Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading

People are "minded" creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we are "meta-minded" creatures: we ascribe mental states to ourselves and to others. How do we manage this without instruction in formal psychology? Alvin Goldman explores this question with the tools of philosophy, developmental and social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. His specific approach is the simulation theory, which elaborates the intuitive idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental "shoes." An early developer of this approach, Goldman shows how to render it philosophically respectable and how recent empirical results in psychology and neuroscience support the hypothesis that the mind literally creates (or attempts to create) surrogates of other people's mental states in the process of mindreading. Goldman unveils a refined, hybrid version of simulationism that posits two distinct levels of simulative processing: low-level and high-level. From the discovery of mirror neurons to the study of imagery and imagination, the author finds that the mind engages in intensive "replicative" activity. Reading an emotion in someone's face activates the same emotion in the observer. Looking at someone else being touched activates tactile empathy in the observer's brain. Includes information on autism, child-scientist theory, egocentric bias, emotion, empathy, enactment imagination, face-based emotion recognition, false belief tasks, first-person mindreading, folk psychological laws, imagination, mimicry, mirroring, modularity theory, projection, introspection, , etc.