Sometimes I wonder if empathy is less about some basic biological facility involving others and more about a simple kind of imagination. Can I imagine that that would be me?

If you lack imagination, you find a bunch of reasons that isn't you, and so your brain doesn't really engage.

If on the other hand you find it easy to imagine that it could be you, then your brain absorbs more about the situation, more of the signals and cues, and spends more time reconstructing what that might feel like and how one might get there or get out from there.

Sometimes I wonder if people who lack empathy aren't just... rejecting the possibility that they could be someone else. And since they don't see it as possible, their brain doesn't waste time on building the experience.

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For all I know, I could have another life in which I go through every experience you have. We might all live each other's lives. These are the sorts of hypotheticals I find it easy to imagine. I cannot say with 100% certainty that I - my window of subjectivity - will never experience what it's like to be over there, where you are, in your brain, this moment.

When I empathize with someone else, it's a little like humoring the possibility that I'm looking at myself in the future. I can do that with anyone. I'm able to suspend disbelief.

Now, I do also feel things without making an effort to imagine. But it's much less. I specifically imagine what it must be like for others, and if I didn't, I could only go on their immediate facial expressions and tone and so on, and how those make me feel, what flavor they seem to have.