[dwaltrip]

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.

[Nevermark]

That is a pretty good TLDR, in fact I think its better than the whole article.

But heuristics are real things and I have never heard any claims that "Theory of Mind" assumed some particular neural circuit implementation.

So there is a false dichotomy if the article is to be interpreted as pitting "Theory of Mind" against evidence that it isn't a simple circuit.

I don't think the article can be reduced to anything that actually makes sense.

[igolden]

Thank you!