“I feel moved by you.”

NT Experience

Compassion is a reaction to suffering – it is a bridge between Empathy and action. NT people see pain, feel an emotional response and have a desire to fix it. Compassion is  reactive/reparative (fixing a broken system).

Care is action-oriented and is an ongoing feeling not necessarily tied to suffering.

My Experience

I find it very hard to differentiate between Care, compassion, and Sympathy. In all three cases my output is the same: I attempt to fix problems. I do this because my Ethics and Axiomatic Deontology have “do not harm” as the number one rule. If someone or something is in need and I have the capacity to fix it, I should fix it. Semantically this is Functional Altruism.

Since I lack Social Salience I can’t directly measure suffering unless:

• somebody explains that they are suffering and how
• I observe them crying, which is like saying “I am sad” or “I am suffering”

My “compassion” is triggered in the same way as my “care”: I see a need that I can fulfill.

If I am aware of distress but don’t know how to fix it, I am not able to provide any help. Distress without information is not actionable. Here is Failure Example.

Here is an LLM summary of my “compassion”:

The ad-hoc decision to resolve a specific, identified suboptimal state in any Black Box (person) when the “Manual Frame Construction” (MFC) identifies a solvable problem.

Comparison

In some cases the output (helping) can overlap, but the trigger and entire feeling is quite different.

Semantic Divergence: yes.