This spring two cardinals keep attacking large windows on my house. They don’t know their reflections are not other cardinals that want to invade their territory. They, like most animals, don’t have the level of self-awareness great apes and humans have, the awareness to know themselves in reflection.
 
It doesn’t really matter how many times the cardinals bang into the glass. They can’t learn the lesson of self-awareness. The reflections will continue to be perceived as enemies, and the cardinals will waste the time they need to build their nest and care for their young.
 
And so, when I think of my TV, I wonder whether or not all those pundits banging against the glass just don’t see how similar they are to those birds. Reflections in glass are images turned inside out: Your nose that on your body extends outward toward a mirror appears to be a nose extending outward toward your body in the reflection. Pundits, supposed higher-order animals possessed of self-awareness, spend their time attacking the reverse image of themselves.
 
Like the cardinals, you gain nothing by banging against the glass in which you see yourself “inside out.” Remember that the next time you let a political (or any) discussion upset you.

Vicissitudes. Ah! Changes. Could we undergo any more than we now daily face? Fashions, mores, politics, philosophies, neighborhoods, emotions, waistlines…
 
As land-dwellers, we’ve seen it all, or we’ve seen our fair share of changes. Nothing should shake us. Does our relatively unshakeable nature have anything to do with our composition? We’re mostly water, and there’s a steadiness in water that resists change. Given that we are mostly water and that water is hard to change, shouldn’t we be almost immune to change, save of course, extreme changes.
 
All substances have a specific heat value. We associate the value with calories (not food Calories—they’re an order of magnitude larger): One calorie is the amount of heat energy needed to raise one gram of water through one degree Celsius at one atmospheric pressure (1,013.2 millibars). In short, a watched pot seems to take forrrreverrr to boil. Why? If you want to raise the temperature of that little gram of water by a single degree, you have to pump 4.186 joules (one calorie) into it. Water, the physicists say, has a high specific heat. By comparison, a gram of copper will rise a degree Celsius with the infusion of only .38 joules. Copper has a low specific heat. Good thing we’re not made of copper. We would heat up and cool off pretty fast.
 
Water protects us in an ocean of air, a substance that can heat up and cool down relatively rapidly. Weather. Ocean “weather” isn’t as fickle. It takes a long time for ocean water to heat up and cool off. Again, thanks to that high specific heat of water we can weather the weather. Almost all ocean-dwellers would succumb if their environment were as fickle as our ocean of air.
 
As water-beings—usually, our physical makeup ranges between 45 and 65% water—we have the potential to resist rapid change; at least, physically. And one might think that our physical nature spills (I like that word) over into our intellectual and emotional natures. We’re hit by a constant energy of change, but we can resist changing. That’s bad in some ways, of course. It’s as slow a process to get us to change our views as it is to boil water. We can be stubborn regardless of how many of those calories of change we encounter daily.
 
But our resistance to change gives us the ability to persist through changes and adversity. When we encounter changes like the loss of an object, even a house, or the loss of a job, we have the ability to maintain a relatively steady character. Maybe you have not experienced such changes, but you have seen in the disrupted lives of others hit by fires, floods, and storms, a steadiness of character that manifests itself in a refusal to give up. Even in the tragic loss of a loved one, we have the ability to stay very near what we were.
 
Think you’re under pressure to change your character because of the vicissitudes of society or changes in your personal world? Is someone or some group infusing you with excess energy, their energy? Like the water that dominates your composition, you can absorb a great deal of energy without changing.
 
What’s happening now? Are you encountering an angry person in an angry energetic outburst? Think water. Think, “I am mostly water.” Think high specific heat. Think, “A watched pot never boils.” Think, “It’s going to take more than a few emotional calories to get me boiling.”
 
You have both a literal and a figurative high specific heat. Realize that, and it will take a considerable input of energy to get you boiling. 

One lesson novice scuba divers learn is that determining the source of a sound underwater is more difficult than it is above water. When we hear a sound traveling through air, our brains detect the slight difference between the arrival times of vibrations as they reach our separated ears and use that slight difference to determine the direction from which a sound emanates. But what works on dry land doesn’t work well underwater because sound travels faster in the denser fluid. We’re used to sound waves traveling about 1,100 feet per second through air, but in water, depending on temperature and salinity, sound can travel between 4,600 and 5,000 feet per second. For us, that makes sound seem to hit both ears simultaneously, giving us little chance to determine its origin.
 
