In practice, even thinking like yourself can be difficult because you're always changing. That's why people have difficulty staying on a diet, because they're no longer thinking like the person who chose to go on it in the first place.

I have a bumpersticker on my car: Don't Believe Everything You Think

I first read about Theory of Mind a few years ago in reading the book Talking Hands, by Margalit Fox. Fascinating book about sign language - I heartily recommend it.

At any rate, there was a chapter about Theory of Mind. Did you know there is a test for it? It goes like this: the subject observes a room. In the room is a child playing with a ball. A proctor comes in and asks the child to put the ball away into one of two opaque boxes. The child does and is escorted from the room by the proctor. Another person enters the room and moves the ball from one box to another. The test subject, who is observing this is asked, "when the child comes back in, in which box will s/he look for the ball?". People who have developed Theory of Mind will answer with the original box, otherwise the one that the ball was moved into.

What's fascinating to me is that how the mean time at which ToM develops depending on the certain well-defined categories. For example, a test subject who has autism will more often than not develop ToM very late, if ever. If you are deaf and learned sign language from hearing parents, you will develop ToM later than the general population. If you are deaf and learn sign language from deaf parents, you will develop ToM right on time. If you have Down syndrome, you are likely to develop ToM sooner than the general population.

The last point is especially fascinating since my daughter has Down syndrome. I had a talk with Libby Kumin who is probably the world's foremost authority on language development in people with Down syndrome about this in the context of language pragmatics, which is also a Down syndrome super power (kids with Down syndrome tend to pick up on non-verbal cues sooner than the GP). Turns out that it is. Cool, huh?

plinth, that is fascinating. Wow.

Do they know anything about why that is? Very interesting.

So far it seems like a lot of what they consider to be definite stages of development are on far more of a continuum. It's hard to find things about sense of self and others past certain stages of development.

It just seems like most things are on a continuum, but the way they treat everything is dimensional: on/off, yes/no.

Language and self awareness is another odd bit. I'm kind of hitting targets around a subject that so far doesn't seem very well defined in and of itself.

Can you tell me anything about Down brain specificities?

I'm not sure who "they" is, but in my cognitive development training it was a basic premise that all human development, no matter whose framework you're working with, occurs on a continuum, and that stages don't switch on and off immediately. Also, children can slide back and forth between different developmental stages before they develop permanence at that level. This is becoming further complexified now that we have much more information about brain plasticity.

"They" being "current established research." I meant development in adulthood, and not continuum of developmental stages but continuum of "disorders" compared to the dimensional approach, which they are considering for the DSM-V, should it actually ever come out.

I just got a crazy head full of DS info. My god, what a lot to wade through. I wonder if that nutrient supplement bit actually helps.

I meant development in adulthood

OK - I think plinth is talking childhood development and language acquisition though.

Heh. That reminds me how, back when I was a student, I came to the conclusion that 'consciousness' might just be a byproduct of 'theory of mind'. We have a model of ourselves because we model others to be able to predict them. The mechanism of theory of mind started casting its watchful eye on ourselves. Probably judging ourselves followed. :-)

Actually, that doesn't sound clear at all.
Basically, I'm looking for aspects of sense of self or self awareness or identity or search term here, but outside of developmental psychology it's not discussed much in what I'm looking for.
Related to theory of mind, so far it seems to have to do with a series of areas working in concert, activating and deactivating, sequences, blah blah blah.
It's hard to explain without getting into lingo and I'm not even sure of all the lingo.
Loosely, I guess the variety of crap I keep hunting around has to do with various states of awareness or consciousness.

I am probably going to look it up or ask a friend, but I was hoping it had to do with specific brain regions.

The reason I brought up theory of mind is that outside of testing for its existence, the continuum of it doesn't come up much, yet there seems to be a huge range of it dependent on multiple factors, but mostly they study things when there are deficits. Still, there is a range in deficits and I'm wondering about the plasticity of that.
Blah blah blah potential blah.
Basically, I'm shooting around for something to study, but right now the regular occurrence of theory of mind issues in certain conditions and people has me picking it apart for clues about other stuff.
Communication, consciousness, empathy-- it all ends up back at a stages of brain development but I don't think it ends there, it's just beyond that all the research seems to break down into ephemeral fruitiness so far.

I've been extremely interested in consciousness and cognition for a long, long time. I think about ToM quite a bit.

My ideas about this revolve around ToM being central to human intelligence, that our intelligence is primarily social and instrumental, and that this is probably the core tool in our cognitive toolbox. I also think it's deeply involved in our own self-awareness.

Most importantly, I believe that because this forms the core of our cognition, this is why our comprehension of the universe is essentially teleological. In plain language, since our core intelligence is in attempting to understanding other people, this requires us to attempt to model their cognition and determine their motivations...that is, their intentions. We are oriented toward discerning why other people do the things they do, so we can predict their future actions (and utilize this understanding for our own desires), and therefore our general comprehension is about the why of things. This is why, for example, non-scientific cosmologies are anthropomorphic--not simply because we assume that the forces of the natural world are human, because that's not always the case. But these non-scientific cosmologies do assume intention by these forces. The anthropomorphization of them is a means to the end of making these forces act in a comprehensibly teleological fashion.

And so the early development of natural philosophy was necessarily also teleological. The key moment that was the birth of the modern scientific world was exemplified by Galileo and then Newton's pure descriptions of gravity, not attempting an explanation of why gravity acts as it does. This is when true empiricism began.

This has proven to be extremely powerful. Why? Because when we reason teleologically, we are reasoning backward. We try to understand the purpose of some event, and then work backward to understand the even in more detail. This works well with understanding other people for a couple of reasons. The most important is that people actually do the things they do to achieve goals. Now, granted, those goals are often opaque and nested and even disguised and often confused and contradictory. And people do, in fact, do things for reasons that no one, including themselves, ever understand. But, even so, mostly, it's safe to assume that people do the things they do as a means to achieve some desire, some goal. So discovering the goal and working backward is pretty handy. Also, even given the previous qualifications, a whole lot of motivations are pretty basic and nearly or actually universal and fairly easy to identify.

The second reason this works pretty well for understanding people is because even though people are often confused and they lie, they very often will honestly communicate to others what their desires and goals are. So they reveal their inner-state fairly often.

And the third reason this works pretty well, relatively, for understanding people is because there's not really much of an alternative. Think about this from a modern science standpoint. Modern science rigorous tries to avoid doing this. Psychology, when it's done correctly, tries to look at available evidence and move forward, not assume motives and work backward. But, you know, we've not been that successful with this. Not relative to the natural sciences. Even with extremely cutting edge stuff, neurology stuff and similar, it's still ambiguous and complex and often research is tainted by the sort of assumptions it should be avoiding in the first place (much of evolutionary psychology, I'm looking at you). So, really, the problem is that other than what people tell about themselves, and what we can guess about them based upon our self-awareness and our ability to form theories of mind, other people are black boxes. Mostly, their motivations are about the only things that we know very well at all. And that's not very well, really. But it's good enough.

(This is where I should mention that a really interesting thing is that while we're social animals and we need a theory of mind to function as social human beings, we're also competitive in important ways and therefore we also have an incentive to not be completely transparent. Lying is useful. And it's collectively useful, too. Not having complete information about each other is both individually and collectively useful. So there's kind of competing values for people able to develop good theories of mind, but also that they're incomplete and imperfect.)

Anyway, I'm very interested in epistemology and the philosophy of science, and so I find the tension between the fact that human cognition is inherently teleological and that science is most successful when it's not teleological to be extremely interesting. And I enjoy examples of this tension. A really good example is how everyone talks about evolution. Even evolutionary biologists, who know better than anyone else, often use teleological language when talking about evolution. It's almost impossible to not do this. But thinking about evolution teleologically is easily the biggest fallacy people commit when thinking about evolution. It manifests in many, many different ways. Talking about evolution "optimizing" things, for example. Any example of talking about evolution as if there was a goal, a direction it was pointing toward.

