http://www.autism-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TOM-in-TD-and-ASD.pdf
This test was also originally devised by Wellman and Estes, and involves asking the child what the brain is for. They found that *normal 3-4 year olds already know that the brain has a set of mental functions*, such as dreaming, wanting, thinking, keeping secrets, etc., Some also knew it had physi cal functions (such as making you move, or helping you stay alive, etc.). In contrast , *children with autism (but who again had a mental age above a 4 year old level) appear to know about the physical functions, but typically fail to mention any mental function of the brain* (Baron-Cohen, 1989a) This paper on autism and theory of mind really shines a light on the most intractable problem within philosophy of mind. In particular ...children from about the age of 4 years old normally are able to distinguish between appearance and reality, that is, they can talk about objects which have misleading appearances. For example, they may say, when presented with *a candle fashioned in the shape of an apple,* that it looks like an apple but is really a candle. C*hildren with autism*, presented with the 5 same sorts of tests, tend to commit errors of realism, *saying the object really is an apple, or really is a candle, but do not capture the object’s dual identity* in their spontaneous descriptions (Baron-Cohen, 1989a). This cartoon from a Psychology Today <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/aspergers-diary/200805/empathy-mindblindness-and-theory-mind> article illustrates the kinds of tests that show whether children have developed what is called a theory of mind; an understanding of the contents of other people's experience: "Children with autism are virtually at chance on this test, as likely to indicate one character as the other when asked “Which one knows what’s in the box?”" So often it becomes clear to me in debating the issues of consciousness that they are missing something which cannot be replaced by logic. The way that many people think, especially those who are very intelligent in math and physics, only includes a kind of toy model of experience - one which fails to fully realize the difference between the map and the territory. It makes a lot of sense to be that having a very low-res, two dimensional theory of mind would correlate with having a philosophy of mind which undersignifies privacy and oversignifies mechanistic influences. The low res theory of mind comes with a built in bias toward behaviorism, where all events are caused by public conditions rather than private feelings and experiences. There are several other interesting findings in the (brief) paper <http://www.autism-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TOM-in-TD-and-ASD.pdf>. Autistic children find it difficult to tell the difference between what they meant to do and what they actually did, so that when they shoot at a target and miss, they don't understand that they intended to hit it but ended up missing it and say that they meant to miss. Overall, the list of deficits in imagination, pragmatics, social mindreading, etc has been called mindblindness. This is not to say that everyone who doesn't understand the hard problem has mindblindness, but I would say it is very likely that having mindreading-empathy deficits on the autistic spectrum would tend to result in a strong bias against idealism, panpsychism, free will, or the hard problem of consciousness. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