A magnifying glass works because it has varying thickness; the time light has to travel through the thinner circumference differs from the time for it to travel through the thicker middle of the lens. Here’s Richard Feynman’s explanation: “By…putting [in the paths of the photons] just the right thickness of glass to compensate for the time along each [photon’s] path, we can make all the times the same...it’s a focusing lens. By arranging things so that the times are equal, we can focus light—we can make the probability very high that light will arrive at a particular point, and very low that it will arrive anywhere else” (p. 58).
 
Arriving at the same time. It obsesses us. “Meet me at the coffee shop at ten,” “Get me to the church on time,” “Had I been at the corner just a second before, I might have been killed by that truck.” But isn’t it interesting that in the physical world the close timing of sound waves befuddles us whereas the close timing of photons makes things clearer, even to the point of magnification?
 
And maybe when we fault someone for bad timing, we need to determine whether or not we are judging by what we hear or what we see. Often, there is more than a single perspective. And that perspective, even in the physical world, might determine whether or not we really have a grasp on what we have witnessed by ears or eyes. Always check the medium through which you make your judgment.

*Feynman, Richard. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton U. Press, 1985.

What would happen if recently named “zombie volcanoes” erupted? Missed that story? Geologists down under (that is, in New Zealand) have discovered a new zone of rising magma adjacent to a line of active volcanoes. Their concern is that North Island, the site of “25 enormous eruptions in the past 1.6 million years,” might produce other explosive events in the Bay of Plenty.
 
Termed “zombie volcanoes” by Cornell’s Matthew Pritchard, the magma chambers rising off the line of current volcanoes in places like New Zealand and the central Andes might in the near future prove catastrophic. Why? Two reasons: Eruptions pose threats to nearby population centers (and sometimes worldwide population) and they can alter planet-wide temperatures by blocking sunlight with ejected ash.* Apparently, volcanic eruptions might have forced our planet into the Little Ice Age beginning in the thirteenth century—and changing the course of human events all the way through the eighteenth century. A new series of eruptions might also introduce an “ice age” that cools planet. But, not to worry. There’s no indication that such “zombies” will awaken zoooon.
 
On a human level, we also face the eruptions of anger that plague us. They can lead to outright violence in an explosive outburst or to a cooling that spreads and affects many lives. Almost every big city newspaper and local TV newscast has a daily story about some zombie anger, something that has been forming under surface interactions that erupts in gunfire. And the problem for police and even for civilians is that the magma of anger doesn’t always gather beneath known sites of eruption. It’s as though we live on a human planet underlain by molten emotion secretly intruding upward toward some unexpected eruption site.
 
Detecting zombie volcanoes requires extensive seismic tomography, a process that involves reading “sound” waves of earthquakes and manmade sounds to reveal solid, liquid, and mushy (not an official term) material below the surface. The problem we have on the human planet is that we can’t detect the magma of anger that lies hidden without extensive intrusion into the lives of the angry or potentially angry. We shake our heads as we read the news about another tragic shooting, another bar fight, another incidence of domestic violence. It’s as though we are bystanders on the side of a volcano just looking shocked that the thing “suddenly” erupted. Like Mt. St. Helens before the eruption, the site looked peaceful, even serene.
 
There are those, of course, who use whatever emotional tomography is available to anticipate the eruptions of anger, but generation after generation has discovered that such zombie anger rises from the depths of youth, showing us that the magma of intense emotions will always lie below the surface and that it doesn’t necessarily lie beneath sites of previous eruptions.
 
No one knows when the magma beneath the Bay of Plenty will erupt. It could be years, decades, or centuries away from a breach of the surface. Even if it does erupt, it could be a minor eruption, but then it also could be major blast. We don’t know, and we have no way to stop it. The “Bay of Plenty” seems to be an appropriate designation. There appears to be a bountiful supply of anger magma in every generation. And in the case of violent eruptions we know that anger that remains long dormant can rise from the dead to wreak havoc on the living.  
 