Another area where ToM is very interesting is with people who have some impairment with this. I recently had an argument with a moderately autistic person who is absolutely certain that non-autistic people are completely fooling themselves with all their reasoning about what's going on in other people's minds. This person can't imagine that a ToM is really possible; and, even if it's possible, that it could be reliable at all and, instead, everyone is really quite solipsistic. Excepting himself, because he doesn't assume that any other people think like he does at all in the first place. This is interesting because to some degree he's being pretty smart--he's being scientific. However, where he's making an error is in not considering the possibility that our ToMs could be fairly reliable because, after all, we wouldn't assume that each individual dog thinks arbitrarily differently, so why would we assume that this would be possible with people? Unless one is an anthropocentric exceptionalist. But that's not very scientific. Instead, it's most likely that our brains and our minds are far more alike than they are different and that, in addition, we've evolved to necessarily have fairly reliable ToMs about others.

And, yeah, I think jouke that you're exactly right in your theory. I had the same idea. I think that self-awareness is pretty much an inevitable consequence of a ToM.

That's not to say that ToM is a necessary condition for self-awareness in a given individual. Rather, I'm thinking, as I think you are, of this in evolutionary terms. A theory of mind can't be the only key part of the beginnings of human consciousness; I think there are a few that probably evolved concurrently. But once you have a rudimentary capacity for ToM, I think that self-awareness at the level we consider it important is pretty much inevitable. (I'm not sure that self-awareness is some qualitative thing that is binary, it's there in total or it's absent in total. Rather, I think that self-awareness as we understand it in ourselves is a combination of being something quantitative and qualitative. That is, in some respects it's quantitative. I think some other animals are self-aware like we are, in some respects, but to a lesser degree. But in other respects, it's qualitative, and this almost certainly includes ToM, for example.)

It's important to understand that our self-awareness in the larger sense--that is, the sense in which we're self-aware of ourselves as minds in the same way we're aware of others--is not really that much more reliable and complete than it is of other people. Our ToM of ourselves is not that great. And that's because we understand ourselves using the same simplifying reasoning we do others. We reduce the number of motivations we consider and are aware of to a manageably small number. We understand ourselves via our memories of ourselves and our experiences, and those memories are synthetic because we keep what fits within the structure that is comprehensible to us and elide the rest, and numerous other ways in which our memories are more constructed than they are simply accurate or complete. Indeed, there's a feedback loop between our self-image, our ToM of ourselves, and our memories. It's entirely possible for our model of ourselves to go more badly awry than our models of other people, in fact, because of these feedback loops and how much more strongly our models are influenced by the temptations to lie to ourselves about ourselves.

And this is extremely interesting because you might wonder that even if this modeling of self was inevitable once a ToM became part of our cognition, why aren't we better at it? After all, we do have much better access to ourselves than we do others. It's possible, surely, for our models of self to be quite complete and accurate. There's a couple of possible reasons I can think of off the top of my head for why they're not. First, maybe this self-awareness is simply the product of our ToM utilized on our selves and is limited by the scope and power of the ToM. It's only able to be within the same order of magnitude as powerful describing ourselves as it is other people. Or, possibly and even more provocatively, perhaps it's useful for us to have incomplete and sometimes inaccurate self-knowledge for exactly the same reasons as it is to have incomplete and sometimes inaccurate knowledge of other people. Our self-awareness is flawed for the same reasons our awareness of others is flawed. That is to say, it's not actually flawed. The errors are useful.

And, of course, it might be a combination of both reasons.

Woah, kmellis! :-) Splendid that you have so many ideas about this.

I view one of the values of ToM applied to ourselves as a way of predicting how others will view us. My evolutionary view of this is that as a human species we're involved in an escalation of trying to outwit eachother. And this second degree model "how do I think [level 0] that others view [level 1] what I do [level 2]" is necessary not to be outsmarted by others and lose our place in our social group. As humans we don't fight physically but we judge and form coalitions and try to outcast. Which can be deadly given how we need to share resources.
Theoretically you could have more levels / reflective models as well: "how do I think [L0] that others judge [L1] how I [L2] react to others needs [L3]".
There are people who are incredibly apt at playing this social warfare. They're often very social and not necessarily focused on non-human patterns and information as your classic idea of very intelligent geek is. So we often don't realise the chess game like intelligence involved.

The ToM applied to ourselves causes us anguish and cognitive problems. The anguish is the kind of stuff that meditation and therapy and spirituality tries to address: we get so focused on how our social group will react to us that we don't recognise it anymore as relating to our social group. We think it's an objective truth that [being heavy and having spots] is bad in itself. Or that not being able to realise long term goals, like finishing an education, losing weight, doing too much drugs, make us a 'bad person'. (Again a judgement that's been dissociated from the judger). Also some people optimise their behaviour so much on that 3rd and 2nd level that they effectively minimise level 0: how do I feel.
Spirituality, meditation and therapy try to help us by:
- trying to keep us from getting knotted up in trying to make level 0, level 2 and level 3 consistent. Just let that go and accept that it's multifarious through time.
- trying to bring us back to level 0. It's the primary level in the sense that the other levels can't exist without level 0.
- trying to break the social warfare of trying to outwit eachother having us make a "leap of faith" transition to blanket altruism that can't be reached through optimalisation of the normal L0, L1, L2, L3 mechanisms of 'selfishness'.

The cognitive problems pertain imo to the combination of ToM, a modeling of the here and now in somebody else, with the theory of future actions, that is: how do I think that you'll behave towards me in the future. Do I trust you.
So not only do we model the others behaviour right now, we also try to predict, to extrapolate to the future. To be accorded trust by others my actions need to be consistent through time. I can't say "yeah, I said I would pay this week for the drugs when I bought them last week. And I meant it. But guess what, I feel differently now". Or "yeah, I said really loved you and would stand by you when I wanted to have sex with you last month. And now you're pregnant. But guess what, I feel rather meh about you now and she's so much more charming and lovely than you".

This social need for consistency through time is hard to reconcile with the fact (imo) that our brains consist of different 'modules' that are trying to optimise for other things. Untrustworthy or erratic people don't achieve this consistency. (I'm consciously avoiding using "can't" or "won't").
So others will tend to think of us as monolithic and consistent. As we want them to. But at the same time with ourselves we're aware that the 3rd level reflexive ToM is not always consistent with how we perceive our feelings and longings. Sometimes we look at somebody else than our SO and desire her or him.
This consistent model of ourselves as voluntary actors leads to a focal point, a homunculus, that's really and consistently in control. The boss.
But there is no boss. It's just a rat king; all rats are trying to running in different directions. And the resulting direction of the whole rat king group of knotted rats, is the result of the summation of who runs hardest in what direction.
So in that sense there is no one discrete consciousness. No 'I'. But a gliding scale of multiple warring inclinations and ideas and urges that also change through time.

I'll start a sect like commune. As the members are meditating I softly walk by and murmur "be the rat king".

Ah well.
Sorry if this is gibberish to you. It's nice to see that somebody else is interested in this and to try to put my somnolent ideas and hunches about this into words.

And after reading your comment:

I came to the exact same conclusion about our teleological tendencies. As a child we ask "why" and learn about longer term goals, or other causal mechanisms involved in our world. So we tend to follow this chain of 'why's and at some point arrive about the grandest why:we wonder why we exist. What's the ultimate goal. But, imo, there is no goal, no super parent we need to satify. Imo the question of why all this? only arises when things are insatisfactory. F.i. through anhedonia.

