On 16 Jul 2014, at 15:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:
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. Children
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 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.
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.
Craig, you beg the question in a novel interesting way. I agree with
the concluding sentence, but that would describe exactly the state of
a rationalist who decides to keep comp and materialism, and de facto
eliminate the person and consciousness.
But the big discovery is that when we look at computer science, we can
apply to machine (ideally correct believer in arithmetic) the simplest
notion of knowledge (Theaetetus), and the incompleteness (which
already guaranty universality and the consistence of Church Thesis)
prevents any possible confusion between the first person knower and
any machine or 3p description, and this already for the machine in
their own 1p view, so defined by Theatetus (with believability played
by provability in rich enough theory of numbers or digital machines/
programs, combinators).
If the theory above of autism is correct, a machine would become
autistic when denying they are their unnameable "[]p & p", and
identifying themselves with their body (the describable []p part). It
is a bit the correct conclusion of the materialist computationalist,
and I am OK to consider the materialist eliminativism (of the 1p and
consciousness) as a form of autism. Good point! But again, the
machines like it too, and is not a point against mechanism, but
against mechanism + materialism or non-idealism.
Bruno
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