Theory of mind is mostly more trouble than it is worth.

Theory of mind is mostly more trouble than it is worth.

Theory of Mind (ToM) or mentalizing is the ability to understand how the world looks to someone else. Developmental Psychologists fetishize ToM because they can spot age at which children learn to mentalize. Clinical Psychologists fetishize ToM because that can show that some individuals with poor social skills are poor at mentalizing. There a counter-argument which states that mentalizing is inaccurate, prone to error and the source of much unhappiness. Psychology never seems to consider the proposition that people give up on mentalizing because it blurs perception and if someone is on the limits of their mental capability then ToM an expensive luxury. 

The Upanishads are a set of ancient texts that provide the core concepts of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. The two thousand year old Bhagavad Gita, written in Sanskrit, in India is probably the best known. This moral tale is rehearsed as a conversation between the Lord Krisha and a warrior prince Arjuna. Arjuna is leading an army in a just war against opponents who are kinsmen.  Arjuna is described as having compassion for his enemy and does not wish that, in the future for his army to grieve for them. Krishna asks ‘where do you get this weakness from’ In this reading mentalizing is an intellectual flaw. 

Bible In common with the Koran and the Talmud sees things in a similar manner.  God inflicts ToM on Adam and Eve as a punishment for eating the forbidden fruit: Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. In this reading, the ability to mentalize represents both a fall from grace, and a quality that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

There is a consistent theme in traditional introspective musings on the human condition, which still can be seen in pockets in C21 British society that mentalizing is a weakness and necessary precursor of deceitfulness and vanity.

There are echoes of these teachings in current research on primates. Our nearest relations in the animal kingdom can nearly do mentalizing. Robin Dunbar cites evidence in support of the “social Brain Hypothesis” that that the great apes have some ability to distinguish between accidental and intentional actions, and that, occasionally, in their mating behaviour seem to take account of what a dominant male can and cannot see.  Interestingly, the anthropologists see the apes successfully using ToM to enable deceit as clever, and as conveying an adaptive advantage.

This is the disconnect that allows the technologists and academics to believe that we are in an enlightened age, and for the Roman Catholic Archbishop of London to simultaneously opine that “We live in age of unprecedented ignorance” 

To value mentalizing over direct perception, or reason over faith, is to value Machiavellian calculation over truth, an employment contract over loyalty in the workplace, and to prefer a prenuptial marriage agreement over a mutual declaration to unconditional love. 

Valē Rob Moore

 

 

I was listening to Stephen Fry talk about an arbitrary, momentary decision by someone he had never met, that led to his going to Cambridge and the start of his fantastic and rewarding public life.
My thought turned to my rambling essay which I was sending to academics around the country, trying to find someone who was interested in a half-baked theory of language evolution. One of recipients was Rob Moore, the only UK researcher I could find with an interest in some of the old work of Basil Bernstein. I got an “Out of Office” from Dr Moore stating that he was on sick leave for the year. Then, a day later an email saying that he had read my essay and that something in it was was worth researching and that I “should apply here”. “Here” was the University of Cambridge. The departmental website was a complete mess with no mention of of Dr Moore’s course or position but apply I did, on the last day of the of a deadline.
Never in my life had I seen myself as an “Oxbridge” type but there I was in Oct 2012, a post-grad at the University of Cambridge. I wanted to thank Rob Moore and looked for him but there was no trace.
When I watched Stephen Fry yesterday I immediately thought of my etherial exchange with Rob Moore two years ago and internally voiced the words “for all I know he might be fucking dead”

Valē, Rob Moore

Fri, 02 May
The Faculty has been informed that sadly Dr Rob Moore, who recently retired from his position as Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Education, died yesterday in hospital after a long period of illness.   Rob joined Homerton College in 1987 as Senior Lecturer in Multi-cultural Education and Sociology of Education and in 2001 transferred to the University of Cambridge with convergence of the teaching and research activities of the then School of Education and those of Homerton College.  He was elected a Fellow of Homerton College in 2003.