Also your comment reminds me of some research that claimed that even mathematicians tend to think about parts of their formulas as actors with needs and actions. We anthropomorphyse everything we try to understand. As you rightly noted.

In psychoanalysis, this is usually addressed as "mentalization." Peter Fonagy has written about its use in psychotherapy, for example, here. (pdf alert!)

So in that sense there is no one discrete consciousness. No 'I'. But a gliding scale of multiple warring inclinations and ideas and urges that also change through time.

Yes!

This reminds me of a short conversation I had with Daniel Dennett at a lecture he gave in 1992 shortly after he'd published Consciousness Explained. (And those of us there were very fortunate because it was sponsored by a group of Santa Fe neurologists and it was about 16 of them, a couple of new-agey people from town, and three of us students from St. John's, and my spouse. Very intimate.)

Anyway, I'd not read the book, but I found his explanation very interesting (though I thought the title was unpleasantly hubristic). And basically he argues something similar. There is no integral "I", but it's a synthetic product of memory. I told him that I found that explanation pretty compelling, but asked him why it is, however, that we have such an incredibly powerful intuitive sense of an integral "I"? He said that was a very good question.

Re-reading your quote, I think I (and Dennett) mean it in an even stronger form than you do. It's not just that the self isn't constant, unchanging (in its quality), and a unity; but that it's not in any deep sense a self at all. At least as we think of "self".

I really, really like your layered prisoner's dilemma reasoning. In fact, as soon as I read it, I remembered that it was a key part of how I worked through that whole idea of consciousness arising from ToM, too. I can't help but have some sort of very strong intuitive sense that this recursion is important. That's probably the formative experience of reading GED in 1983 when I was 19 showing. Still. Hofstadter is a very smart man and there's good reason to think that there's a kind of magic in recursion.

But, also, I'm reminded by what you wrote of a recent MeFi thread in which I talked about self-identity and social-identity. It's easy to think of those as not necessarily related things, and that's part of what I was arguing against in that thread. That is, I was arguing that the two have a very important symmetric relationship with each other and that it is pathological for them to be disjunct. Which is not to say that they should be an identity...far from it. But they inform each other. They're complementary in a way, and in some sense the truest self is the whole of the two together. Or, perhaps, how the two interface.

Which you can sort of see when you think about it as you describe it.

Anyway, back to the self. I agree, there is no homunculus. This is something that Dennett and others have been trying to challenge because the rock-solid assumption that it exists poisons a lot of thinking about consciousness. In that lecture I mentioned, and in books and articles he wrote before then and after, he's mentioned that the method of neurology was still basically built around that model: that there's the sensory path inward, and the motor path outward, and where the two meet is "self". Almost everyone seems to assume there's somewhere a little miniature human in our brain (or its a soul?) that is driving the mechanical flesh robot.

But, you know, we're only sure we have an integral self because we experience an integral self. But that experience isn't necessarily trustworthy. To be sure, the experience itself is real as an experience, just as I think free will is real enough insofar as there's no denying we experience it, and I think that's as real as it needs to be.

First of all, as I mentioned, we really need to think about memory's involvement in all this. I don't know why I can be sure that I experience anything in the present at all. Isn't everything I know about myself, including my immediate experiences, actually a memory, even if very recent?

Think about déjà vu. I'm in the camp that believes that it's simply the result of what might be characterized as a tagging error in memory. For some reason, short term memory of present experience is being cycled back through to us with the "long term memory" bit set, along with it being undeniably a present experience. Anyway, the point of the example is that the sense of self can be a construct of the memory in conjunction with the ToM as directed toward self. That is, the object of the ToM is something, it's tagged "self", and thus self exists. Any moment of experience doesn't happen to "self", it's not experienced by "self", but when our cognition utilizes its ToM to model "self", those experiences are attributed to "self", and that makes the Self real itself as an experience. In your reflecting mirrors. Because, of course, we don't just model how other people model us, we model how we model ourselves, too. Right?

And more on memory and self: a couple of years ago I had a very interesting dream. If you'll pardon the length, given that it's been so long, it's easier for me to just quote what I wrote about it shortly afterwards:

A few months ago, I had an interesting dream. I found myself wandering through a very urban landscape. I was lost. I asked a nearby stranger which direction would lead me home, and he pointed me "back, the way you just came from". As I walked where he had pointed me, I was confused because I didn't recognize anything—even though I had supposedly just came this way.

Then, suddenly, the scene changed and I was standing next to a food and beverage booth within or near a baseball stadium. Again I asked someone for help—this time, the woman who was working the booth. I asked her if she could tell me which direction would lead me home.

"Well", she said with a knowing and perhaps wry smile, "it depends. Do you know your address?". She wiped her hands with a rag and draped it over her shoulder. I told her my address.

"Okay", she said. And she flashed that odd smile again. "We should be able to..."

"Hold on-" I interrupted. "We've had this conversation before, haven't we?"

She smiled brightly and chuckled.

I continued, "I'm forgetting things, I'm losing time. Right?"

She nodded. "Yep. That was the fastest yet you've figured it out."

"Hmm. Well, I am a pretty smart guy, you know." I laughed at myself.

Unfortunately, there was another discontinuity and then I was in a rowboat with several people, none I recognized. Just when I had found someone I trusted to help me!

And then I awoke.

As I pondered the dream, it occured to me that—aside from the curiosity that my subconscious had creatively retconned the common dream discontinuities we all experience—the dream's presentation of the experience of amnesia was very artificial, literary or cinematic.

The presumption when one dreams oneself as an active participant in one's dreams is that the experience is a simulation of one's experience of the waking world (minus pesky details like coherence, continuity, and intelligibility).

But this wasn't at all the same as an actual experience of amnesia. After all, with real amnesia, one first experiences what one later forgets.

True, I can't be absolutely certain that my dream self didn't experience, and then forget, those lost periods. But I think it's safe to assume that wasn't the case.

It becomes apparent that it is impossible to duplicate in a retelling (or fiction) the actual experience of amnesia. My dream utilized an artifice to best simulate the effect of amnesia at the cost of sacrificing an important part of the experience which, nevertheless, has an uncertain status.

There is a very real sense, in both reality and in fiction, that the person who experienced the forgotten moments is someone "other". My self-identity is built from my memories of myself. What of myself which doesn't exist in memory?

It occured to me that most of the experiences of our lives are forgotten. Our self-identity, as we consciously conceive it, is artificial in exactly the same sense as my dream. It represents only a small portion of who we are in this world; and the self which inhabits all those forgotten memories is forever lost to us. That person is Someone Else.

Of course we do attempt to integrate into our self-identity that which we cannot remember directly. Stories told by our parents of our early childhood, or simply events remembered by others which we've permanently forgotten—these things we accumulate secondhand we do our best to integrate into our sense of self. Imperfectly, I suspect. Such secondhand memories are usually kept at arm's length—until, that is, those cases when we forget they are secondhand and appropriate them as our own.

Obviously, we are in some real sense the sum of our experiences, whether remembered or not. But this truth just underscores how relatively impoverished and artificial is our consciously experienced self-identity.

The self is really very...sketchy. As I wrote earlier, we rightly question the accuracy of our theories of mind of others. But we should be almost as skeptical of our theories of mind of ourselves.

