I guess I would draw a different conclusion than “I just think differently to most others”. An equally valid hypothesis would be that you have a limited internal model of how other people think, and so can not intuitively grasp why they do what they do, or what they think about. This might even be a facet of a typical mind, considering how often communication (or the lack thereof) leads to relationship woes.
If they thought just like him, his own mind would have always been a fine model of what others thought, as long as he had similar contextual knowledge.
I’m not so sure. Do we even model ourselves correctly, most of the time? I think it’s a faulty assumption to conclude we models themselves correctly. I suspect that there are frequent times we do not understand our own thoughts, or can not trace the origins of thoughts, at least not easily. At least, this is the case with myself. If this is the case, then if our own mental model of ourselves is incomplete or imperfect, our models of others should be at least as bad.
I’m not sure this is so easy—people’s self-simulations aren’t that reliable, are they? Running a sandboxed version of yourself on a brain isn’t so trivial.
I guess I would draw a different conclusion than “I just think differently to most others”. An equally valid hypothesis would be that you have a limited internal model of how other people think, and so can not intuitively grasp why they do what they do, or what they think about. This might even be a facet of a typical mind, considering how often communication (or the lack thereof) leads to relationship woes.
If they thought just like him, his own mind would have always been a fine model of what others thought, as long as he had similar contextual knowledge.
I’m not so sure. Do we even model ourselves correctly, most of the time? I think it’s a faulty assumption to conclude we models themselves correctly. I suspect that there are frequent times we do not understand our own thoughts, or can not trace the origins of thoughts, at least not easily. At least, this is the case with myself. If this is the case, then if our own mental model of ourselves is incomplete or imperfect, our models of others should be at least as bad.
You don’t have to model you, you simply have to execute you.
“If I were in his place, what would I do?”
That’s a very easy and natural thing for us to do. It’s not a matter of understanding the code, you just have to run it.
I’m not sure this is so easy—people’s self-simulations aren’t that reliable, are they? Running a sandboxed version of yourself on a brain isn’t so trivial.