I guess it's interesting that these studies fail to replicate. But I fail to see how saying a "lack of theory of mind" is not a very accurate way to communicate the experience and symptoms of autism.
Autistic people, by their own account and by well documented empirical evidence, express and demonstrate challenges with understanding sarcasm, irony, nonverbal cues, idioms, figures of speech, etc. Autistic people have a unique set of difficulties with maintaining friendships and employment.
Now, I'll take two definitions of Theory of Mind:
> Theory of Mind is the branch of cognitive science that investigates how we ascribe mental states to other persons and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons. [0]
> In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the knowledge that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own.[1] Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. [1]
So... I'm confused. If autism is the impaired ability to ascribe mental states , how then is autism not an impaired ability to form theory of mind? Are we just arguing semantics here?
The authors of this research might be resting their case on a slippery re-definition of theory of mind?
> The assertion that autistic people lack a theory of mind—that they fail to understand that other people have a mind or that they themselves have a mind—pervades psychology.
Of course Autistic people understand that other people "have a mind" or "that they themselves have a mind".. This seems ridiculous. I have had many relationships with autistic people and obviously they know what a mind is and that other people have a mind.
> If autism is the impaired ability to ascribe mental states
First, autism is not the impaired ability to ascribe mental states. Earlier in your post you more accurately described that as a symptom.
There are attempted theories that get more to what autism "is", that it's a heavier weight on bottom-up processing, processing distinct details more and holistic things less. Another (congruent) idea is related to a "narrow tunnel of attention" and to using more of the brain to attend to a more narrow set of stimuli and thoughts. (You can look up monotropism for more info on this idea.)
Secondly, in my experience and others I've read - autistic individuals seem to often do much better at understanding each other. I mean this in two ways: autists are often better at understanding other autists than they are at understanding neurotypicals, but also in many cases autists may be better at understanding other autists than neurotypicals are at understanding autists.
With this framing you could just as well say neurotypicals lack a theory of mind. Largely we don't do that because there are more neurotypicals than autists.
Of course that's not the full reason and it's not fully symmetrical. If there were a 50/50 split in the population then I think autism would be less of a disability for folks in terms of this theory of mind stuff, but it would still be a significant disability for anyone who struggles with all the other consequences of autism.
But it is still relevant that this "theory of mind" stuff may be a misleading way to talk about it; by default I would expect everyone to have an easier time with a theory of minds like their own. And thinking about it this way also helps inform neurotypicals with autistic loved ones that if they expect their loved one to work hard to understand them, they could do the same.
"Secondly, in my experience and others I've read - autistic individuals seem to often do much better at understanding each other. I mean this in two ways: autists are often better at understanding other autists than they are at understanding neurotypicals, but also in many cases autists may be better at understanding other autists than neurotypicals are at understanding autists."
This is an interesting point.
"With this framing you could just as well say neurotypicals lack a theory of mind. Largely we don't do that because there are more neurotypicals than autists."
I think the really interesting result would result from testing this.
i.e. because of prior knowledge, neurotypicals model the default person as neurotypical.
However, knowing whether the second party is neurotypical or autistic, can a neurotypical person model their second party's mental states better than an autist, or worse?
I also found that post very interesting. I would also make a point (vapid as it may be) that autism is a spectrum. Many people over the years have called me autistic, and I for sure have a few too many autistic family members for it to be a fluke. Somehow though, in person I have a solid skill at teaching people technical information at a level they can understand it, I am quick to identify what types of analogies they will understand and my technical knowledge is generally broad enough to relate it. If you saw me at work you would probably consider me -a hard worker -a dirtbag -adept -foolish, whatever it is, but likely not autistic; if you got to know me, you would probably be suspicious. 2 sibblings are in a similar category but more advanced autism, 1 undiagnosed, they are perfectly capable of reasoning about their own/others cognition.
It makes me suspicious though, if I was more defensive then I wouldnt go around saying I might be mildly autistic. If that other me were surveyed, would I unwittingly bias the results?
