Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society. View the full video of Jeremy Rifkin's talk at the RSA. Download a transcript of this video (pdf).
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My mouth was open the entire time.
The most coherent argument I've ever seen for anything.
I want to make it true.
Blood, religious and nationalistic ties all have a property in common: the other. A group is defined not only by what is included equally what is excluded. The empathetic socio-evolutionary step described in this video is missing this essential component; if everything is in an individual's empathetic group, then nothing is.
Nonetheless it seems there is a shift in empathetic relations beyond the traditional ties of blood, religion and nationalism. Consider the evidence presented in this video, the world-wide response to catastrophic events such as the Japanese earthquake. The world knows about these events because our global communication network allows it. Similarly, I would posit that the range of empathetic relations under blood, religious and nationalistic ties is strongly related to the inter-connectivity permitted under the available communication mediums. Therefore, the advent of global communication _has_ ushered in a new empathetic paradigm, and we see the effects of it daily. Without a further leap in communication, another shift in empathetic range seems unlikely.
I am glad the Arts have come to their senses. Empathy and empathic living is most rewarding. I daresay the science fiction of late has even reflected this zeitgeist, not to mention the fiction we all live moment by moment.
I am curious as to what he means by "Annihilate time and space"? Is that a linguistic reference or a physical one? If it is linguistic, I suspect he means something like, "like sand in an hourglass, so too are the days of our lives",
our lives a flake of nano-fiche floating on depths of time and space unimaginable, while if the statement is physical, morally speaking something like this, "The operator states $|\Psi_{Biosphere}\rangle = \sum_{#} e^{empathic connections among all+ \lambda (humans-1)} $ on the physical vacuum lives on planet earth and is about to make a huge choice, which will determine the oscillation spectra of utmost creation". They are not mutually exclusive, yet the use of such strong language in a world of Verbo Caro Factum Est is rather edgy.
Sounds like a philosophy worth embracing-it speaks truth to me.....
Great animation and nice overall reasoning.
However, from a neuroscientific point of view there are some major errors about the discovery and function of mirror neurons in monkeys and, more importantly, in humans in the talk.
In monkeys they do seem to exist - as is known from single-cell recordings conducted mainly in the Parma lab. MRI scans in humans, however, show mixed results and their existence is not unequivocally proven. As intuitive as their characteristics and functions are, their significance shouldn't be over-interpreted.