 
 
*Witze, Alexandra. ‘Zombie volcano’ slowly grows beneath New Zealand. Nature News. June 3, 2016. Online at nature.com: https://www.nature.com/news/zombie-volcano-slowly-grows-beneath-new-zealand-1.20023

Rewriting history is not a new practice. We’ve been doing it since before the rise of civilization. That’s how heroes are made. Slight changes in stories snowball into big changes, and, depending on the agenda of those in power, more snow is shoveled onto the old tales. Take the Song of Roland as an example.
 
By 800 Charlemagne had risen to such stature that the Pope crowned him Emperor. But his rise to legendary status—the magne in his name—wasn’t entirely smooth. He had trouble conquering Spain and suffered a disastrous defeat in a mountain pass at Roncesvalles in the eighth century. It was a defeat without revenge. Those who attacked the stretched-out army disappeared into the hills. But a couple of hundred years later someone wrote a long (4000-line) poem about the battle, making one of Charlemagne’s slain men a hero, and suggesting that Charlemagne had his revenge on the attackers.
 
But that’s the way we often look at things: Rewriting to put, as we now say, the spin on things gone awry. It took hundreds of years for the fiction about the battle at Roncesvalles to evolve into the heroic epic a Pope used as propaganda to inspire a crusade in the Middle East. Today, we rewrite history in a matter of a few decades or sometimes in a matter of just a few years.*
 
Are our memories really that short? Is it a matter of too many people writing too much about an individual event or set of circumstances? Whatever the cause of our rewriting history, we do it faster today than ever. Look at accounts of any administration, political or business, by those who support ensuing administrations. We’re inundated by so many diverse accounts that we aren’t much different from those people of the eleventh century reading a fictional retelling of a lost battle to make it fit into the narrative of legend.
 
We might look through history and pity those who had fictional accounts that misled them, but are we much different? Like Pilate facing Christ (John 18:38), we find ourselves asking almost daily, “What is truth?” though we might frame it more specifically as “What is the truth?” We find ourselves asking that question because the news-poets of our time keep retelling tales to favor their legends.
 
And that leads me to asking why we have legendary characters at all. Why, if we have equal value, do some of us—those news-poets—insist on revising to give someone legendary status? And why do so many wish to spread falsehoods?
 
There’s something telling in every retelling. We learn probably more about the re-teller than we learn about the original circumstance or person in the tale.
 
*Because of the 24/7 news cycle, maybe in just hours. 

As of right now, no one can definitively explain mind, and no one can definitively explain the complex ways we mentally map. The state of cognitive science with regard to mind and mapping parallels the state of the philosophy and physics of time.  Substituting “mind” and “mental maps” for “time” in a paraphrase of Augustine of Hippo’s famous statement, we all say, “If no one asks me, I know what mind (or a mental map) is, but if someone asks, I don’t know.” Maybe you partially know, but try to explain to someone the process of recording a mental map and the process by which you return to it in detail.

Mapping processes seem to take one of three forms either individually or in combination: top-down, bottom-up, and comparative. The top-down process starts with wholes and concepts and works toward comprehending and organizing the parts. The bottom-up process does just the opposite. The combination runs from big picture to small picture and back again until focus centers on one or the other. You will not find these processes described this way in the literature of cognitive scientists intent on grinding particular paradigm axes. But think about this for a moment.

If you walk into a familiar grocery store, you know where to go for the milk. Typically, grocers put items like milk and eggs at the back of the store so that you must walk by other products whose attractive packaging might tempt you to add them to your cart. The management uses top-down mapping to arrange the store’s products, deducing from research on product sales and years of data. As you enter a familiar store, you have a map that points the way to the product you desire, and as you walk the aisles, you see familiar landmarks that you previously mapped.

Having shopped in one American grocery store gives you a map that guides you when you walk into the second store. It is a map based on inductive reasoning and analogy. You have seen multiple grocery stores arranged similarly, so you conclude an unfamiliar store has the same arrangement of goods. That’s essentially mapping by comparison, a system of orienting based on the concept—either inferred or learned—of grocery store patterns. The arrangement applies to large stores throughout North, South, and Central America, so the pattern crosses cultural lines. 

Most open street markets, straw markets, and flea markets manifest bottom-up development that result from seasons or even years of randomness. The ability to map such randomly developed markets presents no special problems for the shopper. Walk the street a time or two. Even if you do not stop at all the tables or stalls, you map the market, and the map is valid as long as the participants maintain their relative positions. In a typical street market, the sellers usually take the same position, usually earned by seniority (or longevity), so week after week, the buyer knows how to navigate along what is often a linear arrangement of vendors. Many stalls or tables lining an American flea market’s rows might randomly change from week to week, posing a mapping problem for the buyer.

