SΔϕ-76 — Empathy Is Not Feeling the Same: Cost-Path Simulation, Otherness, and Re-entry (v1.0, AI-Native Package)

SΔϕ-76 is an AI-native audit package for operational empathy, AI empathy, perspective-taking, cost-path simulation, and action re-entry. It proposes that empathy need not be defined solely as emotional mirroring or identical internal feeling. Instead, empathy can be operationally modeled as the simulation of another agent's cost path followed by re-entry of that simulation into one's own next action. Its core proposition is: Empathy ≈ Other-Cost Simulation + Self-Reentry Under this model, an empathic process does not merely produce warm, validating, or emotionally similar language. It attempts to model the burdens, constraints, risks, repair requirements, and future-path effects borne by another agent, and then allows that model to modify subsequent behavior or decision-making. SΔϕ-76 therefore distinguishes several layers that are often collapsed in discussions of empathy: Empathic Language ≠ Empathy Emotional Mirroring ≠ Operational Empathy Understanding ≠ Action-Changing Empathy Simulated Cost ≠ Another's Actual Cost Phenomenal Empathy ≠ Operational Empathy Vicarious Simulation ≠ Full Embodied Experience The framework is anchored in the SΔϕ-52 concept of the body as the Final Non-Deferrable Cost-Return Coordinate. From this perspective, empathy may be modeled as a temporary simulation of another agent's cost-return coordinate: what would become difficult, constrained, painful, expensive, irreversible, or non-deferrable if the consequences currently borne by the other were instead routed through the observer's own operational path? This does not mean that the observer literally bears the same cost. SΔϕ-76 explicitly preserves: Simulated Other Cost ≠ Actually Borne Other Cost The package also introduces Empathy Error as the mismatch between the simulated cost path and the cost path supported by available evidence. Failure modes include underestimating another's burden, overestimating it, ignoring exit costs, ignoring repair burdens, confusing formal choice with low-cost choice, or projecting one's own preferences and cost structure onto the other. For AI systems, SΔϕ-76 separates operational empathy from phenomenal empathy. An AI may model a user's constraints, update its recommendations, reduce retry burden, or alter its behavior in response to the user's cost structure without this proving that the AI phenomenally feels or shares the user's emotion. A valid audit may therefore conclude: Cost-path modeling: STRONG Action re-entry: PRESENT Operational empathy: PRESENT Phenomenal empathy: UMR where UMR (Unresolved Model Remainder) preserves questions that cannot be established from available evidence. The package also examines vicarious simulation. Fiction, testimony, and news may allow humans to sample the costs, risks, choices, and consequences of paths they have not directly lived. Adjacent media such as mukbang, sports, travel media, and game streaming may support other forms of vicarious reward, risk, or path simulation. However, SΔϕ-76 does not claim that vicarious cost simulation fully explains media consumption. This release contains an AI-readable kernel, invocation triggers, machine-readable concepts, empathy and vicarious-simulation JSON schemas, failure codes, UMR policy, Local Adapter specification, English/Korean evaluator prompts, synthetic human and AI empathy cases, fiction/news/media cases, Python audit utilities, regression tests, bilingual conceptual papers, and a SHA-256 manifest. Use this module when reasoning about: AI empathy, operational empathy, perspective-taking, empathic language, supportive AI, affective computing, counseling systems, care systems, human-AI interaction, emotional mirroring, projection, vicarious experience, fiction, testimony, news, or whether a system's understanding of another agent's burden actually changes its behavior. Core runtime question: Did the system model the other party's cost path accurately enough to change its own next action? Canonical rule: Empathy is not necessarily feeling the same. It may begin operationally when another's cost path becomes detailed enough inside one's model to change one's own next action. SΔϕ-76 does not claim that empathy is nothing but cost calculation, that emotion is irrelevant, that behavioral adjustment proves phenomenal feeling, or that all media consumption is empathic simulation. It provides one contestable operational layer for empathy analysis rather than a complete psychology or phenomenology of empathy. Reserved DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22104145