Of course a downside to that is that it sometimes annoys people, or causes a mismatch of expectations when one party is crazy-prepared, and the other wants to wing it.
>>Most effective, maybe, but not necessarily safe. It can be the record that breaks the record player.<<
I imagine that could also go both ways. Just as my brain might be poison to a psychopath, the psychopath's brain might cause adverse effects in me.
Ideally, doing that would be consensual, part of structured therapy, done in a safe and supportive environment /with failsafes/, and at least one of the parties will have prior experience with training.
I also expect that prior experience working with very nonhuman minds and/or human minds that are nonstandard in various ways could count as useful experience.
>>And that's why it is not safe.<<
Another option is that if the person with the personality disorder actually trusts whoever they are mind-meshed with, they might end up emotionally glomping on to the more empathic partner. Kind of like how scared toddlers or people having mental breakdowns cling to whoever they consider to be their safe person.
Of course if Safe Person doesn't have any sort of emotional regulation training they might freak out too (but at least that is a problem of degree, not an Outside-Context Problem).
>>This depends on the mechanism of lack and mechanism of conveying what is missing.<<
I was assuming a situation where the brain hardware is incapable of processing empathy, etc. (Psychopathy does seem to correlate with less development in or damage to the prefrontal cortex, and I would guess that people with other personality disorders may have different odd setups in their brains.)
So in that case, it would be akin to a blind or deaf person mind-meshing with someone to try and perceive what sight/hearing are like. Ditto for if, say, Aida wanted to ride-along in Steel or Moderato's brain to hear the cetacean languages properly (since compared to cetaceans, humans are at least half-deaf.)
You would, while using the other person's brain to 'run the program' and 'crunch the data' for the sight/hearing/expanded hearing/empathy/sense of security/whatever else be able to understand the Whatever, and you might even be able to understand bits of the Whatever... but once back in the brain that isn't set up to handle the Whatever, the memory would likely be incomplete and it might be more difficult to process with it. Like, a psychopath might remember that empathy is this amazing feeling of connection, or that hurting a normie's feelings is excruciatingly painful for the normie, but probably wouldn't be able to immerse himself in the actual feeling.
Kinda - compare how mood disorders work. Someone who is manic feels like nothing bad will happen, even if their brain tells them otherwise, or they can cognitively process that "the last time I did X it hurt me later". Someone who is depressed can believe that happiness and motivation exist, but they cannot remember what happiness feels like. Someone having a panic attack might still be able to process stuff like there's nothing to be afraid of, this will end eventually, you are safe and so on, but the panic part of panic attack overwhelms all of the logic and other feelings.
Basically, someone can learn how to change their thoughts, or affect whatever feelings they have to some degree, but you can't think yourself out of a biochemical imbalance or wonkily-built mental hardware. So the empath linkup thing would be most useful for giving people perspective on "this is how you feel," and "this is how other people feel" and then using that information to help set goals and build skills /that work with the brain you have./
(Also, apparently being able to analyze one's own emotions is a rarer skill, or so someone once told me. I thought everyone did that? At least a bit? But apparently not...)
>>If you have a biochemical lack...<<
This could be one of several mood or mood-regulation disorders, and possibly some of the things that cause hallucinations. Or even some physical disorders.
>>...and a superpower casting an emotional illusion, it will break the moment the empath lets go or gets distracted. But if the replacement is also biochemical (e.g. stimulating the body to produce certain hormones) then you have to wait for it to wear off.<<
I suppose it is also possible to have an illusion that causes the body to form natural neurotransmitters. Think like the illusionary version of a massage, where you're all chill afterwards because of natural hormones. Heck, I suspect anyone with decent enough illusion abilities and socioemotional skills could hack that, if they're willing to invest in the training.
>>If what you have is an inability to understand an emotion,...<<
This is called alexithymia.
Also compare and contrast with having a lack of cognitive empathy. Basically, an inability to do affective empathy is a sociopath, narcissist, etc, while someone with affective empathy but poor cognitive empathy comes across as a self-centered jerk, because they do not understand other people's emotions. Basically, the poor cognitive empathy impedes perception of other people's feelings, so the person substitutes their own feelings, which...yeah, not great as far as social skills go. Fortunately, someone with affective empathy and poor cognitive empathy will generally care about the other person's feelings /once they understand what those feelings are/ and cognitive empathy is a skill that can be learned to some degree.
