Present research
Divine Empathy in the Age of Neuroscience?
Theories, Explanations, and Understandings.
Introduction
In the beginning was empathy and empathy was with God. God and Empathy were one. Then empathy became neurons and as such dwelled amongst us and we studied them, built our theories and forwarded our explanations. But, did we understand?
Den Danske smile (the Danish smile) is a well known concept, at least in the North part of Europe. Danish people smile at you, regardless of whether you are a stranger or friend, regardless of whether you meet them in the street, in a pub or at the office. The immediate reaction is that when somebody smiles at you, you smile back. This was one of the things that stroke us the most when my husband and I moved from the Stockholm area to Copenhagen. Stockholm, as perhaps most of the capitals, is a mind-your-own-business city. Not only do you not smile at other people, you will convey the message that you are not interested in the others at all. Hence, when you meet a person looking the other way, your immediate reaction will be to look the other way too. Of importance for our discussion is that behaviour affects others. Indeed, smiles affect and thereby spread feelings of well-being. In other words, it affects our personal and interpersonal emotional and cognitive mental states as well as our social lives. Why is this so? Technically, what are the neuro-mechanisms behind such behaviour?
Social neuroscientists coined this behaviour mindreading. Human beings, it is argued, are mindreaders. Some refer to humans as Machiavellian primates. Human beings read other minds in order to predict the behaviour of others in order to outsmart them. Others maintain that the human capacity to read other minds is innate for survival purpose. It is selfish and has the only purpose of reproducing one’s own genes or the best genes to the off-spring. That the capacity of mindreading is important becomes obvious if one considers the rich amount of research performed on the topic by different scientific and non-scientific disciplines. There is also a large agreement that empathy is the core capacity of mindreading. Empathy is the subject matter of the present philosophical investigation.
What exactly is empathy? How is it explained by social neuroscientists, philosophers of mind and phenomenologists? Is there something such as Divine empathy and how then could Divine empathy be understood in the age of neuroscience? These are some of the questions that shall be considered in this study.
Social neuroscientists place different explanations at our disposal concerning what empathy is and what causes it. One and perhaps the dominant explanatory paradigm to explain the capacity of mindreading is the Theory-Theory of Mind (TToM). Roughly, according to the advocates of this theory, our capacity of mindreading, and hence, empathy, is entirely dependent of our capacities to theorize. More precisely, that we understand ourselves and others is due to theoretical reasoning and the causal laws of folk psychology. There is nothing more to it. The theory comes in two main versions, the Child-Scientist View and the Modulatiry Approach.
Another theory that lately has received a lot of attention is the Mirror Neuron Theory (MNT). In short, what is meant is that it are the same neural structures that are active when we detect actions, sensations and emotions in others as those that are involved in the processing of our own actions, sensations and emotions. To court, monkey-neurons see, hence monkey-neurons do. The mirror neuron system of human beings comprises in principle the whole brain. Actually, if the advocates of mirror neurons are right, humans are living mirrors.
A third dominant theory of mindreading is known as the Simulation or Empathy Theory (ST or ET). The hybrid version of this theory is perhaps the most liberal since it does not exclude that there may be mirror-neuron mechanisms at work in mindreading nor does it exclude the importance of theorizing for that purpose. Nevertheless, paradigm simulation theorists refrain from the idea that we need theories in order to understand our own and others’ mental states. What the advocates of the hybrid and the paradigm version do have in common is that they argue that we put ourselves in another person’s mental shoes by way of simulation, imagination, and projection.
To conclude, social neuroscientists challenge philosophers by forwarding contradictive as well as overlapping explanations of empathy. Perhaps the problem is that the different theories concern different aspects of empathy. Some emphasize the cognitive aspects of empathy merely or more than its affective aspects, others put the focus on the affective rather than on the cognitive aspects and yet others try to embrace both. That is not a problem from a scientific point of view. Indeed, methodological reductionism is common and adequate practice of scientific enterprising. What is philosophically problematic, though, is that all draw the conclusion that their version of explaining empathy is the most valid one (the best explanation), thereby refuting or neglecting other feasible explanations. Also, only in few cases attention is paid to the phenomenology of empathy and hitherto no studies are performed on the relationship between empathy and religion.