> Somehow though, in person I have a solid skill at teaching people technical information at a level they can understand it, I am quick to identify what types of analogies they will understand
That's interesting. There's something odd about me but I don't know what, I'm not like other people and they tend to consider me a bit weird (usually in a nice way). In turn, I often can't understand them. That said, what I just quoted above of yours pretty much describes me. I'm extremely good at putting myself in another person's boots for teaching technical subjects, and indeed I'm not too shabby at the social side of things - I'm often surprised at people's faux pas. And yet, people's behaviour regularly baffles me too. It's like I'm picking up a lot of some things but perhaps too little of another.
I did an online test for autism, expected to come out below average but much to my surprise came out above.
> you would probably consider me -a hard worker -a dirtbag -adept -foolish
> I would also make a point (vapid as it may be) that autism is a spectrum
I don't think that's a vapid point at all. It is however a widely misunderstood statement. Autism being a spectrum does not mean "you can have it a little, or a lot, or in-between". It means you can have any one of the symptoms a little or a lot or in between, individually.
Among other things this means being good socially does not trivially preclude autism.
> However, knowing whether the second party is neurotypical or autistic, can a neurotypical person model their second party's mental states better than an autist, or worse?
Even this is still limited by the neurotypical person's prior experience with autistic people and recognizing them as such.
All of this really reduces down to "it's hard to understand people whose brains work different from yours or from others' that you have significant experience with."
>in many cases autists may be better at understanding other autists than neurotypicals are at understanding autists. With this framing you could just as well say neurotypicals lack a theory of mind
Excellent comment, which has me rethinking autism. It's a topic I've thought quite a bit about, since by all measures I am the polar opposite of autistic, I'm extremely abstract to the total neglect of detail, and yet I've always gravitated to friends high in autistic traits. Maybe they have or see something I lack.
The DSM-V defines autism by the disability it causes. The diagnostic criteria list are all things neurotypicals can do but autists struggle at. So I always saw it framed as a disability.
But could an equally compelling list of diagnostic criteria be written, which is all things autists can do but neurotypicals struggle at? Could neurotypical be framed as a disability?
The DSM-V is about clinical diagnoses. Mental disorders are understood as something everyone experiences to varying degrees. You're considered to have something clinically when it impairs your daily life, something psychiatrists have defined as being 3 σ away from the average number of symptoms someone would report.
In this example struggling with things like math wouldn't qualify as a disability unless it impaired you in a statistically significant way
> But could an equally compelling list of diagnostic criteria be written, which is all things autists can do but neurotypicals struggle at? Could neurotypical be framed as a disability?
From my perspective, the surprising thing about people not on the autistic spectrum is how often they lie, how often they stab each other in the back for quite trivial reasons, and how obsessed they are with evaluating and maintaining everyone's position in the pecking order -- they are barely able to think about anything else, at least half of their brains are always evaluating this.
And the famous "theory of mind" in most cases is merely the ability to understand someone who is almost the same. I mean, of course if someone thinks exactly the same way I do, it will be very easy for me to predict what they think. But find someone different (doesn't need to be autistic; any kind of difference will work) and suddenly most people's ability to read their mind is gone.
At a high enough level; science, math, software; anything that requires super human focus basically.
Speaking for myself, I had to learn everything about human behavior from the ground up, which paradoxically makes me very good at reading and dealing with other humans IRL since it's all conscious for me.
But, it's super important to remember that it's a spectrum, some people are seemingly seriously disabled by it.
No. What is it with so many autists trying to turn things around and act as though they are better in some way and NTs are the 'problem'. It's bizarre and seems like some sort of denial.
This is just nonsense. Depending on the severity, autism makes a person completely dependent on other normal people (neurotypical is just a pc term) to simply survive. There's no degree of "normalcy" that, the more "severe" it gets, the more dependent on others you become.
That is true, I was ignoring the severely autistic. It becomes crippling at a certain point, but on the other hand, there are billionaire CEOs on the autism spectrum, who probably got there because they are different.
