Machine Theory of Mind
There is some philosophical context here that perhaps everyone reading this is not aware of.<p>It has been argued that people have an innate Theory of Mind. They use it to theorize about perhaps the most important thing we theorize about: other people.<p>So if someone drinks water, we surmise that they were thirsty (desire) and had the belief that drinking water would quench the thirst.<p>There is one big debate on whether people have a set of rules that they look up (unconsciously), or if they have a little "human simulator" where they throw in the action and out comes a belief/desire configuration. This is characterized as the debate between the "Theory Theory vs Simulation Theory").<p>Some theorists believe that autism is a disorder of this mechanism. Stated another way, some theorists believe that autists don't have a Theory of Mind. Consider this: in order to follow your gaze I would have to believe that you will look in a certain direction only if you are a person who would not want to look off in some random direction, and that you would look at something that is interesting or noteworthy.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind</a><p>Anyway, if these scientists can produce a successful model that doesn't rely in explicit rules or a theory -- a neural net -- then others might look for evidence of this sort of computation in the brain. Alternatively, they could demonstrate that this model essentially encodes a set of rules, or perhaps they could collapse the debate into a hybrid theory.