[nikisweeting]

Yeah I think empathy under the hood is just a very good modeling engine that models other people's brains without our conscious awareness.

IFS, DMT, and other experiences can surface those models to the conscious layer and allow us to introspect them more directly.

In that vein I think sympathy is our intelligent/conscious level modeling of other people's emotional states, which is a higher level process that happens with conscious awareness. In some ways I think sympathy is actually harder, and I respect it more because it shows conscious effort put into modeling experiences you haven't already had / can't intuitively relate to without effort.