Teological, empirical, or epistomological theories as to why any living creature has a sense of self are fascinating to explore. I have many students who are unable to think critically or have a sense of self which separates them from a cultural, racial, social, or religious group due to a variety of reasons which they themselves cannot fathom due to genetic, cultural, familial, religious, or physiological-chemical factors. I think the most interesting question is not whether a creature or creatures (and I include all living beings) reason, but why he or she or it (plants included) think the way they do. Some even commit suicide in the belief that if they do, their group will survive. And what is reason? What is a mind? What is critical thinking? Wonderful questions.
May I quote Robert Frost? He saiid in his poem "A Considerable Speck" and I paraphrase:
I am so glad to find
On any sheet of paper
The evidence of mind.

So there's kind of competing values for people able to develop good theories of mind, but also that they're incomplete and imperfect.)

I think that's really well observed.

human cognition is inherently teleological

I agree with you that it's teleological but I wonder if you could talk more about how make the leap that that teleological tendency arises out of social intelligence and theory of mind. It would seem to me that the need to link cause and effect and make predictions could be more urgent in the material world - the world of weather, food seasonality, herds migrating, and so on. Why do you construct your model so that it moves from human intelligence outward to the natural world, rather than beginning with observations of the natural world and moving into the inter-human social realm?

She nodded. "Yep. That was the fastest yet you've figured it out."

Your dream reminds me of a fascinating story I heard on RadioLab about a woman with temporary amnesia. Do yourself a favor and skip the whole "Kristin Schall is a horse" part and hop forward to about 7:20. The woman in the story conducts the same conversation every two minutes or so, asking the same questions in the same order. She is somewhat aware that she's doing this, and that there are things she knows she can't remember and wants to remember, but can't get out of the script. It seems as though there's a path of facts that are necessary to recall in order to re-establish your narrative, and until she can solidly re-establish and retain those facts, she simply can't move on. The doctor describes a pattern that his practice is seeming to reveal, a pattern that people must go through, in order, to establish the basis of identity: "Where am I? and When am I?"

It occured to me that most of the experiences of our lives are forgotten. Our self-identity, as we consciously conceive it, is artificial in exactly the same sense as my dream.

At my job we are looking at a lot of current cognitive science as we redesign the museum and redevelop the interpretation. There's been some recent good theorizing about museums as places where people participate actively in identity making. People go to museums to do things like justify a worldview, commune with an imagined social past or a family past, reinforce or develop a set of personal tastes (defining what they like and don't like), create new conversational material, and not least because they like to tell themselves they are the kind of person that goes to museums. So we are wrapped up, by default, in this interior process of continuous identity construction. We have been discussing this question of the permanence - or permeability - of identity and of how it is that people direct their own identity making. Should museums endorse and facilitate this process? Or trouble, challenge and disrupt this process? Or both and if so, when to do which?

This idea of narrative, that identity is basically the sum of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, is pretty cool. This often seems to be so much the case in examples as in the story, or in other amnesias, or in memory loss. Identity is the sum of stories recalled in present mind. WE are not passive vessels of accumulated memory - instead, we actively choose which stories to "run" and hold closer to our definitions of ourselves, and which stories to distance or downplay in our creations of self.

It certainly raises the possibility that very little in us is essentialized. One interesting thing to look at, though, is how malleable identity is using this process. For instance, "pray away the gay" therapy that seeks to reassign sexual orientation does not seem to be successful, despite its efforts to replace "I'm gay" self-defining stories with "I'm straight" self-defining stories which amplify productive sexual experiences with the opposite sex. Why this doesn't work, is, I suppose, a big question. Is it because the full participation of the individual who "remembers" their default sexual orientation is not truly secure - that the complicating factor is conflicting internal desires - such as the desire to fit in as a straight person or the desire to act on your attraction? Or is it because there are certain components of identity which are not story-based, do not require a conscious narrative of self?

Miko: I agree with you that it's teleological but I wonder if you could talk more about how make the leap that that teleological tendency arises out of social intelligence and theory of mind.

I think that kmellis meant that ToM is a way of modeling others; understanding their needs and wants and dislikes etc. And applying that same kind of intelligence to the world you start to think of things in terms of actors who want something or don't want. Something that's very apparent with how we talk about technology. "The car doesn't want to start because it needs gasoline." is an example.
Similarly to this anthropomorphisation we tend to think of things as having a purpose, a goal. This reasoning works very well for our human surroundings but breaks down (imo) when you apply it to the cosmos. Or when you apply it to evolution.
Our brains are geared to ascribe motivations and goals even where they don't exist. It's how we understand things.

So ToM is a functional application of these analytical powers, but teleological understandings of cosmology or evolutionary psychology f.i. are misleading, and maybe inevitable, applications of these powers. And the teleological aspects should be considered taints.

Miko: This idea of narrative, that identity is basically the sum of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, is pretty cool.[...]It certainly raises the possibility that very little in us is essentialized.
Personally I believe that these auto narratives are post facto. And that they don't particularly influence our actions. I believe that very little of what we do and how we react to things is malleable. So I don't agree with you there.
Again; in the spiritual realm advice can be found that you are not your historical self. I'm not my education. Or my past accomplishments.
So in that sense there's even a school of thought that says that these auto narratives are figments of our imagination. Which in a literal sense they are I think.
But for a lot of people these auto narratives are extremely important. Laboriously polished and censored year after year. And when you threaten a story that somebody needs for their self image you can expect some pushback.

I think that kmellis meant that ToM is a way of modeling others; understanding their needs and wants and dislikes etc.

Yes, I understand what he's saying but I'm not sure there's evidence that teleological thinking begins with speculation about other's minds and proceeds only then to speculation about the natural world. In bringing up anthropomorphism you make a good case, though. However we don't have great evidence that early societies had anthropomorphic worldviews, though we know they were able to make predictions about natural conditions. Anthropomorphism seems to have arisen later, after (likely) animism which doesn't project a human-thought construct onto the world.

But for a lot of people these auto narratives are extremely important. Laboriously polished and censored year after year. And when you threaten a story that somebody needs for their self image you can expect some pushback.

That's definitely true, but it doesn't mean they are a part of an essential self - simply that that is the story held most closely right this moment. I can't agree with you that little about us is malleable, but you seem to be arguing that there is more of an essential self and that the stories are simply embroideries upon that reality. Yet it's quite clear that changes in thought patterns - essentially, changing what is weighed as important and remembered - can change mood and behavior.

And I think we have to look at cases of people with memory loss or permanent unconscious states for some understanding of what a 'self' is. Is what we see once memory and cognition are lost the essential self? To what extent is it even a self, if it's not conscious as a self? Do these selves have things like sexual orientation? An understanding of who they are in relation to others - the kind of thing which dictates the parameters of appropriate social interactions (parent, child, boss, employee, old, young)? Moods and obsessions that are consistent with the personality of the person pre-memory loss? It doesn't seem like these things persist in any appreciable pattern in these extreme cases. What of an essential self can possibly be there?

I wouldn't call it an essential self. The word 'self' for me smacks too much of a coherent essence.
Just that some tendencies and urges in the here and now are very stable. Unless you count psychopharmaca. And in respect to these tendencies and urges the narratives are only retrospective.
Of course that leaves room for socialisation; we suppress our tendencies and urges to a degree to get along.
But, to give you an example, I have a colleague who is detail- and structure-oriented. I can explain to him that a project is in a phase where that doesn't work so well. But for all intents and purposes it's just the kind of animal he is.
And the same holds for me I'm sure.

Kmellis, when is the last time you experienced deja vu? In general, people stop having it after full brain development so the incidence of it goes way down after your 20s.
There is lots of evidence supporting jouke's post facto thinking. Some people find that profoundly disturbing.

