Ho S Shaun, Nakamura Yoshio, Swain James E
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, United States.
Division of Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, Pain Research Center, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, United States.
Front Psychol. 2023 Mar 9;14:1099800. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1099800. eCollection 2023.
Conflicts are increasingly intensified among the members of the community, making it almost impossible to extend compassion-defined as a wish to relieve others from suffering-from one side to the other, especially when both sides believe that "life is a battle of us the good . them the evil." Is compassion even relevant to conflicts? The answer depends on how a conflict is framed in one's perception. If a conflict is perceived in a frame of zero-sum competition, then compassion is meaningless in such a "tug-of-war" mindset. Conversely, if perceived in a non-zero-sum frame-as demonstrated in reiterated prisoner's dilemma (rPD) in which two players may interdependently render win-win, lose-lose, win-lose, or lose-win scenarios by their actions-then compassion can help achieve the most preferable outcomes for all in a "dyadic dance" mindset. In this article, we present a path of intuitive compassion by pointing to symmetry across three distinct domains of rPD, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism. In each of these domains, conflicts serve as points of bifurcation on a bidirectional path, and compassion as a conflict-proof commitment to carrying out the best strategies-even if assessed for one's own sake only-that consistently produce optimal payoffs in rPD, minimal stress in dyadic active inference, and limitless joy of ultimate enlightenment in Mahayana Buddhism. Conversely, a lack of compassion is caused by invalid beliefs that obscure the nature of reality in these domains, causing conflicts to produce even more conflicts. These invalid beliefs are produced by mistakes of over-reduction, over-separation, and over-compression in the mind, and therefore, a person's mindset is overly compressed from a multidimensional frame to a one-dimensional frame. Taken together, intuitive compassion is not about how to balance one's self-serving goals with altruistic ones. Rather, it is a conflict-proof commitment to transforming conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity according to the ultimate nature of reality. The work presented here may serve as a preliminary science-informed introduction to a genre of time-tested compassion meditations, i.e., mind training, for the world laden with conflicts, starting from the conflicts in close relationships to those in geopolitics.
社区成员之间的冲突日益加剧，使得将同情（定义为希望减轻他人痛苦）从一方延伸到另一方几乎变得不可能，尤其是当双方都认为“生活是一场我们为善、他们为恶的斗争”时。同情与冲突甚至相关吗？答案取决于冲突在一个人的认知中是如何被构建的。如果冲突是在零和竞争的框架中被感知的，那么在这种“拔河”心态下，同情是没有意义的。相反，如果是在非零和框架中被感知——如在重复囚徒困境（rPD）中所展示的，两个参与者可能通过他们的行动相互依存地产生双赢、双输、输赢或输赢的情景——那么同情可以帮助在“二元舞蹈”心态下为所有人实现最理想的结果。在本文中，我们通过指出rPD、二元主动推理和大乘佛教这三个不同领域中的对称性，呈现了一条直观同情的路径。在这些领域中的每一个，冲突都作为双向路径上的分岔点，而同情作为一种防止冲突的承诺，即执行最佳策略——即使只是为了自身利益而评估——在rPD中始终产生最优回报，在二元主动推理中产生最小压力，在大乘佛教中产生无尽的终极觉悟之乐。相反，缺乏同情是由无效信念导致的，这些信念在这些领域中掩盖了现实的本质，导致冲突产生更多冲突。这些无效信念是由思维中过度简化、过度分离和过度压缩的错误产生的，因此，一个人的思维模式从多维框架过度压缩到了一维框架。总之，直观同情不是关于如何平衡利己目标和利他目标。相反，它是一种防止冲突的承诺，即根据现实的终极本质将冲突转化为持久的和平与繁荣。这里所呈现的工作可能作为一种初步的、基于科学的介绍，向充满冲突的世界介绍一类经过时间考验的同情冥想，即心灵训练，从亲密关系中的冲突到地缘政治中的冲突。
