I believe a behaviorist would dismiss such "understandings" as mere unscientific extrapolations, unless they can be backed up with hard, physical (behavioral, in this case) evidence. And if you can find some evidence, then any subjective feelings of understanding become irrelevant.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

That's OK, though. Ideas have genuine value in our lives. (Think of them as possible strategies for living.) We should, of course, be in the habit of evaluating them and of asking others to justify the merits of them.

Most people think of memory as items stored in the brain, which during the process of recalling, must be retrieved and deposited back into consciousness.

Memory can also be considered in the way people think of “muscle memory.” If you go on a week-long fishing trip, say, your body rewires and reconfigures itself into a person that can tell others of the trip afterward, that can recall the trip in private moments, that can quickly navigate back to the good fishing spots on later trips, that steers around hidden water hazards without thinking, and so on.

The first version relies heavily on the storage metaphor. We liken the process of recalling to, say, hauling up old boxes of memorabilia from the basement. We suppose that the brain might send clerks to retrieve stored items from its subconscious basement. The second version relies probably on a machine or old, hardwired analog computing systems metaphors.

They are not equivalent, however. We shouldn't treat them that way. They entail predictions about how we are. Some awfully bad philosophy can follow from either when pressed too far. (The first version places memories outside of consciousness as if all a young child needed to be able to do calculus, say,was to have memories of calculus class deposited in his consciousness.)

You sound really disgusted by some of the claims of behaviorists, Disinfo Agent. I am sorry you feel that way. I know what it is like to be subjected to ideas that deny us our humanity. My only consolation is that you recognize that there is all sorts of craziness running around the halls of academia and that this is the price we pay for having a free marketplace of ideas.

Notice that by typing that text and submitting this post, I have, in effect, reached out to you, connected with you, and ultimately empathized with you. The “empathy” is not the text itself, of course. Nor is it just my private feelings. In the bigger picture, empathy is way we interact with each other, console, and support each other, and the way we benefit from such support.

(Shortly before this, I concentrated really, really hard to build up powerful feelings of empathy for you and tried to transmit noetic rays of empathy in your direction. Alas, I don't think you received them.)

Empathy can be studied in this “ecological” context. Some researchers even study elephant empathy, noting the way elephants mourn for their dead. They don't necessarily have to ask the elephants to introspect either. Empathy is no doubt a social practice that evolved. You can't overlook the personal interaction aspect to arrive at what empathy really is or why it is valuable.

What makes you think that? I have the greatest respect for them, and I've stated as much previously!

I do think that schools of thought that priviledge objective evidence over all else, such as behaviorism, can be carried to unwise extremes, but even then I tend to sympathise more with them than with their opposite, because I think they translate a kind of skepticism which is quite laudable in science, and in life in general.

I think what you're trying to show me there is that the idea of "empathy" can be translated into many concrete, observable behaviours. And I agree! That's the scientific way to think, and I do wish scientists themselves would use it more often.

My misgivings about it are that often people are tempted to follow the converse path: because nothing becomes scientific until it can be materialised into an objective description, then only that which is an objective observation is true science. It's this reverse thinking that I object to. I think it unwittingly leads to the very opposite of what science is.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Empathy does exist whether science is too primitive to measure it or not. Dismissing it because it isn't measurable with current tools is arrogant.

Empathy can be invoked through text. Novels would not exist if you could not empathize with the characters in the story. In fact, I find it very unlikely that anyone would read stories at all. I doubt they would watch movies or television shows. Good writers write to the empathy of their audience.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

Memory is our brain's way of off-loading tasks from conscious focus. Without it we would have to focus on every task like we were doing it for the first time. Imagine every time you get behind the wheel of a car you had to drive like it was the first time. People would probably have nervous breakdowns while commuting. The death toll would be high. Living would be hellish and humans would be idiots.

To put this in computer or robotics terms, think of Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture. You have all these lower systems in a hierarchy that the conscious mind can override when necessary. When you go for a walk you do not focus on each footstep, you send a message to some part of your mind to start the walking pattern and off you go. You override that behavior before you walk in front of a bus. There isn't a different self walking. It's you. You have simply developed into a more complex self than the one that had to think about putting one foot in front of the other to walk across the floor. You have developed walking circuits. It's like getting an upgrade. Self v1.2.0.130.8.91.0.1

The beauty of neuroplasticity is that you can add upgrades like this whenever you care to put the effort into learning a new skill.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

Actually, no, I wasn't trying to show quite that. The notion of translating an idea into something concrete suggests that the age-old mind-body dichotomy has intruded into the picture. Set aside any notion translation for now. For our purposes here, try to see a human being a whole.

