What is acausal compassion?

An introduction to the idea that compassion can operate beyond causal contact, and what this means for how we relate to suffering everywhere.

Acausal compassion begins from a simple observation: the wish to be free from suffering is not unique to any particular being, place, or time. It is a kind of bodhicitta that extends beyond causal contact — an aspiration grounded not in what we can physically reach, but in the logical structure of care itself.

The intellectual roots lie in superrationality — the insight that agents who reason similarly will reach similar conclusions, even without communication.Hofstadter's superrationality context Hofstadter developed superrationality in the context of one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. The key insight is that if two agents reason identically, they can trust that whatever conclusion one reaches, the other reaches too. If we take this seriously and extend it from game theory to ethics, something remarkable emerges: compassion becomes a coordination mechanism that works across any distance, even between beings who can never interact.

This leads to the idea of a meta-Schelling point — a focal point for coordination that is shared across all possible perspectives, grounded in something every sentient being has in common.