Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…It also might be that we have to think of empathy in a new way. As we talked about earlier, suppose that what we are consciously aware of is being generated by some unconscious processes that happen right beforehand. Maybe when we are trying to experience empathy at a certain point in time, there are other processes in the brain that occurred beforehand that we don’t have access to. But if we could access those processes, we could have a greater kind of empathy. Some of this language is used in meditative and consciousness-oriented and mindfulness practices that try to understand compassion and empathy in a greater way. But I wonder if there’s a precise neuroscientific way to tackle such things. There’s a report from about five days ago that there’s a new contribution coming out of Columbia for a kind of “mind vocoder,” they called it, I believe — almost a kind of mind reading — that you can read mind signals and have some notion what an individual is thinking. You’re familiar with this work? I’ve been so focused on writing manuscripts the last couple days. I don’t know stuff in the last couple days in the scientific literature.…

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