懂你英语 流利说 Level7 Unit3 Part2 : On Reading Minds 1

Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds.

And the problem I'm going to talk to you 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.

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?"

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?"

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."

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Which of the following is a common topic of discussion in philosophy? Whether or not other people are conscious

"So ill equipped are we all, to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims" in this context what does "one interior workings" refer to? how one's mind works.

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So as a teacher and as a spouse, this is a problem I confront every day. But as a scientist, I'm interested in a different problem of other minds, and that problem is, "How is it so easy to know other minds?"

- People often misunderstand each other without realizing it.

- to highlight the difficulty in understanding other people's thoughts and emotions.

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(1) Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds.

(2) 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?"

(3) That is, maybe you have a mind, and everyone else is just a really convincing robot.

(4) 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.

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As a teacher and as a spouse, this is a problem I confront every day.

How can we know whether other people have minds?

The crux of the problem is the most important or difficult part of it.

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There is a second problem familiar to us as parents, teachers and spouses, which is, "Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes?"