Morning, Tech. Before I get into what I hope can be a short answer here, I want to let you know that I'm not ignoring your response to me over on Community. It's just that it's such a long post that I feel like I need to set aside an hour or so to answer, and that kind of time is hard to come by.

Anyway, as for the here-and-now...

A couple of general things struck me about your post. For one, you talk in terms of polar extremes, as if one must choose between strict rationality or uncontrolled emotion. That's not my thesis, and I thought I spoke clearly about the powerful synthesis of the two. A disembodied brain floating in a bell jar can be satisfied to just sit there and think, but when installed in its proper organic matrix (body) it gains not only the ability to get out and act, it gains the emotional context to motivate it to do so.

I shouldn't have peeked ahead at Eri's answer, but I did, and she provides a very vivid illustration of the power of emotion to motivate, often to achievement that the rational mind would've dismissed as impossible. Faith can move mountains, they say; intellect alone can't.

Another thing that struck me is that nowhere did you use the word "empathy". Instead, you did what most Conservatives stereotypically do, and conflated it with "sympathy". Close, but most profoundly no cigar.

Empathy is the neutral ability to consult an accurate internal "theory of mind"--a mental model of the mind of another--to understand what it's probably thinking and, most importantly from an evolutionary point of view, predict its actions.

Sympathy is based upon empathy, but it is a reaction to the information gained through empathy. It's identification with the other mind, and a projection on to one's own internal model of the state of the other model.

Before you make the Vulcan mistake and dismiss emotion as some kind of mental disease, consider the question of just why evolution would produce minds capable of emotion. Emotion couldn't possibly be a handicap, or evolution would have weeded it out. Instead, evolution rewarded emotional minds by favoring the reproduction of their host bodies and propagation of the capacity for emotion.

Just between you and me, the short post about the definitions of "sociopath" and "psychopath" wasn't the first draft. I forgot for a minute that this is Flame (as I seem to be doing now), and wrote a typically long essay about the development of the human mind. When I changed my mind I couldn't bring myself to just delete it, so I copied it out and saved it for future need. Herewith, that essay (with "you" being Tom):

There are plenty of tool-making species on Earth besides humans, and plenty of species which build things outside their own bodies. There are plenty of species which exhibit problem-solving behavior. Humans don't have a monopoly on the traits that you seem to think define humanity.

The consensus among scientists is that the growth of the human brain and its development of consciousness was driven primarily by the demands of living in a social environment. It requires, first, developing a "theory of mind", the ability to model the minds of other members of your tribe in order to predict their actions and reactions. Consciousness was achieved when we applied the ability through introspection to our own minds, giving rise to the "I" who observes the model. The process exhibits positive feedback, as better models made richer social interactions possible, requiring development of bigger brains to hold bigger models, ad infinitum unto the present day.

It's not necessary to have a theory of the mind in order to predict the behavior of a mechanical process. Logic alone is mechanistic, obviously, otherwise it wouldn't produce the same result over and over. Birds and fishes operate according to elegantly simple logic that produces flocking and schooling behavior. Mindless predators understand the logic of their prey, which way they'll run or jump or hide.

If logic is all a brain needs, there's no evolutionary pressure for it to become any more powerful than it needs to be to feed and escape being fed upon. There'd be no need for humans to be any smarter than the next-smartest food animal or predator. Anything more is excess capacity that evolution would trim away as a wasted investment in growth and maintenance.

A theory of mind is necesary to understand the emotions taking place in other human minds, and to understand one's own emotions. Human emotions. Consciousness is primarily about emotion. Without emotion, we are not conscious.

(There was more dealing with RightWing objectification of people as things to be judged merely by their economic utility, to be valued or discarded according to their potential to create profit, but that's not necessary here.)

This was more than a little disturbing, even repugnant:

In the Middle East we see the howls of sympathy for the dead. Much like watching wolves howl when one of their pack dies.

You're quite clearly saying that people in the Middle East are not human, and comparing them to dumb beasts. That is absolutely despicable...and is powerful evidence that your ability to model other minds through a theory of mind is deeply flawed and perhaps nonexistent. You lack empathy, and I have to say, that a deficiency in this most crucial strength of the human mind suggests that it might well be you who could be judged less than human.

Ironic...my theory-of-mind leads me to feel the emotion of pity for you, Tech. I wouldn't want to be living inside the mind that I can see from out here.