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Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism

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 vs. them the evil.” Is c...

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Autores principales: Ho, S. Shaun, Nakamura, Yoshio, Swain, James E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10034324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36968746
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1099800
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author Ho, S. Shaun
Nakamura, Yoshio
Swain, James E.
author_facet Ho, S. Shaun
Nakamura, Yoshio
Swain, James E.
author_sort Ho, S. Shaun
collection PubMed
description 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 vs. 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., lojong mind training, for the world laden with conflicts, starting from the conflicts in close relationships to those in geopolitics.
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spelling pubmed-100343242023-03-24 Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism Ho, S. Shaun Nakamura, Yoshio Swain, James E. Front Psychol Psychology 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 vs. 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., lojong mind training, for the world laden with conflicts, starting from the conflicts in close relationships to those in geopolitics. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-03-09 /pmc/articles/PMC10034324/ /pubmed/36968746 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1099800 Text en Copyright © 2023 Ho, Nakamura and Swain. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Ho, S. Shaun
Nakamura, Yoshio
Swain, James E.
Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism
title Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism
title_full Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism
title_fullStr Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism
title_full_unstemmed Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism
title_short Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism
title_sort path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and mahayana buddhism
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10034324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36968746
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1099800
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