Is compassion learned?

i think hate and malice are learned, compassion is always there some people just have more in the way of excercising that compassion than others poverty etc..

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For what it's worth in the discussion, I think empathy is innate in children and a survival mechanism; compassion is more abstracted but it rests in its "purest" form on maintain some awareness to those innately empathic signal/receptors.

The innate aspect of empathy enables infants to focus on others--their parent--their siblings--people around them, and to "mirror" what is going on. Animals do this too with emotions, sometimes (agitation, fear, etc.) but humans seem to do it across the board with facial expressions and emotions. I think that enables us to grasp interaction but also to program expressions and to connect sounds or other symbols with physical events and emotions.

The related aspect of compassion, which may develop partially or predominately in more mature nervous systems and/or personalities is that phone compassion, in my view, is really pragmatic and selfish--where more genuine compassion retains the egocentric feel of a child's immature perception from a more intellectually mature frame of reference.

Hence, compassion would not be present in the infant, as someone asked, but empathy (unaware) would. It is even more visible in children. Yet, the character of that empathy seems to be immature, visible in the child's response to the question, "Why does the sun set in the evening?" and the answer "So I can go to bed." That egocentric immaturity sees itself as connected to everything and at the center of all events, through the personal experience/perception. In that way, when another falls and hurts his knee or whatever, the playmate genuinely "feels" the pain along with the other.

So I am saying, in sum, that as adults we may feel compassionate about another's injured knee and we may even recall our own knee or related injury, but we won't "feel" it as a child "feels" his or her playmate's injury for lack of ability to distinguish the other's experience from his/her own. Our most noble adult empathy retains that ability to perceive and "feel" another's experience while still retaining the ability to "get outside" that situation and see one's self as a distinct entity that is not also being injured vicariously. That ability to experience vicariously that I call "empathy" functions as a survival feature in human infants and enables us to learn a great deal, especially language and appropriate behaviors/emotions.

Or whatever. Smile

-Sal

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Thank you, Sal, for some good insights into children and adults and empathy vs compassion. Makes sense to me!

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Quote:

Things that are genetic are determined at the moment of conception

Determined?

Genetic information may be encoded within the nucleotide sequences of DNA during the process of embryogenesis, but this is of little consequence if this "encoded information" is never expressed either in vivo or eventually as part of the phenotype of the organism in question.

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Miller wrote:

Quote:
Things that are genetic are determined at the moment of conception

Determined?

Genetic information may be encoded within the nucleotide sequences of DNA during the process of embryogenesis, but this is of little consequence if this "encoded information" is never expressed either in vivo or eventually as part of the phenotype of the organism in question.

Miller, I agree with Sal that "things that are genetic are determined at the moment of conception." It doesn't mean that it will be externally expressed by the individual, but is part of his/her genes. Nothing wrong with that statement - IMHO.