>>...and that understanding is artificially added, then the change can be permanent, lik one of those visual puzzles where you can't see the rabbit until it's pointed out but then you can't stop seeing it.<<
There's actually an app for that. Not up to Kraken standards of course, but still pretty impressive.
But you do still have to do the work the slow way. There's no cheat coat of someone crawling into your mind with a label-maker. Though that would be an amazingly useful form of therapy for many different issues.
>>Fire a compassion spell into an evil army and watch them all double over in mortal agony. Or fall on their swords in remorse. Or both.<<
I think the Inheritance Cycle did that to the Big Bad.
A tricky issue with this is that sometimes the Mooks are not horrible people but they are doing bad things for whatever reason. Soldiers kill people as part of their job, orcs are raised to follow Sauron, shanghaied slavers would often start out being very unhappy with working on slave ships, and so on. And there are plenty of examples of people who did what they thought was necessary, only for their minds to snap.
So that's a tricky ethical issue. And now I am exhibiting the opposite issue, which is expressing empathy towards everyone. Great for prosocial behavior, not great for dealing with the Evil Army coming to kill everyone...
>>They may not have the feeling of guilt, but can often still grasp logical framing like, "If you do not finish your homework, the whole group will fail the assignment and you will not get into that sport team you want" or "If one person steals, that encourages more people steal, then nobody's property will be safe and that will be awful for everyone."<<
Yeah, but you still generally need enough functional emotions to want stuff. So if they just lack affective empathy and guilt, but still feel joy and fear-of-pain, etc that will work. If it's straight-up apathy... :/
On a more cheerful note, it can be useful to have a dash of logical frameworking for when emotions or thought patterns are unreliable. I wonder if Terramagne uses it to teach people to work around stuff like panic attacks, depression and mood swings?
Re: Thoughts
Of course a downside to that is that it sometimes annoys people, or causes a mismatch of expectations when one party is crazy-prepared, and the other wants to wing it.
>>Most effective, maybe, but not necessarily safe. It can be the record that breaks the record player.<<
I imagine that could also go both ways. Just as my brain might be poison to a psychopath, the psychopath's brain might cause adverse effects in me.
Ideally, doing that would be consensual, part of structured therapy, done in a safe and supportive environment /with failsafes/, and at least one of the parties will have prior experience with training.
I also expect that prior experience working with very nonhuman minds and/or human minds that are nonstandard in various ways could count as useful experience.
>>And that's why it is not safe.<<
Another option is that if the person with the personality disorder actually trusts whoever they are mind-meshed with, they might end up emotionally glomping on to the more empathic partner. Kind of like how scared toddlers or people having mental breakdowns cling to whoever they consider to be their safe person.
Of course if Safe Person doesn't have any sort of emotional regulation training they might freak out too (but at least that is a problem of degree, not an Outside-Context Problem).
>>This depends on the mechanism of lack and mechanism of conveying what is missing.<<
I was assuming a situation where the brain hardware is incapable of processing empathy, etc. (Psychopathy does seem to correlate with less development in or damage to the prefrontal cortex, and I would guess that people with other personality disorders may have different odd setups in their brains.)
So in that case, it would be akin to a blind or deaf person mind-meshing with someone to try and perceive what sight/hearing are like. Ditto for if, say, Aida wanted to ride-along in Steel or Moderato's brain to hear the cetacean languages properly (since compared to cetaceans, humans are at least half-deaf.)
You would, while using the other person's brain to 'run the program' and 'crunch the data' for the sight/hearing/expanded hearing/empathy/sense of security/whatever else be able to understand the Whatever, and you might even be able to understand bits of the Whatever... but once back in the brain that isn't set up to handle the Whatever, the memory would likely be incomplete and it might be more difficult to process with it. Like, a psychopath might remember that empathy is this amazing feeling of connection, or that hurting a normie's feelings is excruciatingly painful for the normie, but probably wouldn't be able to immerse himself in the actual feeling.