Valē

A Meditation.

There were three way to get remembered. High medieval windows allowed limited light to illuminate large oak boards bearing the remembered names. In pride of place, prominently visible behind the Head’s rostrum, was the list of Oxford scholars. Down one side of the hall that served both for assembly and as a dining room was a melancholy inducing sequence of boards listing the old boys who had “fallen”, mostly in the Great War, but also in the other end of empire conflicts. A third space near the door held two more boards. There was a longish listing of each year’s Victor Ludorum and a very new looking bright board with the short record of those named Victrix Ludorum. The school was established sometime in the 1200s. Girls were admitted in 1967. 

The school was originally established as an act of charity by the tradesmen who made and built the useful stuff that a town needs, in order to provide an education for the boys of the town. Both in the wallboards and the school there is the retrace of an ancient Hindu teaching from the Bhagavad Gita: There are three paths to enlightenment; the path of reason, the path of action, and the path of devotion. The first two meanings are obvious; devotion is the observance of ritual and the unconditional acceptance of the ritual. The Guildsmen worked and created their wealth which in an act of religious selflessness they used to endow a school to teach reason. Sportsmen and women are action embodied. The Oxbridge wranglers were masters of reason, and those who voluntarily gave their lives for the greater good offered the ultimate act of devotion or duty.

For a short while I am lucky enough to inhabit the academic space that is the University of Cambridge. It was said that at interview for certain colleges a rugby ball was thrown at the interviewee. If he caught it then he was half way to his place. My father in law went to a school that had a long standing relationship with Clare College. He was called for interview, asked to do some exams and then went in for the interview. “I was thinking that I might like to study French” said the father in law. Surveying the exam paper the tutor looked up and asked “Hmm. Have you considered theology”. Thus three years of privileged scholarship was repaid with a lifetime of service to inner city congregations. I am sure that the enduring success of the colleges is down to the way that intense academic selection and high intellectual standards were leavened by the sportsmen and the clergymen. Action, reason and devotion when mixed do seem to endure.

My mistaken understanding of the Hindu text was that I should choose the path that suited me, as an individual, best.  I now don’t think that is the case. It seems more likely that at each step all three pathways were always there, out in front, but I could only take one.

When I was in the gloomy high halls of my ancient grammar school, none of them seemed available. I was disorganised and distant from the social and ritualistic fabric of the place. I routinely came in the bottom five of the class, and being nearly the youngest in the year, was never in the running for the high status sports teams. As a coping mechanism I learned to look for the easiest path rather than the one that we were set on by the school. I stopped trying to get to where we were supposed to go and instead took the biggest step that required the littlest effort.  What I did not notice at the time was that many of the things that I did because I found them easy, others avoided because they found them difficult.

The upshot is that I went to Sandhurst and later passed selection for the SAS. After leaving the Army I went a good university and am now, eventually, a Masters student at Cambridge. It is hard to think of two experiences which are better exemplars of the paths of action and of reason, yet I chose neither. Not many people will have done both. I just took one step at a time. Sometime it felt that it was the same step over and over, but every so often I would look around and realise that I was a long way from where I had started.

Thoughts on language.

I am distracted by having to write a 6000 word essay that is supposed to be good. We'll see. As I work through the mountain of academic writing I have had to think through my own perspective on language and communication. I promise never to write anything this serious in a blog ever again, except that there is a similar understanding of theory of mind and Asperger's to be explored at some point.

Claude Shannon published a scientific paper in 1948 called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The principals outlined, and the mathematical proofs demonstrated by Shannon in the early 1940s provided the foundation of the major communication developments in the second half of the 20^th Century. It was the scientific step that enabled the digital age. Shannon’s key discovery was that information is lost into the background noise and categorical ambiguity by exactly the same set of mathematical rules that govern the loss of energy in the process of entropy.  

