An accessible piece; an excerpt:
We’ve built our cultural, legal and political institutions on this theory that people’s actions are caused by choices made rational in the light of their beliefs and their desires....
But here’s the problem: the theory of mind we call carry around with us and use every day has no basis in what neuroscience—Nobel Prize winning neuroscience–tell us about how the brain works. Neuroscience has revealed that the theory is quite as much of a dead end as Ptolemaic astronomy. It’s been around for such a longtime only because it was the predictive device natural selection came up with, in spite of being fundamentally mistaken about how things were really arranged.
Eric Kandel, John O’Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, won Nobel prizes in 2000 and 2014 for experiments that showed exactly how the brain records information. Their work revealed it doesn’t do it in anything like the way the theory of mind says it does—in statements that represent the way the world is (beliefs) and ones that represent the way we want things to be (desires). This research program began with HM, the patient famous for being unable to acquire or store beliefs because of a lobotomy that went wrong and destroyed his hippocampus. The irony of this research is that it ended up showing that no ones’ brain acquires, stores, and uses information in the form of beliefs and desires....
But conscious experience is continually shouting out that belief/desire psychology is exactly how the mind does work. Introspection all by itself seems to refute the notion that we don’t have beliefs and desires with content that represent what we want and what’s available to attain our wants.
Alas, ever since Freud psychologists have diagnosed the illusions, delusions and confabulations in the mind’s eye and the mind’s ear, in the flow of experiences, feelings and sensations passing through consciousness. The theory of mind is just another one of these illusions, useful for survival and success in the Pleistocene, but a blunt instrument of limited predictive and explanatory power. It emerged out of the more fundamental mind-reading ability we share with other species and used to track predators and prey, threats and opportunities. That undoubtedly inborn ability combined with our unique gift, language, to generate the theory of mind. By colonizing consciousness spoken language turned it 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.
Thoughts from readers knowledgeable about this research?