Start over. Cognitive scientists propose models of the mind based on experimentation. That’s the nature of science you know: Test and verify; observe and verify; verify and re-verify. From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, some “scientists of the mind,” like Wilhelm Wundt, William James, and Franz Brentano thought that asking individuals to look inward and report might yield “scientific” insights into motives for behavior.  In their efforts, they sought some experimental methodology that could overcome the subjective nature of the process, subjective because, in using memory to reconstruct motive, the subject under examination might not possess a perfect recall of causes and circumstances and might additionally be influenced by memories superimposed upon memories. Also, reporting is, at best, too dependent upon vocabulary. Take words for “blue.” According to nineteenth century philologist Lazarus Geiger, most European languages have words for “blue” derived from ancient words for “black,” but some languages have words for “blue” derived from ancient words for “green.” I might say, “It looks blue,” and someone else might offer, “It looks azure.” Are we thinking the same color? Language is one of the problematic aspects of introspection. Yet another is an extension of the language problem: If you frame a pattern for your life in retrospect, isn’t that pattern subject to your culture’s way of describing a person? Still another problem is that introspection is, we commonly say, a conscious act. So, you might ask, isn’t looking inward what we’re advised to do by the guys who speak from atop those many hills of wisdom? “Consciously look inward, my child, if you want to understand yourself.” 
 
Well, stop a moment. How conscious were you of the individual letters in the sentences you just read? How conscious were you of the seat upon which you have been sitting? Get the point? Much of what we do doesn’t seem to be open for detailed introspection. If we spent time on those details, we would not have time to do anything else. And since some of that underlying mental activity is always infusing what we do, then we can’t really “introspect” with “flawless” accuracy (a.k.a. “scientific accuracy”). And so it goes with some of the most familiar patterns in our lives. The patterns of letters on this page are cultural forms you have mastered unless I write something like orpwfm. The first two letters make a recognizable pattern: or, as in orphan and order. Even the pattern orp is somewhat recognizable because it is found with a silent p in Marine Corps. But pw is a new pattern, one not used in English, and the pattern pwfm is similarly strange.

Maps are also patterns. They can be patterns of patterns. We see patterns of objects, for example, on a table game, such as chess or checkers, and we transform the pattern into a memorable mental image or into a word description that can be converted into a pattern we recognize: Qe5, or “move the Queen to e5.” On a football field, “Run a post pattern,” the quarterback tells the receiver, and the receiver transforms the words into a movement along first a straight line perpendicular to the line of scrimmage followed by continuous, but second movement along a diagonal line toward the field’s center section. “Put the book on the top shelf.” “Sit at the head of the table.” “Place a fork on the left side of the plate.” “Line up downstage.” “Build a backdoor here.” “He grew up on the other side of the tracks.” “I think something is spoiled in the fridge.” “Hey up there! Turn down that music!” These previous sentences, and an indefinite number of others, all imply this: If you know the terms, you can transform them into a pattern, and the pattern is a map. When you don’t know the terms, you still map by visual clues. When you can’t see, you can map by sound. When you can’t hear, you can still map by touch. When you can’t touch, you can map by smell. “Ah! freshly baked bread. We must be passing the bakery.”

So, we map in many ways, and we apparently map everything in our sensible world. I know your face. You know mine. The pattern doesn’t even have to be complete for the reading of the map. I recognize you by your eyes. I recognize you by your posture. I recognize you by your walk and by an overall appearance. I see you in profile, and I know it is you. I see the back of your head, and I know it is you. I map in 3-D.  Recognizing involves more than a set of lenses focusing on all the details because, in fact, we don’t literally see all the details. Remember your elementary school science class and the little test on vision. The human eye has a blind spot. Yet, we ignore that gap in our visual field as we view any scene. We map more than we see.
Now here’s the human part. We also map the intangible, particularly attitudes. “Avoid that neighborhood at night.” “Party here for a good time.” “Stay there for peace and quiet.” “One of the great vacation spots!” “It’s a war zone.” “The ground is unstable.” “The property has no value because there’s a mine fire beneath the town.” “I don’t want to live anywhere in Nunavut.” “There’s gold in them thar hills!”