Kinda - compare how mood disorders work. Someone who is manic feels like nothing bad will happen, even if their brain tells them otherwise, or they can cognitively process that "the last time I did X it hurt me later". Someone who is depressed can believe that happiness and motivation exist, but they cannot remember what happiness feels like. Someone having a panic attack might still be able to process stuff like there's nothing to be afraid of, this will end eventually, you are safe and so on, but the panic part of panic attack overwhelms all of the logic and other feelings.
Basically, someone can learn how to change their thoughts, or affect whatever feelings they have to some degree, but you can't think yourself out of a biochemical imbalance or wonkily-built mental hardware. So the empath linkup thing would be most useful for giving people perspective on "this is how you feel," and "this is how other people feel" and then using that information to help set goals and build skills /that work with the brain you have./
(Also, apparently being able to analyze one's own emotions is a rarer skill, or so someone once told me. I thought everyone did that? At least a bit? But apparently not...)
>>If you have a biochemical lack...<<
This could be one of several mood or mood-regulation disorders, and possibly some of the things that cause hallucinations. Or even some physical disorders.
>>...and a superpower casting an emotional illusion, it will break the moment the empath lets go or gets distracted. But if the replacement is also biochemical (e.g. stimulating the body to produce certain hormones) then you have to wait for it to wear off.<<
I suppose it is also possible to have an illusion that causes the body to form natural neurotransmitters. Think like the illusionary version of a massage, where you're all chill afterwards because of natural hormones. Heck, I suspect anyone with decent enough illusion abilities and socioemotional skills could hack that, if they're willing to invest in the training.
>>If what you have is an inability to understand an emotion,...<<
This is called alexithymia.
Also compare and contrast with having a lack of cognitive empathy. Basically, an inability to do affective empathy is a sociopath, narcissist, etc, while someone with affective empathy but poor cognitive empathy comes across as a self-centered jerk, because they do not understand other people's emotions. Basically, the poor cognitive empathy impedes perception of other people's feelings, so the person substitutes their own feelings, which...yeah, not great as far as social skills go. Fortunately, someone with affective empathy and poor cognitive empathy will generally care about the other person's feelings /once they understand what those feelings are/ and cognitive empathy is a skill that can be learned to some degree.
>>...and that understanding is artificially added, then the change can be permanent, lik one of those visual puzzles where you can't see the rabbit until it's pointed out but then you can't stop seeing it.<<
There's actually an app for that. Not up to Kraken standards of course, but still pretty impressive.
But you do still have to do the work the slow way. There's no cheat coat of someone crawling into your mind with a label-maker. Though that would be an amazingly useful form of therapy for many different issues.
>>Fire a compassion spell into an evil army and watch them all double over in mortal agony. Or fall on their swords in remorse. Or both.<<
I think the Inheritance Cycle did that to the Big Bad.
A tricky issue with this is that sometimes the Mooks are not horrible people but they are doing bad things for whatever reason. Soldiers kill people as part of their job, orcs are raised to follow Sauron, shanghaied slavers would often start out being very unhappy with working on slave ships, and so on. And there are plenty of examples of people who did what they thought was necessary, only for their minds to snap.
So that's a tricky ethical issue. And now I am exhibiting the opposite issue, which is expressing empathy towards everyone. Great for prosocial behavior, not great for dealing with the Evil Army coming to kill everyone...
>>They may not have the feeling of guilt, but can often still grasp logical framing like, "If you do not finish your homework, the whole group will fail the assignment and you will not get into that sport team you want" or "If one person steals, that encourages more people steal, then nobody's property will be safe and that will be awful for everyone."<<
Yeah, but you still generally need enough functional emotions to want stuff. So if they just lack affective empathy and guilt, but still feel joy and fear-of-pain, etc that will work. If it's straight-up apathy... :/
On a more cheerful note, it can be useful to have a dash of logical frameworking for when emotions or thought patterns are unreliable. I wonder if Terramagne uses it to teach people to work around stuff like panic attacks, depression and mood swings?