August 17, 2004
BECAUSE SO ORDAINED:
Reading Your Mind: How our brains help us understand other people (Rebecca Saxe, Boston Review)
Children's early understanding of what makes people do the things they do appears to develop in two stages. In the first stage, children understand that people act in order to get the things they want: that human beings are agents whose actions are directed to goals. At 18 months, a child already understands that different people can have different desires or preferences—that for instance an adult experimenter may prefer broccoli to crackers, even though the infant herself much prefers crackers. Toddlers not yet two years old talk spontaneously about the contrast between what they wanted and what happened. Even nine-month-old infants expect an adult to reach for an object at which she had previously looked and smiled.Children in the first stage are missing something very specific: the notion of belief. Until sometime between their third and fourth birthdays, young children seem not to understand that the relationship between a person's goals and her actions depends on the person's beliefs about the current state of the world. Two-year-olds really do not understand why, if Sally wants the ball, she goes to the basket, even though the ball is in the box. They do not talk spontaneously about thoughts or beliefs, and have trouble understanding that two people could ever have different beliefs. Similarly, while a five-year-old knows that she has to see a ball to be able to tell whether its red, a three-year-old believes he could tell if the ball is red just by feeling it. In the first stage, children think that the mind has direct access to the way the world is; they have no room in their conception for the way a person just believes it to be.
The limitations of a stage-one understanding of the mind apply even to the child's own past or future beliefs. If you show a child a crayon box and ask her what she thinks is inside, all children will say that the box contains crayons. But if you open the box to show that it actually contains ribbons, re-close the box, and then ask the child what she thought was in the box before it was opened, the three-year-old children claim they thought all along that the box contained ribbons.
An impressive conceptual change occurs in the three- or four-year-old child. From American and Japanese urban centers to an African hunter-gatherer society, children make a similar transition from the first stage of reasoning about human behavior, based mainly on goals or desires, to the richer second stage, based on both desires and beliefs. What explains the change? How do children acquire the idea that people have beliefs about the world, that some of the beliefs are false, and that different people have different beliefs about the same world? Between three and five, children mature in so many ways: their vocabulary increases by orders of magnitude, their memory improves, they just know more facts about the world. Each of these changes might account for the advantages of a five-year-old over a three-year-old in solving the false-belief task.
But more than just an accumulation of knowledge is at issue. Rather, we seem to be equipped by evolution with a special mental mechanism—a special faculty or module in our minds—dedicated to understanding why people do the things they do. The maturation of this special mechanism between three and four, in addition to all the other changes happening around the same time, makes the difference between a child who simply doesn't get Romeo's decision and one who does.
A Mental Module
The idea that human beings are endowed with a special faculty for reasoning about other minds fits into a much wider and older tradition of debate about the origin of all concepts, especially relatively complex ones. Most psychologists would grant that some basic perceptual primitives—for example, color, sound, and depth—are derived from the physical world by dedicated innate mechanisms in the mind. But where do more abstract concepts come from—concepts such as house, belief, or justice? How, for example, does a child originally learn that other people have beliefs?
One answer is that the mind uses powerful general learning mechanisms—the same mechanisms that help us learn about any other subject matter—to detect correlations (or other, more complex statistical relationships) between occurrences of the primitives, and then builds abstract complex concepts out of patterns of simpler perceptual ones. John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume defended essentially this story in the 18th century, and many modern psychologists have found it compelling. To acquire the concept person, a child might join together her perceptual primitives corresponding to the visual appearance of people, the sounds people make, and the ways people move. The concept belief would require an even more complex conglomeration of primitives.
An alternative answer is that the acquisition of certain concepts is like the acquisition of language. We do not master the grammar of our native language—for instance, learn how to form questions—by applying general learning mechanisms, but by using a special set of principles specific to language acquisition: a so-called language faculty. Similarly, some of our more complex concepts themselves, and special learning mechanisms devoted to acquiring those concepts, may be programmed into our minds from the start. In the case of the human ability to explain and predict action by attributing and reasoning about beliefs, three kinds of evidence suggest that a special mental mechanism is at work.
