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”
