Compassion

We tend think about compassion on the level of individual selves and minds: Bob feels compassionate toward Jim because Jim lost his wife, or his wallet, etc. Bob sympathizes with Jim because he can internally, to a certain extent, “feel what Jim feels.”

But it’s often more useful to think of compassion on the level of patterns.

The pattern of “losing one’s wife” exists in both Bob and Jim. Its instance in Bob and its instance in Jim have an intrinsic commonality, and when these two instances of the same pattern come to interact with each other, a certain amount of joy ensues—a certain amount of increasing unity.

Compassion is about the minds containing patterns, adopting dynamics that allow these patterns to unify with other patterns that are “external” to the containing mind.

It is about individual minds not standing in the way of pattern-dynamics that seek unity and joy.

The tricky thing here is that individual minds want to retain their individuality and integrity—and if the patterns they contain grow too much unity with “outside” patterns, this isolated individuality may be threatened.

The dangers of too much compassion are well portrayed by Dostoevsky in The Idiot, via the tale of the protagonist Prince Myshkin.

There seem to be limits to the amount of compassion that a mind can possess and still retain its individuality and integrity. However, it seems that (unlike Myshkin) mighty few humans are pushing up against these limits in their actual lives!

And of course, transhuman minds will likely be capable of greater compassion than human minds. If they have more robust methods of maintaining their own integrity, then they will be able to give their patterns more freedom in growing unity with external patterns.

Should Compassion Be Maximized?

Should compassion be maximized? This is a subtle issue.

From the point of view of the individual, maximization of compassion would lead to the dissolution of the individual.

From the point of view of the cosmos, maximization of compassion would cause a huge burst of joy, as all the patterns inside various minds gained cross-mind unity.

But joy is about increase of patternment. The question is whether, after every mind wholly opened up to every other mind and experienced this burst of compassion, there would still be a situation where new patterns and new unities would get created.

Perhaps some level of noncompassionateness, some level of separation and disunity, is needed in order to create a situation where new patterns can grow, so that the “unity gain” innate to joy can occur?

The Practical Upshot

We should be compassionate. We should open ourselves up to the world.

We should do this as much as we can without losing the internal unities that allow our minds to operate, to generate new patterns and new unities.

Our selves and our theaters of reflective, deliberative consciousness are frustrating and even self-deluding in some regards—but they are part of our mind architecture, they are part of what makes us us. At this stage in our development, they are what let us grow and generate new patterns. We can’t get rid of them thoroughly without giving up our humanity.

Perhaps as transhumanist technology advances many of us will choose to give up our humanity, via various routes. Perhaps in doing so we will achieve greater levels of compassion and joy than any human can. But until that time, we have to play the dialectical game of allowing ourselves as much joy and compassion as we can while keeping our selves and our internal conscious theaters intact enough to allow us to function.

While this may sound like a frustrating conclusion, the fact is that nearly no one pushes this limit. As I said above, outside of fiction I’ve met very few individuals who experience so much compassion it impairs their ability to function!

This brief article is part of the overall Cosmist Manifesto.