Privileged reasoning. Reasoning about beliefs seems to be relatively privileged in most people: it develops earlier and resists degradation longer than other, similarly structured kinds of logical reasoning.
For a four-year-old, the false-belief task described above is a very hard problem. And early on, researchers thought that young children might find it especially difficult to reason about beliefs because they are invisible and intangible. But an ingenious experiment by Debbie Zaitchik indicated otherwise. Zaitchik devised a version of the false-belief task which is the same in every respect, except that it uses a (concrete, tangible) out-of-date photograph. In the false-photograph story, after Sally puts the ball in its original location, the brown basket, she takes a Polaroid photograph. (The preschooler subject is given a chance to play with the camera before the experiment begins). Then Anne moves the ball from the basket to the second location, the green box. Before the child is allowed to see the picture, he is asked to predict: where will the ball be in the picture?
If invisible, intangible beliefs make the false-belief task especially difficult, then the false-photograph version ought to be easier. In fact, Zaitchik found the opposite: for young children the false-photograph version is significantly harder than the original false-belief task. Counterintuitively, the need to reason about beliefs—rather than other representations of the world, such as photographs—makes the false-belief task easier for children. The same is true for Alzheimer's patients: reasoning about beliefs resists degradation by encroaching dementia longer than other kinds of logical reasoning, including the false-photograph problem. Even healthy young adults respond faster and more accurately to the false-belief version. Most people seem to have a natural fluency in thinking about beliefs, and this fluency helps to overcome the logical demands of a problem about the contents of another mind. [...]
Uniqueness. Some theories go one step further and argue that the ability to reason about other minds is not only universal among human beings, but unique to them, part of what marks us off from our nearest evolutionary neighbors. Many peculiarly human skills—language acquisition and use, cultural transmission of knowledge, and Machiavellian deception and counter-deception—depend on our ability to figure out what another person is thinking, whether this knowledge is then used to forward co-operative or competitive ends. What's more, experiment after experiment has failed to provide clear evidence that even our nearest relatives, chimpanzees, reason about the contents of other minds. The experimenters are getting more ingenious, though, and the question of species specificity remains open. [...]
What is still missing is definitive evidence that any non-human animal has ever gone beyond stage one, to make the three-year-old's impressive transition into a world of beliefs: a transition that enables us to predict one another's conduct, coordinate for the common good, and suffer the sorrows of Romeo and Juliet when we get things wrong.
We can hardly be surprised that thinking of others as subjects rather than just as objects would be limited to Man, nor the capacity to believe nor to work for the common good. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 17, 2004 11:42 PM
Everyone thinks "that the mind has direct access to the way the world is."
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 8:58 AMWhat about the great Western tradition of skepticism--Plato, Hume, etc.?
Posted by: oj at August 18, 2004 9:08 AMWhich says that the mind can recognize when reality differs from perception.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 10:20 AMAlthough maybe I need to modify my statement to: Everyone thinks "that the[ir own] mind has direct access to the way the world is."
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 10:25 AMDoesn't it say that we only perceive a personal version, not genuinely apprehend objective, reality, but that this is a sufficient basis for our lives?
Posted by: oj at August 18, 2004 11:26 AMOJ:
I think the answer to your question is "Yes."
Information theory says so. Our observations are abstractions of objective reality--if they weren't our observations would be reality itself.
But at some level the observations must be sufficient, or outfielders would never be able to catch a fly ball, or batters able to hit a slider.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at August 18, 2004 11:56 AMOh, that damn cave. If I could rip just one metaphor from the collective human brain, it would be that damn cave. It has caused more trouble and misery than any weapon.
As it happens, here it supports my point:
[2744] And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision--what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
[2745] Far truer.
[2746] And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
[2747] True, he said.
[2748] And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.
[2749] Not all in a moment, he said.
[2750] He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?
[2751] Certainly.
[2752] Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
[2753] Certainly.