​Because mapping is essential to motile living in a complex world, each of us might consider how, why, and what we map. Understanding both the process of mental mapping and its content will yield clues not only about our personal nature, but also about the nature of any animal species with a brain. 

Think of yourself as a locus for all who find relevance and meaning in who you are and in what you do. Even if, as a hypothetical example, you have no direct human contact, but rather only indirect contact with an unknown postal worker who picks up and delivers your mail, you are a center, a place at which another, in this case the worker, finds at least partial meaning for an activity in time and space. The U.S. Postal Service has mapped you. So has Google Earth. If you carry a phone, the cell phone towers also know where you are, and as we all discovered in 2013, so does the NSA.

Because your contact with others is, most likely, more complex than this simple, hypothetical relationship with another through the delivery of mail or the satellite image of your house on the Web, understanding your locus and the loci of others is integral to your self-analysis. Wherever you live, you are on some kind of formal or informal map. Someone who knows you knows where to find you. “Oh! Sam, on Tuesdays he is usually at the golf course. Barbara? She goes to the beauty salon on that day. And Frank, well, Frank’s usually at the local bar every afternoon.” Regardless of any current notions you might have about your significance in the universe, you are an integral part of this planet’s life, serving alternately and sometimes simultaneously, as center or vector in social contexts. Similarly, you have mapped others’ existence.

You are also a world in yourself, and that world can be mapped as surely as the planet on which you live. From the outset of your life, this personal mental mapping is often a matter of common sense learned by trial and error. You have walked into a grocery store for the first time, traveled the aisles, searched for milk, and made your way back to the front of the store. During subsequent trips to the same grocery store, you have walked directly to the milk. How? You followed a mental map. You have also traveled your neighborhood, your town, city, or countryside, noting features and spatial relationships. And you have noted temporal relationships, such as how long it takes to get from feature A to feature B. Your maps are not, however merely the result of your own efforts to get a grip on the layout of your world.

Culture, religion, and education, overprint other maps on your personal geography. These influences are introjections that add attitude to place.  Thus, your mental maps house spatial, temporal, and attitudinal relationships. Understanding the ramifications of mental mapping means looking into what and who you are. Self-analysis might—but this is not guaranteed—reveal the motivations for your mental maps.

​You have been a cartographer from birth, but you haven’t been the same cartographer. Each new map has altered the way you map space, time, and others. Take long term relationships as an example. Those two young faces change over the years. Body shapes change. But people in a relationship hardly notice the changes on the terrain they once mapped except in punctuated moments stretched over years. And as you alter the map—draw a new map of an altered terrain—you do so on a previously drawn map, much like painting over a painting, somehow making a translucent, if not transparent, overlay.

Yet another tragic tale: Clinton Police Officer Christopher Ryan Morton, responding to a 911 call with other officers, was shot and killed when he and the others went to the “wrong” house. Inside the house James Waters shot at all three, killing Morton and wounding the other two. Responding, a SWAT team found the shooter dead and also charged Tammy Widger with possession of methamphetamine with intent to deliver. A dispatcher had sent the police to the wrong address. But was it really a “wrong” address? Just by coincidence, the police found themselves at the scene of criminal drug activity and face-to-face with someone who obviously thought shooting police was his only option.
 
But with seven billion people at all levels of ethical and moral behavior, shouldn’t we expect that some of us will encounter one such circumstance? Car wrecks occur not because there is a single car on all the roads, but because there are a couple hundred million vehicles passing on the same roads that are also subject to adverse driving conditions and inattentive or reckless drivers. Not to diminish the terrible tragedy of the officer’s death, but here’s a little personal example of another kind of coincidence, one with less serious consequences.
 
I was talking to a friend of mine some ten years after our high school days, when I asked whether or not he had seen Tony C. Why that name popped into my head, I’ll never know. “Whatever happened to him?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him since we left school and went off to college.”
 
He said, “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him either, but that makes sense since I went away to school and then spent the last six years avoiding MIGs in the skies of Vietnam and Cambodia.”
 
Later that night, my friend called me and said, “Guess whom I ran into late this afternoon.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tony C.”
“Really? And I just mentioned him.”
“I mean I really ran into him. We had a fender-bender in the mall parking lot. I literally did ‘run’ into him.”
 