Clearly, no one is interested in the question, but there are lots of people without noted disorders who simply do not believe that other people do not think the way that they do. The realization that people do not all think like them can be an earth shattering revelation or something they never quite accept, they just think there is something "weird" or "wrong" with these people and discount them. How much does this have to do with ToM? It's complicated, just like self awareness and consciouness. They are related, they inform each other (note the anthropomorphization, I think there is a higher tendency to do this when explaining something to others when you can't break it down in terminology for the purpose of communication) but they are not just aspects and facets of each other in the sense of existing.
A lot of what we think of as consciousness is in a sense verbal or related to communication and in a sense what we tell ourselves, but the brain is ever changing depending on how we use it. Knowing you think and what you think of yourself are very different areas, talking about it from the angle in which I was asking.

What I find interesting here is how you two are exhibiting different aspects of what I am assuming to be a function of ToM I was wondering about.

One of the big problems in discussing "sense of self" or "identity" or "consciousness" or anything in this range is these terms shift dramatically in definition depending on how you are discussing them and in what vein, by what theory, etc. which is what makes it difficult to search.
"Self," "personality," "consciousness," "identity" break down into different elements that we conceive of as a whole depending on how you want to talk about them that is also very dependent in the fact you want to communicate about them.
So far, it is assumed that conscious thought and memories originate in what amount to the ability to articulate them to ourselves or others. How you understand ToM or identity speaks very much to your ToM and identity, etc. and this changes in the process of communication, whether to yourself or others.
I'm currently trying to understand things from a psychobiological standpoint, but I think I still have an article that you may need database access to find about how fragmentary the elements of what you think of as a "self" are and the moment by moment construction of it in terms of conscious awareness.
Also, I've been going through old radiolabs and TALs lately and there are a variety that approach memory.
What is known about memory is growing and changing all the time, and in a lot of ways, there isn't all that much we do know about it. And this is hard to discuss because it breaks down types and elements of memory.
All these things we are trying to discuss are about a wide variety of different things working together in a certain way to create a phenomenon and most of what we assume to be valid comes from what happens when things stop working.

I agree with you that it's teleological but I wonder if you could talk more about how make the leap that that teleological tendency arises out of social intelligence and theory of mind. It would seem to me that the need to link cause and effect and make predictions could be more urgent in the material world - the world of weather, food seasonality, herds migrating, and so on. Why do you construct your model so that it moves from human intelligence outward to the natural world, rather than beginning with observations of the natural world and moving into the inter-human social realm?

Then, later:

Yes, I understand what he's saying but I'm not sure there's evidence that teleological thinking begins with speculation about other's minds and proceeds only then to speculation about the natural world.

I'm not sure what you're saying, because I think that there's almost an overabundance of evidence that teleological thinking beings with speculation about other's minds. That is to say, this is a human cognitive developmental universal.

Just to be clear, because it's possible that there's some confusion of terminology here, but teleology is a comprehension derived from an ascertaining of purpose. In Greek philosophy, this is understood as the telos, often translated as "that for the sake of which". It's not simply connecting cause-and-effect. It's understanding a cause as the necessary antecedent to achieve a desired effect. A cosmological teleology, such as Aristotle conceived, would understand the cosmos as, first, its (desired/necessary) end state, and then, second, all the sequence of event necessary to achieve it.

Teleological thinking is thinking about the "why" of things. Children ask "why?", not "how?", and that's significant.

A modern example, for instance, is that recent noxious essay, "What are women for?"

It's quite a good question to ask: why should anything necessarily need to be "for" something? Why should every event be presumed to have occurred to achieve some ultimate purpose?

But while that's a good question, it's a question that many people, and many cultures, just don't really take seriously. I think there's a very strong case to be made that the default assumption is almost always "everything happens for a purpose". That's a common saying. It's a saying that comforts people.

Now, what evidence is there that this is prior in human cognition? Well, it's not entirely prior, of course. Looking at cognitive development, what happens first is a simple conditioned association of cause-and-effect. It's arguable, by the way, whether this is a rational comprehension at all, and not mere conditioning. But, for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that it is some rudimentary reasoning. Y proceeds from X, therefore X causes Y. I'll grant that babies achieve this (or almost-this as mere conditioning; but, again, let's assume some rational faculty involved).

But it's clearly very rudimentary. And, far more than any other thing in its environment, babies are focused on other people. Especially its caregivers.

The thing is, the next and very important stage of development is the creation of a theory of mind. I don't agree with the idea that ToM, as a cognitive tool (as opposed to instantiations of its usage), is integral, that it's either there or not-there. As I wrote earlier, I think it has some important core features that are qualitative and are necessary conditions for it. But I think it's more a modeling process that can be more or less sophisticated.

If our cognition wasn't primarily social, there wouldn't be the severe cognitive defects associated with social neglect during that crucial developmental stage. But there are. Language acquisition absolutely requires social interaction during that stage. But there are other cognitive impairments that occur to children that don't exist within a social environment (and here I mean social in its most basic sense: frequent interaction with at least one other individual).

I do think that people on the AS have impaired ToM, but I don't think they lack them. I don't think that the fact that developmental human cognition builds a ToM is a necessary consequence of social interaction, I think that, like language, it's a cognitive ability we've evolved to possess that requires a social environment to develop, but that it's not wholly, or even essentially, a product of socialization, rather, its essential features are evolved. This is a pretty accurate view of human language as we know it scientifically today; and I think human language is an extremely good example for what ToM probably is. Not coincidentally: I think the two co-evolved and are deeply interwoven with each other.

The most important cognitive tasks for young children is to understand their environment, and their environment is overwhelmingly a human social environment. Almost everything that happens to a young child that's dependent upon its caregivers serves human purposes, human needs (including its own). This is why developing a capacity for ToM, and instantiating versions of it, is crucial.

Everything that's essential and fundamental to human rational cognition is present in, say, a normally developing four-year-old. Many, many nuances aren't there, to be sure. But pretty much what we understand of ourselves as thinking creatures, is.

And I'm claiming (not the first to do so) that pretty much this reasoning, this more complete ability to comprehend the environment, is the product of a combination of language acquisition and theory of mind.

So, yeah: I think that because human cognition evolved within the context of the human social environment, and we can see this recapitulated (and, no, I'm only slyly referencing the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" fallacy, not endorsing it) in individual human development, I believe that teleological thinking forms the foundation of human reasoning. Because, although I've not said it explicitly, the best way to predict the actions of other people is to understand their motivations. What is the purpose they're trying to achieve?

I don't want to repeat things I wrote earlier, but I think intuit that people reading this will want to object, pointing out that we frequently do crap jobs of understanding and then predicting the actions of other people, of comprehending their motivations. And this is true. But it's only relatively true. We do crappy jobs of this relative to our expectation of actually knowing what is going on inside someone's head. Which is unrealistic. Again, we aren't that great at modeling ourselves, and we have far more access to information about our own inner states than we ever do, or could, have about anyone else. So, relative to perfection, it's true: we suck at this. But relative to knowing nothing? Or, more to the point, knowing only what we could know about what other people will do based upon correlating past observed events? By the standard, we do quite well.

Not to mention that human language can't really function as communication without a capacity for theory of mind. (Whether or not any possible language could exist without requiring a functioning ToM in its speaker is another, highly speculative, matter that I don't wish to pursue at this time.) At the very least, a very large portion of how we actually use language is to signal to others (truthfully or falsely) our motivations, feeding into their ToM of ourselves.

Anyway, ToM serves us well, all in all. It's our most powerful foundational tool in our cognitive toolkit. So I think it's natural and inevitable that we apply it to everything, not just other people.

Again, think about natural phenomena. You objected to my assertion about teleological thinking by seeing it as almost the same thing as anthropomorphisation. But it's not. It does share something essential: the idea that there are goals. But you don't need to anthropomorphize to attribute the existence of goals to the natural world. (I guess the people that would disagree with me are the hardcore anthropocentrics who see cognition in toto to a goal-making, exclusively human enterprise and thus see other animals,and anything and everything, as being automatons that might appear to have goals and attempt to achieve them, but that's just anthropomorphisation. Say, the extreme behaviorists. I think those people took a very good cautionary idea to an absurd logical extreme, and that's what I think of people who see other animals as machines to which we falsely attribute any form of consciousness.)