Consider it again from the ecological context. Empathy evolved in animal communities. In the long run, it was likely a process of co-evolution where showing empathy and receiving empathy evolved together in the communities. That is, it probably wasn't the case that nature evolved inner feelings of empathy such that people walked around with strong feelings of empathy trapped inside them with no way to express them or benefit from them. More likely the physiological processes, including the feelings, along with empathetic language, gestures, hugs, etc. as well as the capacity to receive empathy from others and benefit from it all evolved in tandem. Nature evolves bodies and communities of bodies.

Hence, when we empathize, we don't "translate" an inner feeling into an outer concrete. Rather a person (consider them as a whole body for this) simultaneously feels, talks to, and hugs another person. There is no translation from one form to another. When it is time for the body to empathize, it puts all elements into play at once. All are required (in the typical case) for empathy. They all go hand-in-hand. They are all at the same level.

It is the person that empathizes. It is the person that receives empathy. The interaction and the feelings are all equal parts of empathy. Note that empathy never becomes concrete here. It hasn't solidified into any one thing you can point to and say, "That right there is empathy." Empathy is a particular pattern of life.

And yet I can feel empathy without manifesting or demonstrating it in any way, and without changing the "pattern of my life" by an iota.

Grant Hutchison

If so, then they need to be reminded that the only "ist" that is required by science is the one at the end of "scientist".

Science has its phases and schools of thought, like any other social activity. Especially the human sciences. That's just a fact of life, there's no use in denying it.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

But behaviorism shouldn't be a "school of thought", it should be a "mode of inquiry". When an "ist" is a declaration of expertise, it is a useful moniker, but when it is a claim on truth, it becomes counterproductive. I personally flinch every time I hear "school of thought" applied to either science or philosophy, because it tends to be applied in the latter sense, not the former. A filter is a piece of a spectrum, useful when you need depth instead of breadth, but it can be a blinder just as easily.

Yes. Feeling empathetic while withholding action is another skill you have learned. (Although one might wonder why you think you feel empathy at that time.) Our evolutionary history and your participation in empathetic interchange as a youth laid the groundwork for you to feel empathy without having to get out of your chair. That's a special case, however, and does not represent the circumstances you learned to use the word "empathy" in. If you tried to expand that back to the general case, such as if there was world where everyone sat around and claimed that they were feeling empathy, the concept would lose its current meaning.

You know the quote about Bohr telling Einstein that he should stop telling God what to do?... Perhaps you shouldn't tell science what to do.

To be honest, I often have the same reaction. A discipline that splits into schools of thought gives a strong impression that it's going round in circles, rather than progressing. But other times I think we should probably be more patient with young and difficult sciences like psychology. They're still in their childhood, really. How unified was physics 2,000 years ago? (Even today, you still have the various interpretations of QM, which are also schools of thought, in a way.)

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Good point. Artists can be very good at understanding the information in the world that we key on when interacting with each other. They can reliably mimic the relevent elements such that we can emotionally engage their work.

Likewise, studying how artists and magicians present their craft is a wonderful way to gain key insights about the process of perception.

Nonsense.
As I walk through any public area, just a little introspection reveals a constant flicker of empathic feedback as I respond to the emotions around me. I don't just identify the emotional content of the faces and exchanges around me, I register those emotions. This sort of stuff happens over and over again, every day, and it barely registers on consciousness unless an alarm bell rings (very angry man in peripheral vision!)
And (surprise) there's a neural correlate: on fMRI, my brain flickers with the activity of mirror neurones in my emotional centres (amygdala, insula, elsewhere), which fire when I experience an emotion directly, and which also fire when I observe an emotion in someone else. Same neuronal activity, both times. Interestingly, those who are a little way into the autistic spectrum show less mirror neurone activity.

Big hugs and shared tears are a show of empathy, which of course has a social function that is not to be underestimated. Those are skills we learn, as evinced by the large cultural variations in ways of displaying empathy. Emotional mirror neurone activity is involved in how we register empathy, and there's another one of those pesky internal states accessible by introspection.

Grant Hutchison

Grant, when you are down and a friend comes over to cheer you up, the important thing is not the inner states inside him, but his coming over and spending time with you. The inner states are necessary, but the actual nature of them is not relevent. They may be a bit different in everybody. We wouldn't deny that Ken can feel empathy because his MRI was different from yours.

If an android copy of your friend did exactly the same thing, would you feel equally cheered up?

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I just wrote "Nonsense" again, but it was rude the first time, so I delete and apologize.
But really: you can't be serious. As a society we have nothing but contempt for those who simulate empathy in order to fulfil their own ends (gold-digging spouses come to mind). A variety of inner states may lead to the "come over to cheer you up" behaviour, and that's why we value the real deal and deprecate the fake.
And what if it were revealed to me that my so-called friend was a "philosopher's zombie", a simulation of a human, perfect in every detail except for its utter lack of consciousness. Would I still cheer up as a result of his visit?