Tragic and comic coincidences abound in a world filled with so many people. There’s only so much space on the surface of the planet, and much of that is water—but then the shipwrecks of the Andrea Doria and the Titanic tell us that even on that surface coincidences abound. We are living on the Planet of Coincidences and Chance Meetings. There are so many of them that we err if we ascribe to them some special meaning or fatalism. The Universe didn’t conspire to cause a brave officer’s death or two friends’ accident. The reality is that more coincidences are coming our way: Being on vacation when a tsunami hits; choosing to build a house on the side of long dormant volcano that later erupts, skiing when an avalanche occurs, living on Earth when a passing asteroid occupies the same space as the planet, having a dispatcher send you to a crime scene that was not the crime scene you were supposed to visit, and you can name a gajillion other such coincidental meetings with both grave and not-so-grave consequences.
 
We can do our best to anticipate circumstances that might turn ugly, but we should all be forewarned that we can’t avoid all such circumstances, from minor fender-benders with long lost acquaintances to tragic killings by desperate criminals. We live on a finite, dynamic planet that just by coincidence throws people and processes together somewhat randomly simply because of the sheer numbers of people and processes that can interact.
 
Still, anticipation is our best defense. So, once again I remind you: What you anticipate is rarely a problem. (And now I wonder whether or not I shouldn’t add as a qualifier: “but not always”)

Here’s a slightly faulty parallelism: most disasters are either personal or meaningless. The point is made by W. H. Auden in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem with its second stanza focused on Pieter Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which Auden says of the moment of Icarus’ plunge to his death, “how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster….” For a nearby ploughman in the painting who might have heard the cry of a falling Icarus, the event was “not an important failure….”*

The implication, of course, is that what isn’t personal lacks meaning, and it is also a suggestion that our subjective sense overrides our objective assessment by affecting our attitude about our world, ourselves, and others. So many Icaruses fall that it’s difficult for any of us to maintain an empathetic attitude. We can be worn out by tragedies large and small that we know occur daily. And with regard to Icarus, well, didn’t he disobey his father and ignore commonsense in flying too near the sun? With all the innocents that suffer through no fault of their own and that seem to deserve our empathy, why should we be concerned about a foolish kid who took an unnecessary risk? He chose to fly high, and, as we all know, what goes up…. But the gravity of our own circumstances weighs us down, so how can we spend our emotions on the personal tragedies of many others, especially on the foolish and brash who cause their own falls?  

Should we be concerned, for example, about people who suffer from the flu? Or people with mumps? You know, everyone is supposed to be vaccinated. According to the CDC, 6,584 mostly college-age Americans had the mumps in 2006, the highest number of infections in about two decades. Bet they all felt “up” right before they felt “down.” But they didn’t cause their illness. Seems that if it’s not one thing, then it’s the need to improve the MMR vaccine (mumps, measles, rubella) before an outbreak occurs similar to that of 2006, that of Austria also in 2006, that of Britain in 2004, and also that of Canada in 2008.  Is the disease a small inconvenience that many people have experienced? Pretty much, unless you consider those who suffered the associated brain inflammation, swelling of the pancreas, deafness, and occasional male sterility mumps can initiate.  Who among us was aware of the 2006 outbreak? Personal or meaningless? And a recent story makes the point.

Are you aware of the March 7, 2018, story about thousands of cheerleaders being exposed to mumps at the National Cheerleaders’ Association All-Star Championship in Dallas?* Not concerned? Aren’t most of us most of the time like the ploughman in Brueghel’s painting, largely unaware of the fall of Icarus, going about our daily business? But these high-flying girls did nothing brash, nothing foolish. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just as all those victims of car bombs, suicide bombs, and stray bullets have also been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

​Regardless of our level of empathy, we can’t take on the world’s tragedies personally. We might acknowledge that they occur, but we don’t entangle ourselves emotionally in the never-ending problems of our contemporaries. And if we throw all the past tragedies into the mix, we recognize how necessary personal experience is to engendering empathy.
 
As you listen to, see, or read news stories about the plight of others, do a little emotion check. Are you like Brueghel’s ploughman? If you answer affirmatively, you are not necessarily a self-centered character. You can increase your empathy by personalizing the fall of another, giving their suffering, however large or small, meaning.  
 
