I think this is a mechanism that actually happens a lot. People generally do lose a lot of empathy with experience and age. People definitely get de-sensitized to both strongly negative and strongly positive experiences after viewing them a lot. I actually think that this is more likely than the RL story—especially with positive-valence empathy which under the RL story people would be driven to seek out.
But then every time that empathy thing happens, I obviously don’t then immediately eat chocolate. So the reward model would get an error signal—there was a reward prediction, but the reward didn’t happen. And thus the brain would eventually learn a more sophisticated “correct” reward model that didn’t fire empathetically. Right?
My main model for why this doesn’t happen in some circumstances (but definitely not all) is that the brain uses these signals and has a mechanism for actually providing positive or negative reward when they fire depending on other learnt or innate algorithms. For instance, you could pass the RPE through to some other region to detect whether the empathy triggered for a friend or enemy and then return either positive or negative reward, so implementing either shared happiness or schadenfreude. Generally I think of this mechanism as a low level substrate on which you can build up a more complex repertoire of social emotions by doing reward shaping on these signals.
Also—I really like your post on empathy that cfoster linked above! I have read a lot of your work but somehow missed that one lol. Cool we are thinking at least somewhat along similar lines
For instance, you could pass the RPE through to some other region to detect whether the empathy triggered for a friend or enemy and then return either positive or negative reward, so implementing either shared happiness or schadenfreude.
In that case I’d be interested in the “some other region to detect whether the empathy triggered for a friend or enemy”. How is that region doing that? Specifically, (1) what exactly is the “low level substrate”, (2) what are the exact recipes for turning those things into the full complex repertoire of social emotions? Those are major research interests of mine. Happy for you & anyone else to join / share ideas :)
I think this is a mechanism that actually happens a lot. People generally do lose a lot of empathy with experience and age. People definitely get de-sensitized to both strongly negative and strongly positive experiences after viewing them a lot. I actually think that this is more likely than the RL story—especially with positive-valence empathy which under the RL story people would be driven to seek out.
My main model for why this doesn’t happen in some circumstances (but definitely not all) is that the brain uses these signals and has a mechanism for actually providing positive or negative reward when they fire depending on other learnt or innate algorithms. For instance, you could pass the RPE through to some other region to detect whether the empathy triggered for a friend or enemy and then return either positive or negative reward, so implementing either shared happiness or schadenfreude. Generally I think of this mechanism as a low level substrate on which you can build up a more complex repertoire of social emotions by doing reward shaping on these signals.
Also—I really like your post on empathy that cfoster linked above! I have read a lot of your work but somehow missed that one lol. Cool we are thinking at least somewhat along similar lines
Thanks!
In that case I’d be interested in the “some other region to detect whether the empathy triggered for a friend or enemy”. How is that region doing that? Specifically, (1) what exactly is the “low level substrate”, (2) what are the exact recipes for turning those things into the full complex repertoire of social emotions? Those are major research interests of mine. Happy for you & anyone else to join / share ideas :)