Anyway, a non-anthropomorphic teleology would be this sequence: "Why does it rain?" "So that the grass and trees have water to grow, and the animals and us have water to drink." Much thinking about the natural world involves exactly this sort of thing. Why does something happen? Because it's necessary for some other (desirable) thing to happen. Desirable to whom? That's a good question, and where some anthropocentricism comes in, admittedly.

Perhaps the way I worded it earlier was misleading. Teleological thinking isn't simply and merely presuming a goal, and then working backwards. Of course not: usually, we don't have a goal, but behavior/events, and we reason forward to a goal we presume exists, guess at one based upon how this behavior/events is similar to past observed known goal-seeking behavior, and then, once we think we understand that goal, we then go the other way, re-comprehending all the behaviors we've seen in that light. And, thus, we have a model of a particular behavior. A model that we believe describes that other person's ToM. And we use it to predict their next behavior as they attempt to achieve that goal we've supposed. When our model fails, we refine it.

That it's not really and entirely starting from an assumed telos and working backwards, that this is a vast oversimplification, is a very nice parallel to how people generally think about empiricism, which makes the same mistake from the other direction. Scientific empiricism is not, as we were all taught, the Scientific Method. Scientists don't actually reason this way. They no more reason that way than anyone could actually reason according the oversimplified teleological way, either. Both reasoning methods involve a moving forward and backward along these chains of causation, where what we think we better understand as we do informs how we reconstruct those links as we move in either direction.

But the fundamental difference is that teleological reasoning assumes that in the most essential sense, things happen in order to achieve some goal. Empiricism doesn't. (But it can in a limited sense! When it's appropriate! Such as...when there are actually goal-seeking agents involved in the causation.)

This assumption that there's a goal at the bottom of things is problematic because, when there's not, the assumption of any particular goal injects a bias in the chain or reasoning. And, often with natural philosophy, it injects a very strong bias that turns out to be very, very wrong.

One way of understanding the development of scientific empiricism is as discipline of reasoning, in both the individual and institutional contexts, that minimizes as much as possible (up to and including its elimination entirely) teleological bias. And this is very interesting for many, many reasons. One of them, as I wrote, is that this is difficult for us, because we don't naturally think that way. Arguably, we can't think that way. I think this is an important thing to consider. It may be that most of the heavy-lifting of scientific empiricism in resisting teleological bias comes in institutional, methodological forms, and not in the practice of cognition of individual scientists.

Kmellis, when is the last time you experienced deja vu? In general, people stop having it after full brain development so the incidence of it goes way down after your 20s.

Now that you mention it, it's been a long time. I've not heard about this developmental theory about it, but I'll provisionally take your word for it.

Jouke wrote:

Personally I believe that these auto narratives are post facto. And that they don't particularly influence our actions. I believe that very little of what we do and how we react to things is malleable. So I don't agree with you there.

Then, ethylene wrote:

There is lots of evidence supporting jouke's post facto thinking. Some people find that profoundly disturbing.

I think both of you are somewhat overstating this. I think this is kind of an overreaction, or perhaps just a framing thing, based upon how much people intuitively believe, and how much it's common wisdom, that the things we do are mostly willed and mostly the product of our conscious desires and expression of our self as we understand ourselves. Which is sort of a myth, because we don't will nearly as much as we think we do, nor are our desires nearly what we think they are, nor do we express those desires as willed actions nearly as much as we think we do.

But none of that is to say that we don't, relative to being automatons with no self-awareness, act the way that we think we act.

One of the things that bothers me a bit about how I am assuming you're thinking about this, Jouke, is that it seems to me that both you and ethylene are still building into your comprehension a lot of dualist ideas about human consciousness. That is to say, that's there, over here, this distinct thing which is our self-experience, and, over there, that distinct thing which is what we actually do. I don't think they are distinct. I don't think any of this is distinct. I reject dualism, and not just metaphysical dualism, but its physicalist heirs, almost entirely.

I think that there's many reasons why we do the things we do, and among them include our self-awareness and identities. I think our ToM of ourselves influences the things that feed into it, and they influence it, and so on. In the same sense that the whole self, I think, is a synthetic product of our ToM applied to ourselves in conjunction with how we experience memory, I think that the way in which we experience our expression of choice, and, indeed, completely random behavior, is that it's incorporated into our model of ourselves. In the same way that we can't really differentiate between stuff we'd call "noise" and actual decisions motivated by goalseeking, when we observe other people, I don't think we're very good at differentiating it in ourselves, either. In fact, we may be incapable of it, entirely. In a way, you can think about our ToMs in general as like genetic algorithms. Of course, now I'm sounding like the behaviorists I mocked, so I should be careful here.

But, yeah, we basically create stories about our past selves that create order out of chaos. But then, that's what storytelling is. I'm suddenly running up on a discussion I was having about a Language Log post yesterday, about what it means to write non-fiction narratives. Of course, I'm not a relativist. But our storytelling about even true events inevitably suffers from making things more true, more comprehensible, than they actually ever are. And fiction? Well, outside of a very few writers, such as Tolstoy, I've hardly ever encountered a fictional character that wasn't wildly more comprehensible in his/her motives and character than any person I've ever known in real life, including myself. We clean up our stories about other people. We make them more comprehensible than they really are. And, yes, indeed, we do this about our understanding of ourselves.

You objected to my assertion about teleological thinking by seeing it as almost the same thing as anthropomorphisation. But it's not.

I thought that's what you were suggesting, but I accept now that it wasn't. What hung me up was where you asserted things like:

because this forms the core of our cognition, this is why our comprehension of the universe is essentially teleological.

While this may be true now for the general run of humanity, and your clarification of what teleogy includes beyond observable cause and affect is helpful, I am not sure I accept it was always true, that human conception of the world was and is always one of discerning a purpose as though there was always a purpose to be discerned. Discerning a pattern is sufficient for survival. The same is even true of those infants you mention who require a social environment to survive. They do, because their needs must be met -- but they don't require a ToM to survive. They require only, as you say, the ability to trigger the response that will result in continued survival. Not only is anthropomorphism not required, any idea of purpose is also not required. Things don't need to have a purpose if they are observable, predictable phenomena.

In short, I resist this idea that a theory of mind is necessary to build a working model of the world in which to live, either as an infant or as an adult. The existence of adults with impairments in this area who cannot theorize about others' purposes is evidence for the case: they may not have what some of the rest of us deem a "full" or "healthy" existence, but they have an existence nonetheless. They don't perish; they can make predictions and manipulate the world's conditions to meet their needs.

I can accept what you offer, that it's near-universal and a default thinking strategy, but I don't think I agree with what you seem to be asserting: that it's prior, a necessary precondition of workable model building. Important, frequent, yes. Common, yes. Strongly prejudicial, yes.

But I would take more seriously the question of "why should there be a purpose?" because I'm personally not sure that, in the absence of the acculturated view that beings and things can be said to have purposes, there is a purpose to be perceived or discovered in the natural world. Cause and effect, yes, ultimate purpose, seemingly absent from empirical evidence. So fundamentally, it's an erroneous extrapolation which of course does make science a difficult discipline. I think when you call it a "bias" you are closer to something that makes sense to me.

But I would stop far short of "we can't think that way," because many of us do, and I'd also stop short of saying that we owe working models of the world to this thinking, because I don't see how this thinking - attributing purpose - can ever create an actual, usable working model of the world.