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_with_the_Fall_of_Icarus  
**http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/03/07/thousands-cheerleaders-possibly-exposed-to-mumps-after-texas-competition-health-officials-say.amp.html  

“So, what’s going to happen if this sex robot technology becomes big business?” you inquire.
 
“Well, according to De Montfort University’s Kathleen Richardson, Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI, such robots will dehumanize women ‘and will influence the way a new generation of men treat and respond to women….’”*
 
“Oh! That’s not good. We already have a culture that dehumanizes women—and to a certain extent, men or any version of the human species that finds a category for itself. I guess this isn’t really a new thought, and I probably knew the answer to my question even before I asked it. Here’s that article on Richardson, and I see that she also says ‘human empathy will be eroded….’ That makes sense, but do we know that for sure? Or, is it one of those this-is-the-way-we-believe-the-human-psyche-works principles? You know, a principle based as much on cultural standards as it is on science. Wouldn’t we have to wait to see the influence of a number of human-robot relationships on the psyches of men? Or of women if someone builds male robots for intimate relationships? I see in the article that when Professor Richardson was at the University College London, she did postdoctoral work ‘into the therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions.’ That makes me think of another….”
 
“Hold that thought. I think we have a good idea that dehumanizing has long been a human trait or practice, and its expression in art and literature is as old as fertility figurines from thousands of years ago. People didn’t have to wait for Lord of the Flies or science fiction works like Blade Runner or other twentieth- and twenty-first century stories for examples of dehumanizing, objectifying, and commodifying. We’ve been dehumanizing one another since we began to walk upright. Think past and present slavery. Think massacres. Think dictators like Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and too many others to mention. Robots? Just a difference in kind, certainly not in degree. People have always treated other people as though they were as expendable and interchangeable as the parts of cars, parts for which one has no permanent feelings. But all this talk begs another question: Although we seem to have some sense of what it means to objectify and dehumanize a human, do we know what it means to ‘humanize’? Now, what was it you were going to say?”
 
“I find it interesting that her study of the ‘therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions’ isn’t itself another example of ‘dehumanizing,’ especially a ‘dehumanizing’ of the autistic children in her study. So, if I understand her point, which she made for a documentary on a local Channel 4 and which she is apparently going to make in a report she is writing for the British Government and for the European parliament, as well as for other political bodies, robots will destroy human empathy but robots are good to instill empathy in autistic children. Am I missing something here?”
 
“No, you have a good point. She seems to condemn the use of robots for one kind of intimacy but suggests it for another kind. Gosh, this being an empathetic ‘humanizing’ human is so confusing. I wonder whether or not Professor Richardson might consider doing an experiment with some dehumanized adults to see whether or not she could increase empathy through the use of the very robots she claims destroy empathy. Even if she got negative results, she would have some science to back up her assumptions about the effects of robots. Aren’t we running similar, real-time experiments on the dehumanizing effects of smart phones and tablets that enable individuals to text rather than talk face-to-face? I think I would like more information on empathy itself. I see that there are two kinds according to the experts: Situational empathy and dispositional empathy. Would Richardson or any other person truly know when empathy has been turned off or on? Don’t we just rely on what we think about the empathy of children, for example? Aren’t we just interpreting their level of empathy the way we look at a pet dog and assume that it has anthropic feelings? Do we just ask people how they feel about substitute humans (robots)? And if we do ask them, can we rely that they are truly reporting on themselves?”
 
“Are you empathetic? Willing to take an empathy test like Hogan’s, Mehrabian and Epstein’s, or Davis’s? The tests aren’t hard. They’re noninvasive physically, just a series of questions. And if you accept the definition of empathy given by Mehrabian and Epstein as ‘a vicarious response to the perceived emotional experiences of others,’ would you be able to tell whether or not you or someone else has ‘real’ empathy for a robot-person even after a great date? And if someone did show empathy for a robot, what would that indicate about the person’s relationship, that it was humanizing and not dehumanizing?”
 
“Wow! You’ve given me something to think about.”
 
*Channel 4 documentary to feature DMU professor’s call for ban on sex robots. Online at  http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/research-news/2017/november/channel-4-documentary-to-feature-dmu-professors-call-for-ban-on-sex-robots.aspx