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Most scientists assume that mental inference is a core ability of the human mind. So a lot is at stake if apes can do it. We know that monkeys cannot; they can understand what a human is doing but not what he is thinking, desiring, or feeling.
Scientists still debate whether these apes understand the meanings of the symbols or are just mimicking their trainers in order to request rewards.
The human capacity for social reality appears unique in the animal kingdom. Only we can create and share purely mental concepts using words. Only we can use these concepts to more effectively regulate our own body budgets and each other’s, while we cooperate and compete with one another. Only we have concepts for mental states, such as emotion concepts, for predicting and making sense of sensations. Social reality is a human superpower.
Modern dogs also have long been bred for certain desirable characteristics, like attaching to a human caregiver, and other characteristics surely have come along for the ride, perhaps even something like human emotion concepts.
Dogs use our gaze to tell them what to attend to, and their skill is so great that they seem to read our mind in our eyes. Even more remarkably, dogs follow each other’s gaze to get information about the world.
Many animals can experience unpleasant affect when another animal nearby is suffering. The first animal’s body budget is taxed by the second animal’s discomfort, so the first animal tries to fix the situation.* Even a rat will help another rat who is in distress, for example. Human infants can comfort another infant who is in distress. You don’t need emotion concepts for this ability, just a nervous system with interoception that produces affect.
So the question “Was Rowdy angry?” is actually two separate scientific questions: • “Was Rowdy angry from the boy’s perspective?” • “Was Rowdy angry from his own perspective?” These questions have substantially different answers.
a number of scientists now suspect that very social animals, such as dogs and elephants, have some concept of death and can experience some kind of grief. This grief need not have exactly the same features as human grief, but both could be rooted in something similar: the neurochemical basis of attachment, body budgeting, and affect.
When you have a brain that essentializes, it’s easy to come up with a wrong theory of the mind. We are, after all, a bunch of brains trying to figure out how brains work.
the brain is wired to categorize, and categories breed essentialism. Every noun we utter is an opportunity to invent an essence without intending to do so.
Neuroscience has delivered a far better understanding of the brain and its function than our own experiences ever could, not just for emotion but for all mental events.
humans use concepts to build social reality, and social reality, in turn, wires the brain. Emotions are very real creations of social reality, made possible by human brains in concert with other human brains.
Your mind is not a battleground between opposing inner forces — passion and reason — that determine how responsible you are for your behavior. Rather, your mind is a computational moment within your constantly predicting brain.
concepts come from your culture and help negotiate the quintessential dilemma of living in groups — getting ahead versus getting along — a tug-of-war that has more than one solution. On balance, some cultures favor getting along, while others favor getting ahead.
The human brain evolved, in the context of human cultures, to create more than one kind of mind.
to a certain extent cultures guided by Buddhist philosophy, do not make hard distinctions between thinking and feeling.1
Natural selection favors a complex brain. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience. Your genes allow you, and others, to remodel your brain and therefore your mind.
This variability is not infinite or arbitrary; it is constrained by the brain’s need for efficiency and speed, by the outside world, and by the human dilemma of getting along versus getting ahead. Your culture handed you one particular system of concepts, values, and practices to address that dilemma.
affective realism, concepts, and social reality. They (and perhaps others) are inevitable and therefore universal, barring illness, based on the anatomy and function of the brain.
Affective realism, the phenomenon that you experience what you believe, is inevitable because of your wiring.
Body-budget predictions laden with affect, not logic and reason, are the main drivers of your experience and behavior.
Your own perceptions are not like a photograph of the world. They are not even a painting of photographic quality, like a Vermeer. They are more like a Van Gogh or Monet.
Your brain’s concepts are a model of the world that keeps you alive, serves to meet your body’s energy needs, and ultimately determines how well you propagate your genes.
your neurons influence one another not only through direct connections but indirectly through the outside environment, in an interaction with me. We are performing a synchronized dance of prediction and action, regulating each other’s body budgets.
Concepts also encourage us not to see things that are present.
When you are born, you can’t regulate your body budget by yourself — somebody else has to do it.
Social reality is the human superpower; we’re the only animal that can communicate purely mental concepts among ourselves.
We constantly mistake perceiver-dependent concepts — flowers, weeds, colors, money, race, facial expressions, and so on — for perceiver-independent reality.
as a field, psychology keeps rediscovering the same phenomena and giving them new names and searching for them in new places in the brain. That’s why we have a hundred concepts for “the self.”
Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as reality.
What we experience as “certainty” — the feeling of knowing what is true about ourselves, each other, and the world around us — is an illusion that the brain manufactures to help us make it through each day.
Certainty leads us to miss other explanations.
there is no single reality to grasp. Your brain can create more than one explanation for the sensory input around you — not an infinite number of realities, but definitely more than one.
We are a bunch of brains regulating each other’s body budgets, building concepts and social reality together, and thereby helping to construct each other’s minds and determine each other’s outcomes.
You are also somewhat responsible to others, not only the less fortunate but also future generations, for how you influence their wiring.
There is a kind of freedom in realizing that we categorize to create meaning, and therefore it is possible to change meaning by recategorizing.
A scientific revolution swaps out one social reality for another, just like a political revolution does with its new government and social order.
Progress in science isn’t always about finding the answers; it’s about asking better questions.
It is a gift when someone with a different point of view engages you in honest conversation,
