no noticable or rational thinking involved.
This is one of those issues that can’t be solved, I fear.
In cognitive behavioral therapy we talk about Schemes, or well structured sets of ideas, that make up the human mind and generate behavior. These ideas are so ingrained from practice that they send out messages at “light speed” and are fairly undetectable. So, people do make “reasoned” (based on their own concept of logic) decisions that speed through their mind so quickly that it hard to imagine where they come from. Heuristics (packages of information) based on available data further simplify the data.
In the situation where the man sees the guy getting beaten there are all manner of triggers for prepackaged concepts to be set off. Meanwhile, the man slipping off the roof has other bundles of info ready to go.
Anyway, that’s the theory of how it all works in my particular realm. It is also pretty intuitive if you think about it.
Well of course you can’t literally feel what he’s feeling, but it’s the feeling of empathy, identifying with another’s common humanity, recognizing yourself in someone else. And like I said it may not even be a voluntary concious process, but could well be an involuntary one. Hell, I would think the sight of someone about to die might shock the concious mind enough to let the unconcious take over temporarily…
I rather like the way this is put. Yes, that’s the point exactly.
Detrop,
You may of course be right. It may well be “the result of millions of bits of data being processed in that split-second.†Ideas coming, as Adlerian said, “at light speed.†So that, rather than an unconscious decision, is what determines the action.
Still, I think the phenomenon is interesting to contemplate. I’ve considered similar examples involving animals even. The squirrel that runs across your path as you’re driving along. The split-second you realize it’s a living creature that you’re about to hit is the same instant you take evasive action, not to save your car (how much damage can a squirrel do?) but to save the life of the squirrel even at the risk of a life-threatening automobile accident.
Wouldn’t the rational mind, were it present in all its light-speed efficiency, simply agree to plow forward, leaving the matter of the squirrel’s chances completely up to the evasive skills of the squirrel? Or is the rational mind given no chance to enter into the equation, thus allowing unconscious instinct (your sympathy as “default setting�), to rule the moment?
I have some qualms with the idea of the “unconscious.” It is a bit of a misnomer, I think. As is the “subconscious.” Why stop there? Wht isn’t there a sub-sub-conscious, and so forth?
A reflex of action cannot be a directive conscious effort, it is not a thetic-consciousness, as Sartre put it. Consciousness is directly resultant of intention, and intention must involve signification of ‘oneself aware of oneself making a decision.’ Likewise, a conscious intention is always a freedom because it carries the possiblity that it be denied, that is, not chosen, and therefore it is also capable of failing. However, failure does not affect freedom.
“One cannot have an intention without trying to act on it, and thereby acting. The assassin whose rifle jams at the crucial moment, in one sense does no more than move his finger; but he has acted no less than if he had succeeded. Success does not depend on one’s freedom alone, and freedom does not depend on success.”- Sartre
Anyway, that’s not really the point at hand. Just thought I mention that as an aside.
I really don’t know, Jerry. As I said previously, there are too many variables involved at the level of consciousness, at the level of thinking to oneself and measuring consequence and sacrifice vs. success. In two seconds there are too many considerations to be made, and I suspect a degree of ‘indeterminacy’ in the actual corespondance between our instinctual internal process and our directive conscious efforts.
I think the allowance of the ‘rational’ mind entering into the equation is determined by the amount of time one has to reflect. Yet I don’t think that unconscious actions are always necessarily ‘instinctual’ because many circumstances simply haven’t been experienced so to become a matter of instinctual programming in dealing with those conditions. Have we been driving over squirrels for millions of years? I think not. So its hard to really find that dividing line between inherent behaviors and newly improvised behaviors.
And this of course is the point. If not from programming, where does the instantaneous response (the spontaneous compassion) come from?
This indeterminacy is interesting to think about and one wonders at how all of this would impact a discussion on freewill versus determinism, if such discussions hadn’t been done to death here.
But consider situations where time is not a factor. Schopenhauer put the matter another way which also illustrates this “recognition of one’s own essential being in anotherâ€, and without relying on instantaneous decision-making. He considers the decision-making of people close to death and suggests a reason for their intense interest in the continued existence of others:
“…two criminals have been condemned to death; one of them, whose ineptitude has led to the capture of the other, overpowers the guard…and succeeds in freeing his companion without making any attempt to free himself. Also to be included here…is a scene often reproduced in copperplate print in which a soldier kneeling to be shot by firing-squad is violently shooing away his dog, who is running up to him.
In every case of this kind we see an individual who is with perfect certainty going to meet his immediate destruction ceasing to think about his own preservation in order to direct all his attention and effort to that of another. What could possibly express more clearly the consciousness that this destruction is only the destruction of a phenomenon and is therefore itself phenomenon, while the essential being of him who faces destruction remains unaffected: it continues to exist in the other in whom at precisely this point he so clearly recognizes it, as his actions prove. For if this were not so; if we had before us a being actually about to be annihilated; how could this being betray so intense an interest in the welfare and continued existence of another as it does betray in expending its last energies to this end.†(Emphasis added).
[Schopenhauer, “On Ethicsâ€]
It’s important, in other words, for the person about to die to help the other live, not for the sake of the other alone, but for the sake also of the person about to die. Why? That’s the question. And I just happen to like Schopenhauer’s answer.
When you reach out a touch something that you think is cool… but is actually very hot, you instinctively withdrawl your hand right? And from what I’ve read… the circuit for this to happen doesn’t even loop to your brain… this ‘instinct’ to avoid pain is completed in the spinal cord… and then sent back to the hand.
So… maybe Jerry spontaneous compassion isn’t what schop had in mind… but rather some sort of instinctual biological function. How or why I’m not sure…