I'm still not convinced were not arguing semantics. Okay, agreed, an impaired theory of mind is a symptom of autism. But to me this is like saying the sky is blue, and then someone saying "no its actually scattering blue".
The fundamental mechanisms that make an autistic brain different than the statistical average brain are not yet fully understood, I know. But this study we are talking about is not about the fundamental mechanisms.
I just got out of a relationship with a French woman because of our differences in cultural norms, she also had an accent and we used idioms and expressions that neither of us were super keen on. We both lacked a robust theory of mind of each other. I had an impaired ability to ascribe mental states to her. And I find it very unlikely that I will ever become fluent in French. I currently and probably always will lack that capacity.
I also have an impaired ability to ascribe mental states to Donald Trump, and my cat. But most people would consider me allistic. Because I have mental processes that allow me to ascribe the mental states of other statistically normal people. Within the context of statistically average people, of my own culture, I have a robust-enough theory of mind. ToM is not binary, but a degree, and context dependent.
"Mental conditions" are classified mostly because they are disadvantageous or uncomfortable to some group of people. They can only be classified in relation to normal social behavior at some degree of deviation. Shouldn't it be implied that allistic people also have an impaired theory of mind of autistic people.
Taking Wikipedia's definition of ToM, it specifically mentions "capacity". So when you mention that autism may be a "narrow tunnel of attention", this feels very consistent with the definition of ToM. If my attention is extremely narrow, then I will have an impaired ability to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them.
> So when you mention that autism may be a "narrow tunnel of attention", this feels very consistent with the definition of ToM. If my attention is extremely narrow, then I will have an impaired ability to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them.
Indeed that may be a cause of impaired theory of mind in many autistic individuals. It would depend on what the narrow tunnel of attention is focused on. A narrow (and deep - I failed to say that earlier) tunnel of attention focused on another mind, say an autistic psychotherapist, or better an autistic psychotherapist focused on autism, may have a greatly heightened theory of mind.
Perhaps tangential, but consider Temple Grandin's exemplary work designing animal handling facilities that work much better largely due to treating the animals
better - often with changes or accommodations to things that nobody realized caused the animals stress and anxiety, often by putting herself in their place.
Condensing GPs wall of text, I think the overall point is that Aspies are bad at ascribing motivation and mental states to neurotypicals, but much better than neurotypicals at ascribing them to other Aspies.
It's more a case of speaking different "emotional languages" than a strict deficit.
> With this framing you could just as well say neurotypicals lack a theory of mind. Largely we don't do that because there are more neurotypicals than autists.
It's because NTs are the default, and Autism is seen as a (sometimes) harmful deviation that is still being investigated.
I think they are claiming the opposite and that autistic people don't lack theory of mind, but that the theory of mind claim is stemmed from their communication impaiarment. I am no expert, but I think they are trying to overcome the idea you're presenting.
> Because theory-of-mind tasks rely heavily on “fairly complex language” (San José Cáceres, Keren, Booth, & Happé, 2014, p. 608) and because autism, by diagnostic definition, involves communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Morson, & Grace, 2016), it is unsurprising that autistic participants with communication impairment perform less well than nonautistic participants without communication impairment. And because autistic people vary in their communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Geye, & Ellis Weismer, 2005), it is unsurprising that autistic people vary in their theory-of-mind task performance.
This was my takeaway as well - theory of mind can sometimes be described as 1. "literally does not understand that other people have their own thoughts" or 2. "cannot reliably predict what other minds would think". Most high-functioning autistic people I've met clearly don't meet the first definition, but definitely meet the second.
The second definition makes more sense to me since it also comes up in non-autism diagnoses, like personality disorders. They have trouble reliably predicting what other minds would think, but for different reasons.
High-functioning autistic people would meet the 2nd definition when trying to predict what neurotypical people would think. But they're also probably better at predicting what other high-functioning autists would think than neurotypical people are. It's just easier to imagine what someone might think if they think like you.
A part of all psychology diagnoses is that it must both match a definition and negatively impact someone's life. So if you never had to care about what neurotypical people think, then it wouldn't rise to the level of a problem and there's no diagnosis.