We live in a world in which entropy must always increase and the amount of available energy in the universe will constantly, irreversibly diminish. That is an iron law of nature. Yet at the same time in our everyday lives we do allow the law of the conservation of energy. In standard practical physics calculations of energy, mass and temperature need take no account of empirically tiny amounts of entropy. Shannon demonstrated that the same was true for information. In any communication system there was a threshold below which the effects of information entropy could be ignored. Below a certain rate of communication,  usually expressed in bits per second, a means of communication could be found that was effectively error free. Above this rate errors were inevitable and would increase exponentially, and without bound, as the communication rate went up. Shannon was the first person to realise that it should be possible to send a billion bits of date to the moon, and have them bounce back, and on their return find that that not a single bit had been lost. The key to this was the understanding the only upper limit on error free communication was speed.

It is the common assumption that we can communicate exactly what we want to another individual and that if individual cannot understand our normal speech and read out standard shared writing, they have something wrong with them. Shannon’s work suggests that, provided it is only their communication ability that is impaired, then there should exist a communication paradigm such that they can communicate normally but more slowly. (In these terms a smaller vocab would be "slower")

Theorem:

There exists a language paradigm for any setting such that no individual will be disadvantaged for reasons of communication alone.

In communication disorders such as dyslexia, SLI, and pragmatic impairment disorder, auditory and cognitive function are expected to be normal.  In a rigorous application of the science of communication one would expect these disorders to be the consequence a communication rate that was too high for the individual concerned at their particular state of development and general ability. If the communication paradigm were changed these communication breakdowns should disappear and be replaced by (simpler and slower) error free communication. What many young boys  discover, is that as soon as they can get out of school and into the Army, or into a building site, or factory, or more problematically, into a gang then they no longer feel disadvantaged by language.

Welcome to my new blog.

I am busy. I have a supposedly part time job which takes up 35 hours most weeks. I am a post graduate student at Cambridge. This is also  part time. I am resolving the future of a very small family farm in Northern Ireland with my cousin who is I think is getting more and more ill by the day. Add to this the normal responsibilities that go with family life and fatherhood and there is a recipe for an imminent burnout and breakdown. As it happens, I feel that I am getting used to the routine and now have time to start this blog.

I am a slow writer. Twenty years ago I studied psychology at a University where many of the country's experts on dyslexia were based. Nothing I have read about dyslexia ever connected with, or spoke to me about my personal atypical written and spoken language quirks. More recently (over the last four years, perhaps less) I have begun to understand a similar, but separate, communication disorder: Specific Language Impairment. (SLI). SLI is more than just difficulty with reading in class. There are a group of distinctive markers. Something not quite right with written, spoken, or heard language. There is tendency to interpret language literally and rigidly. There is an associated probability of poor theory of mind, which is usually associated with Asperger syndrome and autism. In short SLI is a group of communication characteristics which looks like a mixture of dyslexia and Asperger but is actually something else. About one thing I am absolutely sure: It is not a disability.

At the age of 10 I was considered too far behind my peers in character and at communication to be allowed to go on to the local, rather poor, comprehensive school. By the age of 18 I had a place at Sandhurst, the world leading military academy who's bread and butter criteria are character and communication. I later added to that with a good honours degree from a top level UK university, passing SAS selection and gaining a place at Cambridge. (There were some failures and scrape-throughs as well) In all of these places there were people who, in an orthodox way, were much better qualified than I. My trick was to find out a way of using different aptitudes to get to solutions that others could not see.

I am sure that academic and educational research centres do not understand the skills conferred by SLI. Why that should be so I will write about here.

I will also write about:

The evolution of language and social cognition.
1972 Series 3 Landrovers.
Renovating derelict farmhouses.
Left and right hands and brains.
Mindfulness.
Cheap B&Bs

I think that I will find myself writing about fulfillment, grace and death.