Quote:
Originally Posted by D10
In theory, anything with long term thinking should be capable of producing a theory of mind. It would be really weird for a species to evolve language, technology, and etc. Without the basic mental capacity for cooperation based on long term goal directed thinking.
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That's our theory, but we're a social species that evolved intelligence. That might bias our views.
For example, I've read about experiments in psychology that test people's ability to figure out puzzles in logic. Most people are unexpectedly bad at doing this, ordinarily. But if you frame the puzzle, not as an abstract set of questions, but as a way of detecting whether someone is deceiving you, the same people do significantly better. That is, we seem to have highly developed social intelligence, but our general purpose intelligence isn't as good in most people (autistic spectrum people might be an exception).
So could we have a different pattern, one where toolmaking or navigation was the core ability, and social reasoning was at best a difficult addon? We know a nervous system can work like that, because some people have that pattern. Could it evolve without sociality? Could we have a species that was either fully autistic, or Asperger-like, putting together social alliances through rational calculation?
I'm not sure we know.