this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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The biggest issue with our environment that drives these problems is that human brains can only reliably grok a few hundred other humans as being people. Beyond that, to a greater or lesser degree, anyone else just feels like an object (which is why we feel upset when people we know die but the statistics of how many people die each day globally don't have a similar effect.)
Some of us cope better than others but fundamentally any environment that requires humans to be reliant on interacting with over a few hundred other people will lead to people treating each other as objects.
It's why conservative people often feel it would be inconceivable to mistreat someone they personally know but will casually do profoundly cruel things to people they don't. If you view their actions towards people outside of their sphere of personhood through the lense of what is and isn't an appropriate way to treat an object rather than a person they often seem perfectly naturally.
I know the research you're talking about here but don't think it should be viewed as something that makes people incapable of empathy to those outside their core group. It makes it harder, but that hasn't stopped entire nations of people moving hard left towards extreme vocal empathy among one another as the working class. Unity, solidarity and love for one another is demonstrably possible among very large numbers it just requires the right set of prerequisites to achieve, these prerequisites are what socialists should be working towards ticking off in order to set the stage for a wider revolutionary movement.
Nah. Some people have the capacity to have a wider net than others. Some people have the capacity to intellectually overcome the limitations of how we naturally are. Some people put sufficient effort into fulfilling that potential. We all should each do our best to do so.
Doesn't change that even those of us who are especially good at it are still only good at it for a human. We are all terrible at it and it is fundamentally cruel to try to force everyone to live in a society that requires a level of empathic ability that is profoundly beyond what humans are evolved to be able to handle. It's like expecting everyone on Earth to be able to lift 5 tonnes or outcalculate a supercomputer in their head. It's a foolish and unreasonable thing to hang the success of society off people's ability to do.
The brain is not distinct from the body. This is very close to a Dualist argument which is a hack philosophy that proposes the mind and "spirit" of a person are distinct from the rest of that person. It comes from the belief that our human sentience is special or different.
If the intellect can do it, it is natural. The difference between one person's capability to do this and another is simply the background and material conditions these two find themselves in. The background being the historic education and upbringing of that person and the conditions being relevant because people (as you point out) will look to protect their own interests and that of their group first before they seek to protect the interests of others. I argue however that with the right education on class, a person becomes able to see the interests of their class as analogous with their own interests as a result of being a member of that class. This then results in them fighting for the interests of others as a result of recognising it is in their own interests as shared members of that class group. This is basically what we socialists call "class consciousness" compared to "false consciousness".
You're making the mistake of thinking the human brain has an infinite capacity to expand its intuitive empathy. It just doesn't. No more than your bixepf has an infinite capacity to increase it's strength. You can fulfil that potential more or less but you'll still never win an arm wrestling match with a gorilla or a robot. Humans have finite limits to their potential. Our current society and most of the proposed alternatives is structured in such a way as to only really work if humans generally have a far higher capacity for intuitive empathy than humans have.
That is fundamentally a flaw that must be overcome by a more thoughtful and purposeful design process than either "well this is just kinda how things ended up really" or "let's imagine if things were different, but not too different because that's hard!" (because our brains are also kinda bad at imagining things being seriously different to how they are.) Or if we decide for actual specific reasons that it isn't viable to even attempt to approach a human society that is shaped to humans rather than one which humans have to clumsily try to shape themselves to, we have to find ways to overcome the limitations of our biology. Often we do a good job of that externally, but for this it might only be possible through trans-humanist approaches. Which to be seems like it should be something we consider because we must, not because we think it is somehow more convenient than thinking purposefully about how we should share our lives together (though for the purposes of that, we may also be currently limited by how well our languages allow for those discussions to meaningfully occur. That's a fairly solvable issue as we are constantly evolving new ways for our languages to help us express ideas they previously didn't easily cover.)
As for the difference between the mind and the brain I'm not convinced by your argument at all. The mind is an emergent property of the brain but that does not make them one and the same any more than it makes Windows 98 an x86 PC.