You see people care about this stuff because they go to their therapist and say, "boy there are a lot of neurotypical people I have to predict, and being slightly better at reading autistic people doesn't make up for it."
Unreliability is relative. Everyone botches this up all the time. The most neurotypical person I ever met literally questioned the whole premise of predicting what other people were thinking and said that most people will just tell you things if you ask.
> most people will just tell you things if you ask
In my experience people are often bad at explaining their inner emotions. Rationalisation is one of my favorite words!
I will often ask a friend why they acted a certain way, and I will carefully listen to what they say, but I often disagree with their stated motives - denial and lack of self-awareness are rife. This has nothing to do with people consciously trying to deceive me (there's another topic!). I have the same faults. I'm average at reading people, yet all too often I have to trust my own flawed instincts about what I think is going on.
> Autistic people, by their own account and by well documented empirical evidence, express and demonstrate challenges with understanding sarcasm, irony, nonverbal cues, idioms, figures of speech, etc.
Last year I was officially diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Level 1, which closely aligns with what was once categorized as Asperger's Syndrome.
What you're saying is a generalization I would've made at one point, and may very well be true of other people with ASD. It's generally not true for me, and in fact, I feel like I have a preternatural sense for what I think linguists call "pragmatics". I grant that I may have had to reverse-engineer my way to that understanding, since I don't know how more neurotypical people experience them.
I think this is all utterly misunderstood. IMO autism is a predictive processing failure: the brain gives too much weight to inputs and inference and not enough to prior knowledge. This causes hypersensitivity to everything surprising, which is deeply unpleasant. The coping mechanisms are to try to shut out anything that's insufficiently predictable, to try to force things to be as predictable as possible, or to restrict attention to controllable and predictable things.
Regarding the fundamental mechanisms. This is the view that I subscribe to as well.
It explains "stimming". Repetitive behavior is soothing because its predictable. And it explains things like toe walking - feet are sensitive, and the inability to predict the stimulus of things we might step on is uncomfortable. Folks with autism may have a heightened discomfort with unpredictable sensations.
There is growing evidence that atypical dendrite development in childhood and early adulthood is linked to autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy.
I see autism and schizophrenia on a spectrum of predictive processing failure. Normal folks typically cannot tickle themselves. But folks with schizophrenia can - probably because its difficult for them to predict their internal sensations.
[I'm somewhere (though I don't think very far? on the spectrum).] I think the way we go about diagnosing or assigning value to abilities is productive. I for one can if I really set my heart/mind on it, make a good guess why someone I know did something. I rarely do this though--it seems like such a waste of time, when I could just ask them. I also can't stand gossip which is a collective theory of mind.
So I don't see the need for the part "and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons." As for the 2nd definition other than finding oneself in awkward situations, e.g. being the last one still at a 'party' not realizing that the host wanted you to leave an hour ago, I haven't really found it to hinder my success. I also don't think it's one thing, black/white, but if I did have to pick one I'd say that the person somehow naturally places their attention on something other than people around them almost all the time starting from a very early age.
>express and demonstrate challenges with understanding sarcasm, irony, nonverbal cues, idioms, figures of speech, etc.
A common element to these, is that they are either a bit sideways of a straightforward relationship or many times are being used directly to deceive. Basically, my impression is that autistic people and myself compared to others are by default worse at detecting “liars”.
Most animals on the other hand, don’t try to deceive or control their communication methods in order to hide what they are really thinking. When they are happy, sad, or angry, they consistently display exactly those things. This is why I find it easy to emphasize with animals who have a toddler level of intelligence.
> Most animals on the other hand, don’t try to deceive or control their communication methods in order to hide what they are really thinking.
I'd challenge that assertion. It may be literally true if you allow "all animals" to be skewed by masses of beetles, but then it doesn't seem very relevant to the subject of human cognition.
Conversely, animals that are related to us--or which have traits we consider intelligent--are often capable of deceiving others of the same species.
