Theory of Mind
Other minds are perceptions in the mind. The organic perception is that each biological body of an animal or human has a mind in that body and a body in that mind. The perception of a mind without a body in it is a disembodied mind. The perception of a body without a mind in it is a philosophical zombie (P-zombie) or machine that Marvel comics called a life model decoy (LMD). The idea of embodied or disembodied minds must be assumed to speculate or investigate folk psychology, mind-reading, also known as Theory of Mind (ToM).
https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/
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. More accurately, it is the branch that investigates mindreading or mentalizing or mentalistic abilities. These skills are shared by almost all human beings beyond early childhood. They are used to treat other agents as the bearers of unobservable psychological states and processes, and to anticipate and explain the agents’ behavior in terms of such states and processes. These mentalistic abilities are also called “folk psychology” by philosophers, and “naïve psychology” and “intuitive psychology” by cognitive scientists.
It is important to note that Theory of Mind is not an appropriate term to characterize this research area (and neither to denote our mentalistic abilities) since it seems to assume right from the start the validity of a specific account of the nature and development of mindreading, that is, the view that it depends on the deployment of a theory of the mental realm, analogous to the theories of the physical world (“naïve physics”). But this view—known as theory-theory—is only one of the accounts offered to explain our mentalistic abilities. In contrast, theorists of mental simulation have suggested that what lies at the root of mindreading is not any sort of folk-psychological conceptual scheme, but rather a kind of mental modeling in which the simulator uses her own mind as an analog model of the mind of the simulated agent.
Both theory-theory and simulation-theory are actually families of theories. Some theory-theorists maintain that our naïve theory of mind is the product of the scientific-like exercise of a domain-general theorizing capacity. Other theory-theorists defend a quite different hypothesis, according to which mindreading rests on the maturation of a mental organ dedicated to the domain of psychology. Simulation-theory also shows different facets. According to the “moderate” version of simulationism, mental concepts are not completely excluded from simulation. Simulation can be seen as a process through which we first generate and self-attribute pretend mental states that are intended to correspond to those of the simulated agent, and then project them onto the target. By contrast, the “radical” version of simulationism rejects the primacy of first-person mindreading and contends that we imaginatively transform ourselves into the simulated agent, interpreting the target’s behavior without using any kind of mental concept, not even ones referring to ourselves.
Finally, the claim─common to both theorists of theory and theorists of simulation─that mindreading plays a primary role in human social understanding was challenged in the early 21st century, mainly by phenomenology-oriented philosophers and cognitive scientists.
Other Minds Arise as Products of an Unconscious Process
When you get a chance to do so, go outside, and place your thumb in front of the full moon. The image of the thumb obscures the image of the moon in two dimensions. This two dimensional image in the mind contradicts the perception in the mind that the thumb is small and nearby and the moon is large and far away. Helmholtz recognized this general pattern of contradiction and further argues that visual depth perception and perception of the speed of objects arises spontaneously as the product of an unconscious process. Today we call this type of pre-processing of conscious information a subconscious process. Helmholtz said these perceptions have the pattern of conscious inference, but do not involve conscious inferences, and therefore he called this general idea an unconscious inference. The conscious inference automatically arises as the product of an unconscious process.
Other minds arise this way too - as the conscious inference generated by a mysterious, unconscious, or subconscious process. Either the inference that other minds exist just pops up in the field of awareness or we associate it with a natural process that Helmholtz calls unconscious inference. When we observe dead animals or people; or symptoms such a brain death; we infer that a cognitive process is generating the other minds; which but for the cognitive process associated with a biological body there is no other mind. Based on these types of observations we infer that an unconscious biological process is also generating our mind. This is how we come to be convinced that our mind, and other minds, are products of a biological cognitive process.
Sigmund Freud speculates that the newborn ego (the conscious part of the newborn animal organism) does not yet form any distinction between ego and not-ego. Freud calls this conjecture "Primary Narcissism". This is a strange conjecture since the adult Sigmund Freud reports that he cannot remember the condition of his own newborn ego! I call this inability to know the character of my prior mind in early life "The Generation Gap". This is a lacuna or gap in the continuity of the mind itself!