[2754] He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
[2755] Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
[2756] And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity him?
[2757] Certainly, he would.
[2758] And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
[2759] "Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,"
[2760] and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
[2761] Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
[2762] Imagine once more, I said, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?
[2763] To be sure, he said.
[2764] And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if anyone tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
[2765] No question, he said.
[2766] This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upward to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed--whether rightly or wrongly, God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
[2767] I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
[2768] Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.
[2769] Yes, very natural.
[2770] And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?
I understand that there is a certain proto-Christianity in this passage that makes it irresistable to Christians of a certain bent. But in Plato's intent, it is Plato (or, rather, Socrates, the Governor to Plato's Homeland Security Advisor), not Jesus, who is able to perceive reality and is trying to drag the prisoners up to the light.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 11:56 AMDavid:
Doesn't this:
the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upward to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed--whether rightly or wrongly, God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
mean that our senses lie to us and the truth resides only in the realm of pure intellect?
N.B.: I'll not stoop to the cheap parlor trick:
forced into the presence of the Son Himself :)
Posted by: oj at August 18, 2004 12:08 PMNow I'm confused.
When I say, "Everyone thinks 'that the[ir own] mind has direct access to the way the world is.'", what I mean is that people are convinced that "our senses [may] lie to us and [thus] the truth resides only in the realm of pure intellect?"
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 12:13 PMIs the confusion that, by "direct access", I mean knowledge of reality that does not come through our senses?
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 12:15 PMJeff: Yes, exactly. We do not act on reality, we act on a model of reality we each run in our own brains. People who can distinguish between the world and their model of the world are few and far between. Making that distinction, or at least making to much of it, is not a survival trait.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 12:17 PMBut wouldn't this be a useful skill for any preditor? The cat understands that the mouse doesn't know he's there...
Posted by: mike earl at August 18, 2004 12:20 PMOne way to check how close your direct access is is to walk through a door opening without opening the door (assume it closed for the purpose of this experiment).
One's pure intellect will, almost all the time, have zero impact on the outcome.
We scientists say, almost zero, because nothing is certain.
Since pure intellect can, and does, lead different people to mutually exclusive opinions, the value of pure intellect , alone, must be zero.
One of the very, very few things I'm certain of.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 18, 2004 1:57 PMHarry:
Put sheep into a pen made of a single thin strand of electrified wire. After a few days, turn off the electricity. It will make no difference.
Before chasing a road runner, build a brick wall across the road and then paint it so that the road appears to continue unobstructed. Once you've chased the Roadrunner onto the painted highway, follow him.
Is "2+2=4" a statement about reality, or a statement about a model of reality?
How many doors did you walk into to vet your example?
Prove your existence to my satisfaction.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 2:04 PMHarry:
Put sheep into a pen made of a single thin strand of electrified wire. After a few days, turn off the electricity. It will make no difference.
Before chasing a road runner, build a brick wall across the road and then paint it so that the road appears to continue unobstructed. Once you've chased the Roadrunner onto the painted highway, follow him.
Is "2+2=4" a statement about reality, or a statement about a model of reality?
How many doors did you walk into to vet your example?
Prove your existence to my satisfaction.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 2:05 PMWiden your horizons, David.
In the sheep example, something else has changed aside from throwing that switch. Plug that in (so to speak), and the question is answered in my favor.
The 2 + 2 example was ill chosen. Arithmetic is, conceptually, the shakiest sector of mathematics. Yet few of us would hire a carpenter who believed that 2 + 2 equaled something other than 4.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 18, 2004 6:36 PMSomething has changed, but not as perceived by the sheep.
Yes, arithmatic is a robust model, but it is only a model.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 18, 2004 7:18 PMThe Matrix
Posted by: BJW at August 18, 2004 7:27 PMYes, what changed was in the sheep's brains, in their perception. They learned. Learning changes the universe.
