Point. I think in the future, in the near future, maybe right now, people are going to be pleading, or finding themselves pleading to just be treated like people, to be treated like human. I know one of the things that astounds me, that's astounded me the past few years, is how hard it is to get people, even people close to me, who call me their friends, to apply not just a theory of mind, but a theory of soul to me—to make their judgments and assumptions about me, to factor into their judgments and assumptions about me and the fact that I have real feelings, a real inner life; I assume I’m not alone in finding that there’s a disconnect.
The jargon that's used to describe our behaviors, our interactions, our relationships, it's just extremely pathological, pathologized. Our theory of others is increasingly theory of Inca machine: we explain ourselves in terms of automatic behaviors, things that are caused by trauma, by pharmaceutical drugs, by society, by technology. While I think all these factors are real, and in fact very bad, I still have to locate both some kind of realness to people and some kind of agency within people. I know outside forces supervene on inside agency, but there’s still choice—people can still be assumed to choose and to feel.
I think the golden rule should apply to phenomenology: assume others' phenomenology is something like your own. Assume it's human. Assume that they're embedded in the world in a way relatively similar to your own. Assume that things hurt them. If someone's acting like a robot, talk to them about it. Don't just pathologize them. Try to tap into their soul like tapping maple from a tree, maple syrup from a tree. Don't just pass forward deadness, moral deadness, spiritual deadness, indifference.
Counterpoint. I feel so much doubt and uncertainty just because my operating model of my immediate society increasingly forces me to include the variable of ‘sociopathy,’ to assume that others are going to behave in a sociopathic way. That is with complete indifference to the potential suffering, physical, mental, or emotional of others.