You can see this overlap between self and other as a clever evolutionary trick. To thrive as a social being, one has to make sense of the internal lives of other individuals, to accurately guess what other people are thinking, wanting, and feeling. Since we’re not telepathic, we have to infer this from information we get from our senses. One possible solution is that we come to understand people in the same way that we come to understand any other phenomenon, like the growth of plants or the movement of stars in the night sky. But there’s an alternative. We can take advantage of the fact that
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