Some other sectors of mathematics, geometry for one, are robust. Arithmetic is very shaky. That's why the easily alarmed are so alarmed by Godel.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 18, 2004 11:35 PMOf course geometry is secure, it's a pure mental construct.
Posted by: oj at August 18, 2004 11:43 PMDavid:
"Prove your existence to my satisfaction" is akin to asking the proof of a negative.
That is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, no matter the subject.
So, in the absence of proof, we go with the odds. How many doors have you decided to try and walk through, rather than open?
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at August 19, 2004 7:29 AMWhat in the world are you people talking about?
Jeff: Exactly. You can't prove your existence to me. The classic proof, of course, would be to fly to Massachusetts and punch me in the nose, but that doesn't work here in our post-classical world because what we would like to prove is that other consciousness exist, not other bodies. I take your existence on faith or, if you prefer, because I trust the model of the world that I'm currently running in my mind.
Similarly, the door metaphor is inapposite. None of us keep walking into doors intentionally because the model we run in our mind tells us that we can't walk through doors. Just last weekend, though, my sister-in-law mimed a greeting to me because she thought, erroneously, that the sliding glass door to the patio was closed when it was open.
Have you never, for example, seen a group of people standing in front of a door they assume to be locked, only to have someone else walk right through the unlocked door? In fact, the very existence of the word "assume" makes my point.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 19, 2004 9:29 AMThe fact that we don't bother to test our assumption about our ability to walk through closed doors proves who secure we are in our beliefs.
Whether those beliefs are grounded in some sort of cosmic certainty is a silly question.
Whether they are or not, we're not going to try walking through them.
The evidence is the evidence.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 19, 2004 1:51 PMHarry: That's my point. I'm not saying that reality doesn't exist. I take it on faith that it does. I'm saying that we are all secure in our own model of reality, at least up until we walk into the door, and sometimes thereafter.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 19, 2004 2:10 PMWhat does that mean?
Practically all Americans, if you believe the polls, think the God works miracles or that he answers prayers.
That's apparently the result of their never having tried walking through the door -- or since few of us make that particular experiment, the mere extrapolation from related experience, such as, when we set the cereal bowl on the breakfast table, it never falls through the table.
Orrin is certainly correct that untested faith is sufficient unto itself, but Jeff is equally correct that at that level, all faiths are equal, which Orrin disputes.
We do not fail to test the world, although some of us are more enthusiastic testers than others.
Faith of itself is useless. A tested faith is rather more useful.
The difficulty is to figure out which tests are productive.
Tests that require you to die first -- as Orrin's do -- are the least useful.
Although I think I understand Orrin's motive in asserting faith, I cannot square it with his disdain for academic questions. It's the most academic of all questions.
For most of daily life, cosmic faiths are neither here nor there and it doesn't matter which one we adhere to.
When you get down to putting on amulets and standing in front of bullets, we get some faith clarifications PDQ
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 19, 2004 5:07 PMHarry:
No, I don't dispute that all faiths are equally valid. It's just that only one is lovely.
Posted by: oj at August 19, 2004 5:21 PMPractically all Americans, if you believe the polls, think the God works miracles or that he answers prayers.
Thus buttressing my point: Everyone thinks "that the[ir own] mind has direct access to the way the world is."
So true, but they have not tested their beliefs, which makes them mere prejudices.
Orrin seems to have faith that Keyes is going to win in Illinois, but we're going to have an election anyhow.
I cannot think any faith that requires human sacrifice is lovely.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 20, 2004 12:20 AMHarry:
Keyes is going to lose. In the process he'll muddy Obama up enough that the foolish talk of his glorious future will be tamped down.
I don't think he proposes human sacrifice.
Posted by: oj at August 20, 2004 12:29 AMHarry: You're going to argue with people about the quality of their world view? And I thought OJ was tilting at windmills.
Posted by: David Cohen at August 20, 2004 12:39 AMI'm not going to argue with them.
But if someone tells me I can, for example, throw away my insulin and replace it with either a) prayer or b) Chinese herbs, I'm gonna ignore him.
I've been told both a and b.
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