Probably far more than we know of, given that to detect their deception, we'd first need to understand animal communication. Consider cuttlefish that communicate by skin coloration. They may lie by simultaneously sending contradictory messages on each side of their body towards different recipients.
Chimpanzees engage in conspiracy and betrayal as a common feature in their societies. Domesticated animals may show humans what humans expect to see, that's all.
> Domesticated animals may show humans what humans expect to see, that's all.
On that note, It's been shown that in a lab--the location, not the breed--that dogs can use deception to get treats. (Not a surprise to most dog-owners.)
99% of people put the definitions on 1% of people, on how well the 1% interface with the 99%. What if it was the other way around? There is a neurological difference, but is it really neurologically worse? Nature decides I guess. Well it would, but these days society decides, well, the bulk of society, well the 99% meaning nonautistics that is.
My personal problem is that, there is some pervasive belief that autistics lack empathy, morals, or gets judged as being narcissistic or worse. These sorts of accidents can happen because signalling doesn't happen, because of the neurological difference, despite the autistic person in question hypothetically following a very ethical code and behaves with full integrity and love and so on but not initially obvious due to the neurological gap. My fear is that shaky concepts, like ascribing lack of theory of mind, could contribute to "othering" and even more misunderstanding.
So in some ways it becomes a semantic argument, theory of mind, why yes minds exist, and autistics may be bad at ascribing mental states to allistic people, but allistic people are bad at ascribing mental states to autistic people (guess you'll have to take this one for granted, but e g or they could replicate the specialised results I mean, like systematise vast bodies of knowledge) so I would say it goes both ways right? So what I mean is the autistics could say allistics lack a theory of mind, because they only understand eachother and not autistics. Except the weight is put on the 1%, by the 99%, rather than a uniting force for humans to understand eachother, it becomes a onesided label of weakness.
I'm confused. Elon Musk says he is autistic (actually he says he has aspergers, which has been eliminated with DSM 5 and replaced with autism) , is there any evidence a high functioning autistic person like him "express and demonstrate challenges with understanding sarcasm, irony, nonverbal cues, idioms, figures of speech, etc".
This definition- of someone failing to understand idioms or figures of speech, sounds more like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek than the meme twitter billionaire.
Is the definition of autism so broad as to have little practical meaning?
What was described was a specific common experience, not a definition. There are strengths as well to autism. The definition is broad, but it does have practical meaning, diagnosis is done by educated psychologists obviously though
Are normal people really any good at figuring out what other people are thinking? Or is it just that, being more similar to other people, the heuristic "he's thinking pretty much the same thing as what I'd be thinking" works pretty well?
Temple Grandin call herself the woman who thinks like a cow. I very much doubt she does think like a cow, but she seems to better at empathizing with cows that neurotypical people are. Does she really have defective empathy?
I don't think that I'm "on the spectrum" but I'm quite bad at predicting social responses to stimuli. I don't know when a joke will get a laugh or be offensive, when a comment here will get voted up or down, when flirting or a complement is harassment, etc. I interpret this as meaning that my theory of mind is deficient, it's a poor simulation of reality.
That perspective can form a weaker claim about autistic people that's more defensible: they have theories of mind like anyone, but at best different, and at worst maladaptive. We can recognize that they have a theory of mind and still recognize that some are deficient or as with various forms of bigotry, diseased.
High functioning autistics like Temple Grandin who appear to have a better functioning theory of mind than mine make me think that ToM isn't at the core of autism.
> I don't think that I'm "on the spectrum" but I'm quite bad at predicting social responses to stimuli. I don't know when a joke will get a laugh or be offensive, when a comment here will get voted up or down, when flirting or a complement is harassment, etc.
Interestingly, all of these also have a cultural aspect. One can be excellent at predicting all these reactions in one culture and be a complete failure at it in a different culture, even though you are the same person.
I've heard that theory of mind issue described as "cannot reliably make predictions based on what other people might think or do.", which is more nuanced than the other definition of "doesn't understand that other people have minds of their own."
Using the first definition, about prediction, makes a lot of sense and is a useful psychological concept.