Also, I've been going through old radiolabs and TALs lately and there are a variety that approach memory.
What is known about memory is growing and changing all the time, and in a lot of ways, there isn't all that much we do know about it. And this is hard to discuss because it breaks down types and elements of memory.

If you haven't read anything by Harvard memory researcher Daniel Schacter, you should. You're right that we know little about memory, but that's relative to the fact that we've known basically nothing at all while assuming we knew everything. But in the last thirty years, there's been some great research into memory and we know a lot more about it than we used to. And it's not really closely conforming to intuition about it.

Where I talk about this publicly a lot is with regard to plagiarism, where how memory actually functions and what is possible is very different from the assumptions people bring to bear on how they understand plagiarism.

And this is hard to discuss because it breaks down types and elements of memory.

Right, and that's very important. Memory is better understood as a related group of functional cognitive units that most likely correspond to neuroanatomy.

I'm bowing out of this discussion.
Have fun.

Yes, I understand what he's saying but I'm not sure there's evidence that teleological thinking begins with speculation about other's minds and proceeds only then to speculation about the natural world.

Rereading your objection, I think I may have a bit better understanding of where you're going with this.

Well, here we're moving into dangerous territory of evolutionary psychology. Nevertheless, I guess I'd say that the sort of cause-and-effect reasoning you're discussing is pretty much necessary for any animal that uses a lot of cognition with which to interact with its environment. So, certainly, I would agree that adaptability in the form of recognizing and remembering cause-and-effect would necessary play a prior role in an evolving animal intelligence in a certain kind of environment. Which is almost certainly the kind of environment human evolved within. (But it's not the only one possible! I can imagine some environments being primarily social prior to any need for the cause-and-effect kind of cognitive ability you're discussing. In a social insect environment, where for the individual the context is primarily social and if the greater environment were to slowly change so as to require some adapatable individual cognition involving that environment, it might piggyback on top of that, rather than the other way around like we're assuming for humans.)

Anyway, I guess my point is that I think that most "higher" animals all share this sort of reasoning. It's prior, but ubiquitous and not that essential to the advanced cognition of humans that we might called abstracted modeling. And that advanced cognition, I propose, is a product of human social intelligence and in this sense, it's prior to all human models of natural behavior (not just at the cultural context, but in the individual context of cognition, too).

In short, I resist this idea that a theory of mind is necessary to build a working model of the world in which to live, either as an infant or as an adult. The existence of adults with impairments in this area who cannot theorize about others' purposes is evidence for the case: they may not have what some of the rest of us deem a "full" or "healthy" existence, but they have an existence nonetheless. They don't perish; they can make predictions and manipulate the world's conditions to meet their needs.

I guess where we differ here is that I think you're not quite getting what it would really mean to not think at all teleologically and to not at all have a ToM. In all your examples, I see something that is "impaired" relative to the human norm, but I don't see an absence. As I alluded, I think I could make a strong argument that it's impossible to understand a typical sentence of a natural human language without some theory of mind. One that's not typical? Sure. One that's functionally diminished relative to what's typical? Sure. The absence of one entirely? No, I don't think so.

The same is even true of those infants you mention who require a social environment to survive. They do, because their needs must be met -- but they don't require a ToM to survive. They require only, as you say, the ability to trigger the response that will result in continued survival.

It's not because their needs won't be met, it's because in the absence of the interaction itself, their brains don't develop the functional capabilities of normal human brain. It's not just different, it's a genuine impairment. Again, I think the model for this is language acquisition. No one has ever matured in the total absence of language and has demonstrated full competence at language acquired (long) after that crucial developmental period. And case studies of the very, very few "wild humans" who grew up outside of human contact (and the fact that's there so few is very telling, I think) show profound cognitive impairment. It's not just that it's there but hasn't developed because these cognitive skills are social skills, it's that this development is programmed evolutionary to develop in human brains in the context of a social environment. This is the contemporary scientific understanding of human language. It is biological, it's an evolutionary product, its fundamentals are encoded in our genome, but that facility for language cannot grow outside of a language environment.

I'm not saying that cognition isn't possible without a ToM. I think it is. But I'm also not saying that anything less powerful than the typical human ToM is the equivalence of a complete lack of a ToM. In fact, I'm reluctant to go into any detail about the area between the two, because my strong sense is that it's complex. As I said, I do think there very likely is a few things qualitatively unique and necessary for a ToM. But I also think a lot of it is just quantitative. And I'm very undercertain about what those qualitative things are, or how they interact with everything else. I just don't really want to speculate about marginal cases.

However, I will mention that there's a nice example of some of the things that are going on with our favorite companion animals. Dogs are far more social animals than are cats, and are far more like humans in this respect. And while I'm not at all willing to say that cats don't have ToM, or that they don't apply one (if they have it) to humans, I will assert that it's less powerful than is dogs', or at the very least much less applicable to humans. The canonical example is that dogs read human facial expressions and cats don't. Now, of course, you could just say that's an evolutionary product of their being domesticated. But, putting that aside, it's clear that a dog has some capacity for inferring states of mind of humans and what that represents for possible future actions by that human. Cats have a much weaker capacity for this. They don't read human facial expressions, but let's put that aside. Another example that comes to mind is the pointing thing. A cat will always look at your finger when you point, because a cat will never be able to interpret that as you intend it. Many dogs can, and will.

I don't know where exactly we're diverging on this. I have some sense it may be at some level of deep disagreement about what human cognition is and therefore what cognition itself is. I'm not saying that humans necessarily have ToM because an individual human couldn't survive without it, because that would be assuming several different things about humans and cognition that I don't accept. I'm saying that there's lots of reasons to believe that the specific example of advanced cognitive abilities in the human species are the result of a combination of that cognition evolving in the context of both an environment that selected for advanced cognitive abilities and that this environment was at the same time, very social with regard to other individual humans. This meant that a lot of our cognitive ability was selected for modeling the behavior of others, and specifically other humans. I completely and enthusiastically agree with both of the fundamental assumptions of evolutionary psychology (even though I disagree with much of its actual practice): that human cognition is not a general purpose computational machine, but rather a bundle of cognitive tools in a toolkit; and second, that these cognitive tools evolved in a specific environment for which they were selected. The point is that rational thought, cognition, and all that are supersets of which human cognition is just a specific example (and which the cognition of human individuals are themselves just specific examples). I'm not saying we necessarily think teleologically because we necessarily have ToM, but rather that we contingently are a species which thinks teleologically because we contingently have ToM, and that because this happens to be so, we necessarily think teleologically because we're not capable of thinking otherwise.

and I'd also stop short of saying that we owe working models of the world to this thinking, because I don't see how this thinking - attributing purpose - can ever create an actual, usable working model of the world.

For what meaning of "usable"? Epiricism is the exception, not the norm, and there are countless examples of teleological models of the cosmos, both historical and present, of whose adherents would argue otherwise. And even I would argue otherwise, because I think those models usually work well enough for most purposes.

Again, a teleology is no more a pristine arguing backward from a purpose one assumes ex nihilo, than is empiricism an arguing from evidence to a causal relationship one finds purely from induction. Both are models that are so idealized as to be almost meaningless. In practice, both methods are cyclic affairs, going back and forth along these chains. The essential difference is that one model, teleology, sees the goal as the "final cause" of all that precedes it. Empiricism doesn't (though it doesn't rule that out as a possibility; it just does assume that as something built-in). So, in practice, people that practice a teleological understanding of the natural world end up fiddling with their models until they become predictive enough for their purposes, even when the goal the assume exists, doesn't.

it's because in the absence of the interaction itself, their brains don't develop the functional capabilities of normal human brain.

Seems like something reifying itself, then. We define the capabilities of a functional human brain as what most of us do, and reject as non-functional or non-human what other people or species do.

I don't know where exactly we're diverging on this.

I don't really know either; a lot of what you're saying has lost me, mainly because I don't understand what you mean in some components of your argument, like this:

I'm not saying we necessarily think teleologically because we necessarily have ToM, but rather that we contingently are a species which thinks teleologically because we contingently have ToM, and that because this happens to be so, we necessarily think teleologically because we're not capable of thinking otherwise.

But really, I'm OK with that, because I don't actually derive that much enjoyment out of this sort of conversation - I'm much more interested in learning enough to manipulate outcomes for people encountering information (what we term 'learning') and less in how things got to be that way.

I'm just questioning that it's this capability called theory of mind that gave rise to the ability in humans and other species to make predictions about nature. It just seems unproven. You're right about language acquisition and social behavior and all that, of course, but I don't follow you when you leap from there to asserting that because ToM is necessary to acquiring all of that socially built intelligence, therefore all constructions of the natural world arise from ToM and are thus teleological because we can't think non-teleologically. That argument seems to require itself.

If cats have less of this ability cats should be less able to predict mealtime, but they're not. They may not read my facial expressions, but they know when I sit up in bed first thing in the morning that it's time to run to the dish. I understand this concept likely has a lot to do with our thinking but I'm not sure I see enough here to accept that it underlies all ability to perceive and predict connected phenomena.

We might not be diverging at all; I don't know because I'm kind of having trouble tracking the thread anyhow.

For what meaning of "usable"?

Oh, forgot this bit - I was thinking for survival long enough to reproduce.

I'm just questioning that it's this capability called theory of mind that gave rise to the ability in humans and other species to make predictions about nature .

Ah. I'm not saying that ToM is necessary to make predictions about nature. I'm certainly not saying that if other species lack a ToM, then they cannot reason about the natural world.

My argument is that in human beings specifically, our ToM is too fundamental to our particular variety of reasoning for us to not reason in a way that is pretty much always inflected by teological reasoning. It could have been otherwise.

So when I write, as you paraphrase, that our ToM "gave rise" to our ability to make predictions about nature, I'm not saying that ToM is a necessary cause for predictions about nature, categorically. Rather, I'm just describing a contingent evolutionary sequence that characterizes the nature of human intelligence, specifically its limitations. I use the word necessarily in a sentence like "humans necessarily think teleogically" like I'd use it in the sentence "humans necessarily experience temperature as two independent sensations" not that it's impossible for temperature to be experienced otherwise because of the nature of temperature (which, as it happens, is of course not two qualitatively distinct things).

We define the capabilities of a functional human brain as what most of us do

No, that's not correct. In the absence of any sort of other empirical evidence, that is how we'd necessarily define those capabilities. And, historically, that's how we did. This is very much less true today and, specifically in the context in which I was discussing, such as language acquisition, this idea of impairment is no longer a socially normative idea, but (almost certainly, there's tons of evidence) a fact of biology.

If cats have less of this ability cats should be less able to predict mealtime, but they're not. They may not read my facial expressions, but they know when I sit up in bed first thing in the morning that it's time to run to the dish.

Again, I'm not saying that modeling cause-and-effect requires a robust ToM, or even a ToM at all. I do think that cats have a limited ToM, but it's limited enough relative to ours, and dogs', that they cannot make predictions on the basis of modeling our intentions and making predictions on that basis to the degree to which even dogs can, much less other humans; and that's why, as an example, they don't read facial expressions and they don't look where fingers are pointing. They are quite adept at modeling most other cause-and-effect processes, though. And they can accomplish much of what a robust ToM accomplishes through other means. It's probably more work for them than is optimal, and I wouldn't be surprised if cat domestication isn't selecting for the development of a more robust feline ToM, particularly with regard to its ability to model human cognition.

Cats are endlessly fascinating to me because the fact that they aren't primarily social animals, like humans and dogs, is extremely revealing about humans, dogs, cats, and social reasoning. I personally think this is precisely a big part of the appeal of cats to people, even though people may not think of this in these terms. Cats are sort of like us, but also different enough, to be surprising and just deeply fascinating. That is, if you're the type who can get over the fact that cats just aren't going to relate to you the way other humans do and the way that dogs do. This is most obvious with regard to hierarchical/dominance relationships, of course, and I think this has a lot to do with the differential relative appeal of cats to men and women. (Mind, I'm not assuming that gender differences between human males and females with regard to cognition and behavior in the context of hierarchical/dominance relationships is inherently biological.)

My own experience as a cat owner is that cats, in the absence of being able to rely upon a robust ToM to understand their owners, compensate for this by being exquisistely sensitive to simple correlation. Dogs are, well, sloppy compared to cats because they're utilizing a rich, complex, and unfortunately also continuously varying set of social signals as the input to their ToM...not without simply being sensitive to sinple correlation, of course. But because they have that ToM with which they can work with all that data, like humans ourselves they not infrequently get caught up in ambiguous interpretations of all that data. Cats, not so much. Cats are, as I wrote, exquisitely sensitive to simple correlation. In my experience, so sensitive that it can be a little eerie. My previous cat, Simone, was one of those grouchy, standoffish cats who doesn't want to be petted or held, and yet develops an intense bond (and arm's length) with her owner. So, back in 2002, when I first discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer and began watching two episodes back to back every afternoon, Simone would place herself within a few feet of me, as she always did, in this case on the arm of the couch.

Well, because it's difficult for me because of my disability to reach the floor (difficult doesn't capture it; impossible is more the truth), from the first day I couldn't resist the temptation, when I got up after the second episode ended, of reaching down to Simone and, well, picking her up. Because I really want to hold my cat(s), even when they don't feel the same way about it. Well, by just Day Three of this, Simone would jump off the arm of the couch right as I shifted my position to get up. But by just the next day, Day Four? She amazingly, seemingly, recognized the end credits theme song--for the second epsisode, not the first, though they were the same--and before I moved a muscle, not my hand to pick up the remote, nothing at all, she'd jump up. Just as if she recognized the second end credits theme song for what it represented. Which, honestly, I don't see how that's possible. I do think that a combination of things that I, myself, wasn't aware of could collectively signal to her that I was imminently about to stand up. Like I mentioned Clever Hans in your thread. I think that Simone recognized the end credits song, but that's not all. I also think, mostly, that my body somehow changed position, or my breathing, or where I was looking, or all the above. Whatever it was, she was mind-bogglingly attuned to it, after only three days.

Muncie, my current cat, isn't quite the prodigy. But while she, too, doesn't like me to pick her up, she does, unlike Simone, deeply enjoy attention from me. Just not the picking her up in my arms variety. She's weirdly, unusually, conditioned by positive reinforcement in the form of affection from me, far more than I've ever heard of in another cat. So what she does, is she's attuned to every single one of my activities here in my apartment within the context of whether that means I will likely reach down and pet her (but not pick her up). She, too, often likes to be nearby, but she spends a fair bit of time in the living room when, for example, I'm on my PC in the bedroom. But, regardless, she will literally come running instantly when I do certain things (which she hears). When I'm finishing being on my PC, I turn off my monitor. And, presumably, I reach forward in my tilting chair to do so. Whatever it is, that's all it takes. I just reach forward, for all I know even before I actually push that button, and she comes running from the other room, even if she was comfortably sleeping. It's weird. I go into the bathroom? She comes running. I sit down on my bed? She comes running. Hell, I can call her like a dog and she'll come running. Which is very cool, by the way, and makes me feel loved.

For all that, there's lots of times that she feels very much like an alien mind to me. But that's the fun and beauty of living with a cat.