The reason we or other animals have perception or sensory input to begin with was to influence our behaviors.
Is it just how we’re designed?
Is experience of some kind necessery to grasp that a person/animal/sentient being is suffering, and without experience you may only know they are suffering.
Is it only that the experiencing it, or being directly aware of it, is causing feelings, and it’s more likely to help, (and if you’re that type of person that is inclined to benefit others in some cases etc) if you feel that it’s wrong not to, than if you don’t feel it, and only know it.
Can we grasp x without experience of x, or without something that closely enough to the reality of it, represents x?
What’s the reason for that?
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When you see someone noticeably suffering your brain and nervous system respond to that direct stimulus with sympathy. Simply knowing someone doesn’t have the same effect because it isn’t directly experienced by the senses, only in memory and mind.
Because that’s just how evolution made our brain?
See your kid suffering, you wanna do everything to help.
Know about some kid that suffers far away in Africa, well, not as emotionally impactful and also because you are not rich enough to do anything about it.
It’s a combination of kin biased empathy and personal inability to change things.
This is super charged by Trump and MAGA, because they have A LOT of kin biased preferences and does not care about other people’s suffering, that’s why they destroyed USAID.
Having power to act is key. People who are right there in front of you have a clear path where you can affect change for the positive. Those you can’t see are usually handled through another party so you don’t have real agency in that scenario.
It’s pretty straightforward. We weren’t biologically or psychologically built to think globally.
For thousands and thousands of years people only knew what was going on for maybe a hundred miles around them, then the printing press happened but people still couldn’t read. Then the radio happened. Then the TV happened. Then the Internet happened.
If you tried to sincerely care about a tenth of the bad shit in the world, you’d take a Canadian healthcare provider’s advice by the end of the day. There’s just too much to deal with.
in an evolutionary sense it makes no sense to worry about distant suffering and internal suffering is mostly irrelevant as the generational effects are a mixed bag.
in a modern sense it is a problem of scale and “universal” solutions. Taking homelessness as an example: In most states we have solved the shelter aspect of homelessness in the sense that we have more than adequate capacity to put everyone sane enough and sober enough into a group shelter.
If we allowed the addicts and the unmedicated schizophrenics into the shelter it would not be safe enough for the people currently using it. The public prefers the shelters be available for people who’s only issue is shelter and the remainder become an issue with drugs and the lack of a functional civil commitment process. When you try to address the drugs or the drug refusing mental illness you get similar needs to segregate, just drugs, just avoiding the meds for the mental illness, mental illness with drugs, mental illness with drugs that make the illness worse, etc.
Doesn’t mean the suffering isn’t there, but it is far too complex of a situation for any individual or small group to deal with effectively. Even as a government there aren’t clear paths on some of these variations as the legal “right” to go off your medication and sleep in an alley is something that there are lawyers out there defending.
When an individual is looking at a specific instance of something like this they can make a judgement call that the government can’t. A single action by an individual doesn’t have the requirement of being universal or equally available to all, and can come with whatever conditions the one being generous wants.
It makes it easier, safer, and more approachable for an individual or small group to help an individual than trying to equally help everyone in an arbitrary group.
A big part of it has to be that we have a limited amount of processing power in our brains. If we were overwhelmed by all of the tragic shit we can’t see, we’d be paralyzed. At the end of the day, we’re just intelligent animals. What is the evolutionary advantage to having a bleeding heart? There isn’t one, so we don’t.
Currently, I have 3 tasks I’m trying to get done by Saturday night….on top of working. I’m planning out my days, what needs to get done by when so that it’s dry and ready for the next step. I hope it gets done and there aren’t any unforeseen problems and I’ll slot the other two in as I go.
A psychologist has proposed that the human mind can grasp 150 relationships at any one time. I assume this heavily depends on how deep the relationship goes but I digress.
The sun is 8.3 light minutes away, the moon has a diameter of 2,159 miles, and the entire solar system could fit into the sun which has a temp of 10,000F on its surface and 1500 times more in its core.
I don’t write all this to info dump on you, but to prove a point. I’m too busy to worry about things that don’t pertain to my life. Kids in Africa? Sad, but if I worried about them I’d starve to death myself. There are things I can do, ways I can help, but if I dwell too hard on these things I can’t directly influence I’ll end up sacrificing aspects of my life and the help I could be doing.
Most humans can’t even fathom the scale and distances the solar system is at. The numbers I listed probably don’t even mean anything they are that large. Even to the people who can it’s almost too big to understand completely.
The world is too big for the human mind to fully comprehend. We can’t hold all that knowledge in our heads, and so it’s shunted away. We focus on the things we can do, and can see, because to try to understand it all is pointless. We can know others are suffering in the background, unseen, but it’s like the distance to the sun….a number, a stat, a thing we know we should care about but can’t fully comprehend.
But work calls, and food tastes good. The family, sleep, play, chores, friends, relaxing…..so much to do, so much to think about and accomplish….
Let Mars fly around the sun another time. It did it before I learned about it, it’ll continue to do so. It’s easier to not think about it and focus on other things, it’ll sort itself out……..I’m helping that person over there till then. So much to do and think about, so little time to get them done.