The first definition would predict theory of mind issues in unrelated disorders, which I think you do see:
- Autism: the mind's ability to process social cues is not there or severely diminished. You'd expect these individuals to be bad predictors of others because they don't get or can't use sensory information that others do.
- Schizotypal personality disorder: they experience intrusive thoughts. They might be bad predictors of others because they assume that everyone else gets intrusive, paranoid thoughts on a regular basis.
It's also worth noting - the concept is bottom-up, practitioner-driven, while the experiments that get at theory of mind are top-down, academic-driven.
Theory of mind would exist even if it stopped showing up in academic papers, only because it makes sense to have a shorthand for "my patient keeps complaining about uncomfortable social situations, and after I dig in, it turns out they were missing important social cues". That was known by therapists long before we started trying to operationalize theory-of-mind issues for experiments.
It's really, really tough to design an experiment for this, because it's not super easy to design a multiple-choice questionnaire that will predict if you'll have difficulty understanding subtle social cues. It's a thing that a face-to-face interview would uncover, but not necessarily someone's written output.
You can also run experiments where an investigator interviews the person and records when they miss a social cue, but even then lots of high-functioning autistic people would be able to pass that even if they genuinely have trouble interpreting social cues on a regular basis.
This struck me as suitable for a legal definition, maybe, if "theory of mind" needed one.
However, I don't know how someone could be diagnosed as "autistic" such that you could say "autistic people don't have a theory of mind." I mean, how did you decide they were "autistic" in the first place?
All you have to do is read some documentation written by a technical person to see that they have no sense of what other people know. Arguing whether that should be called "theory of mind" or if it needs some other name strikes me as just semantics -- useful for a researcher or the DSM, maybe, but of no value to the lay person. For an ordinary person, we can just say, "yeah, they can't put themselves in someone else's place."
I've only read the abstract, but it seems to directly say "this paper ignores any unflawed research that supports the idea that autistic people have no theory of mind."
(a) says it looks at empirical research that fails to support the theory, (b) is targeting examples that fail to replicate, (c) documents studies they believe made some inherent mistake, (c)2 (why are there two c?) looks at external research that does not support the theory, and (d) is the conclusion made ignoring any research supporting the theory.
Usually when I see these meta-studies, they say they look at all of the data and then will further say they excluded some for some kind of flaw. This one seems surprisingly open about choosing it's data.
My diagnosis allowed me to finally realize why neurotypicals seem to lack "theory of mind," why they act so inconsistently, seem so superstitiously, and be so prone to believing they have unprovable "mental powers."
We autistics are actually the James Randy in this realm of self-believed nonsense! No one has collected our million dollars yet but there are so many "believers" that it's very disconcerting!
GPT4 has a theory of mind; if you describe a situation to it, it can predict reasonably well how a person in that situation would respond to a particular stimuli. So clearly there isn't a biological basis to having/lacking a theory of mind.
Consciousness - what it is, how it arises - not proven. A subject full of quantum woo and statements declared as facts but the conjecture is everywhere.
In broad strokes you have the majority which are physicalists, which leads to strong determinism. This is where thoughts and consciousness arise purely from physical reality and have a chemical and physical basis (“thoughts have mass”). If you rewound the universe to the beginning, always the same outcome, free will is a delusion.
In the minority you have dualism, where the mind and body are separate. This is metaphysics. I subscribe to the latter belief.
My personal (insane sounding) opinion is that there is one universal consciousness and we all channel into it with our minds.
Ever watch someone's personality change after they develop Alzheimer's or dementia? It can be rather disturbing.
Same goes for people who drift in and out of depression or bipolar disorders. There are mood changes, but with them come changes to risk tolerance and a host of other fundamental things.
At the end of the day, a person's character is in some way biologically defined, so any expression of consciousness must also be affected as well.
Like I said my view is complete conjecture and based upon my own religious and spiritual beliefs. I think the brain is channeling the universal consciousness and as it is filtered by the mind, it results in different personalities. The essence of “you” is always there, whether you are asleep or demented or unborn or an infant. Obviously who you are can change.
