TED Talk >> Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds
Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds. And the problem I'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy, which is, "How can we know whether other people have minds?" That is, maybe you have a mind, and everyone else is just a really convincing robot. So that's a problem in philosophy, but for today's purposes I'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind, and that I don't have to worry about this.
今天我要和大家谈的是有关于人的思想。接下来我要讲的内容，不是我们所熟悉的哲学的问题。比如“我们根本不知道，其它人是否真的有思想”。也就是说，也许你是有思想的，而其他人只是一个非常有说服力的机器人。这类问题都是哲学的问题。但为了今天的演讲，我会假设这里的听众都有自己的思想，所以我就不用担心“是否有思想”这个命题。
There is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists, which is, "Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes?" Or perhaps, more relevantly, "Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?"
第二个问题是，作为父母、老师、配偶、还有小说家，可能更为熟悉，就是“为什么去了解别人想要或者相信的东西如此之难？" 也许更贴切的说法是 “为什么改变他人想要的或者相信的东西如此难？"
I think novelists put this best. Like Philip Roth, who said, "And yet, what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people? So ill equipped are we all, to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims." So as a teacher and as a spouse, this is, of course, a problem I confront every day. But as a scientist, I'm interested in a different problem of other minds, and that is the one I'm going to introduce to you today. And that problem is, "How is it so easy to know other minds?"
我觉得小说家们说的最好。正如Philip Roth所说，我们要对其他人这项非常重要的事业做些什么呢？那就是我们所有人在没有能力的情况下，去想象他人的内心想法，和那些无法看见的目的” 当然，作为一名教师，一名已婚人士，这当然是我每天都遇到的问题。但是作为一名科学家，我对关于其他人想法的另一个问题更有兴趣。这也是我今天将要给大家介绍的内容。这个问题就是 “知道其他人如何想这么容易？“
So to start with an illustration, you need almost no information, one snapshot of a stranger, to guess what this woman is thinking, or what this man is. And put another way, the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds, our brain, is made up of pieces, brain cells, that we share with all other animals, with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs. And yet, you put them together in a particular network, and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet. Or to say, as Alan Greenspan did, "I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
我们以这幅插图开始。你几乎不需要任何信息，只有一张陌生人的快照，猜猜这个女人在想什么，或者这个男人是什么。换句话说，问题的关键在于我们用来思考其他思想的机器，我们的大脑，是由各种成千上万的脑细胞所组成，这点和其它动物，如猴子、老鼠、甚至于海蛞蝓都是一样的。然而，当你把它们放在一个特定的网络中，你就拥有书写《罗密欧与朱丽叶》这样的能力。或者说，像Alan Greenspan说过的一样，“我知道你认为你明白我说过的话，但我不确定你是否意识到你听到的不是我的意思”。
Question
- How does Saxe start her speech?
> She engages the audience by introducing questions they're familiar with - The crux of a problem is
> the most important or difficult part
Listen and Repeat
- We often misunderstand other people without realizing it.
