>>9 There are two forces at work here. Firstly, there is the lizard brain, the human aspect of humans. This is where the subconscious would fit in. The lizard brain is what pulls away your hand when you touch something hot, or what feels fear of the dark. It is, essentially, human. The subconscious mind is our most basic instincts. Secondly, there is the civilized brain. This is the conscious brain, what we pile acquired knowledge upon. This is the part of the mind that can reason, consider, and be taught. This is the conscious.
Basically, I don't think the mind is 'not human', I think the subconscious mind is 100%, untouched human instinct. The only non-human part of the brain would be the conscious brain, the civilized part of ourselves that we have taught over time to resist our base urges.
Moving on, you said there is certainly some form of Extra Sensory Perception, something that does not use the 5 senses. I don't like the term ESP, because it further promotes the idea that humans have a mere 5 sense. As you may know, there are well over 5 senses, including the ability to sense the relative location of our body parts, gravity, pain (which is distinctive from simple touch), balance, heat transfer, etc. If we did have a distinct ability to sense emotions, it would still be a sense. Senses are the ability to gather different types of data (ie, sight is the ability to collect visual data), so empathy, as the ability to collect emotional data, would fall under that category
However, I don't think empathy is a separate sense. Empathy is the ability to sense other people's emotions. When a human being feels an emotion, they display very distinct signs as a result. A simple example is crying when you are sad. This simple example of course is easy to spot, but there are hundreds if not thousands of smaller, subtler ways people display their emotions. We can sense these displays without using anything other than our 5 primary senses. We can see a subtle movement in the face, hear a change in tone, feel an increase in strength, perhaps even smell the release of pheromones, and all of this data accumulates into information: the subject is feeling angry.
You are correct, almost all of this happens subconsciously. People who are trained as lie detection experts or psychologists are able to consciously process this data, which is why they are so good at it. However, most people are not. I think this is where the uncertainty of empathy comes from. I don't think empathy is impossible to understand, I think it's difficult to understand because it is the result of so much data being processed. There are many,
many factors that go into determining what emotion someone is feeling, and the subconscious mind processes all that cannot be processed by the conscious mind. So, I would say empathy is still based entirely on perception, just on a larger scale.
Also, you seem to be saying if we don't understand something, we aren't perceiving it. If this were true, no one in the entire world has ever perceived anything. Perception is not about understanding or truth, perception is about making information from data. Data is all of your cones and rods firing intensely, information is 'holy shit, a swordfish almost went through my head'. This perception, of near swordfish murder, is not correct in any way. A person collecting different data, maybe form very far away, might not come to the same conclusion. Perception is simply based on varying amounts of information people receive. The only reason anyone would have a different perception of a person or situation from someone else is different information.
Perception is also not a purely human concept. It applies to other living creatures, as well as non-living mechanisms. Maybe it was humans that figured out any intake of data from an environment will taint the data itself, however
this is a fundamental law of the universe. You cannot observe something without changing it. This can be applied to perception as well: you cannot intake information from your surroundings without changing it.
Basically, I'm trying to say it's impossible to prove or disprove solipsism, because you cannot acquire information without changing it in your own unique way, thus making it part of you. I think we both agree solipsism itself is kind of silly, considering even if everything
was in our minds, we can't control it, so there's no point in assuming it is.