This is a very complex topic I cannot articulate hardly at all in this comment. I also believe in God and practice Catholicism but I think Jesus was a supra-conscious supernatural being.
I know I sound totally insane but this is my personal belief system so no one can take it away from me!
Acquaintance of mine had a benign brain tumor removed maybe a decade ago. It’s subtle but their personality changed a bit.
They’re aware of it too, they talk about a feeling just a little different.
It’s normalized over time, like they just are who they are now, but of all the things to experience in life I bet that’d be a wild one. I appreciate our personalities can change over time but the overnight shift is fascinating to think about.
A great many people believe there is some intrinsic connection between body, mind, consciousness and soul.
They think that when they die, their soul will retain the memories of their life, and will bear culpability for the good and bad actions in life (karma, divine judgment, etc).
For this to make sense, the soul has to in some way influence or be responsible for a person's character. My argument was only that it cannot be directly and completely responsible, given the obvious changes to character as the brain undergoes changes.
Having read the post I was replying to, you'll note that your suggestion has already been made in the context of physicalism. I merely offered a mild critique of the opposing view, metaphysicalism.
>For this to make sense, the soul has to in some way influence or be responsible for a person's character.
Why couldn't the influence go the other way, with a soul left behind that was shaped by physical events it had no effect on? Insofar as the idea of a soul can make sense, that seems the only way.
That depends on the brand of mysticism you prefer. Early forms of Buddhism would agree- that which was reborn was the accrued karma. Living a life of enlightenment let you die without karma, ending the cycle.
On the other extreme end, Christianity favors a version where the soul is responsible, and held in judgement. Some branches allow for purgation, others are a "go straight to heaven or hell" variety. What's the point of rewarding or punishing a soul that had no agency in life? What of a soul that was shaped by a brain fundamentally different at death than early adulthood?
Orthodox Christianity is a little different- there's purgation, without the purgatory. Moreover, the goal in life is theosis- living in such a way that your being aligns with the holy Spirit, essentially attaining sainthood while alive and in direct communion with the divine.
So, many very opposing answers, the truth of which is beyond me to decide for you.
>What's the point of rewarding or punishing a soul that had no agency in life?
So we're to assume that the sensibleness of doctrine is what determines the underpinnings of reality, that some kind of Just World force makes the world work in a way to minimize the injustice resulting from it? That makes even less sense. And anyways, the evidence suggests that such a force is not dominating the other fundamental forces.
I have the same idea about how reality comes together. Hard materialism cannot help but run into fundamental contradictions so it must be false. I think consciousness must be the fundamental nature of reality, and our minds are shards or prisms of it. And the experience of the material world is itself emergent. You might like a book called Biocentrism by Lanza and Berman.
>In broad strokes you have the majority which are physicalists, which leads to strong determinism.
I'm not an expert in the philosophy of consciousness or free will or anything, but it's my understanding that most philosophers are compatibilists even if they are physicalists. So it's not necessarily true that physicalism leads to hard determinism.
Autistic people, by their own account and by well documented empirical evidence, express and demonstrate challenges with understanding sarcasm, irony, nonverbal cues, idioms, figures of speech, etc. Autistic people have a unique set of difficulties with maintaining friendships and employment.
Now, I'll take two definitions of Theory of Mind:
> Theory of Mind is the branch of cognitive science that investigates how we ascribe mental states to other persons and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons. [0]
> In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the knowledge that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own.[1] Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. [1]
So... I'm confused. If autism is the impaired ability to ascribe mental states , how then is autism not an impaired ability to form theory of mind? Are we just arguing semantics here?
The authors of this research might be resting their case on a slippery re-definition of theory of mind?
> The assertion that autistic people lack a theory of mind—that they fail to understand that other people have a mind or that they themselves have a mind—pervades psychology.
Of course Autistic people understand that other people "have a mind" or "that they themselves have a mind".. This seems ridiculous. I have had many relationships with autistic people and obviously they know what a mind is and that other people have a mind.
[0] - https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind