Humans have this seemingly innate or nearly innate theory of mind, where the beliefs and desires of other people can be reasoned about in an effort to understand or predict their behavior.
A few key neuroscience results suggest that the brain does not really work how the "theory of mind" has us think it should. The concepts of belief and desire that we use in our theory of mind, may actually just be crude heuristics that were useful at some point in our evolutionary past, but don't actually have explanatory power in the way most humans naturally try to apply them today.
I don't really know how strong this idea is. I think it is fairly speculative in these early days of research.
My summary l may have a bit of extra color. I listened to Sean Carroll's podcast with the article author, where this same topic was a big part of the conversation.
My favorite parts touch on how thoughts projected out of neural firings do not describe the cause of those firings. I think.
I imagine planting bread crumbs after already walking a trail, as a best guess narrative of where I walked and why.
> What makes some neural firings [semantically significant] is just their place in the causal chain, the pathway to further behavior. Rats choose among alternative pathways as a result of neural firings produced by previous experience. But it’s not because these neuron circuits contain statements about anything.
> By colonizing consciousness, spoken language turned [consciousness] into a monologue of silent speech, tricking us that the meaning of spoken words is given by thoughts’ content when its just silent sounds passing through consciousness. Neuroscience shows that that in our brains the neural circuits neither have nor need content to do their jobs.
China will create designer babies with extremely high IQ (150%+). There will be no way for the rest of the world to compete using good old fashioned nature, so they either become irrelevant, serfs, or also start using in-vitro CRISPR editing. This will lead to AGI in a single generation (so about 30-40 years).
arbitrarily concludes that a mechanistic understanding of the brain is "a threat" to our "distinctiveness" i.e. we are not unicorns anymore. zero-information garbage if you ask me
A few key neuroscience results suggest that the brain does not really work how the "theory of mind" has us think it should. The concepts of belief and desire that we use in our theory of mind, may actually just be crude heuristics that were useful at some point in our evolutionary past, but don't actually have explanatory power in the way most humans naturally try to apply them today.
I don't really know how strong this idea is. I think it is fairly speculative in these early days of research.
My summary l may have a bit of extra color. I listened to Sean Carroll's podcast with the article author, where this same topic was a big part of the conversation.