 Chris, is there a problem of other minds? Traditionally people think that the problem with other minds is that they're hidden from us so that we're supposed to know about our own mind but not about other people's minds whereas we somehow have direct access to physical objects in the world but I think this is wrong because I'm a follower of Helmholtz and we equally have no direct access to physical things in the world both the minds and the things we have to understand by combining the evidence of our senses with prior expectations but what is really different about other minds is of course while I'm trying to understand your mind you're trying to understand my mind and this creates what I like to call closing the loop so what I do determines what you do and what you do determines what I do and this of course is quite different from our interactions with physical things in the world But how does interaction become possible then if we constantly try to double guess each other? Well I think it's the same system in general where minimising prediction errors so I'm trying to understand what you're trying to convey to me and I have a hypothesis about what this might be and then essentially I say things to you which will indicate what my hypothesis is and I can predict what you will say back to me to some extent if I'm right and if I'm wrong you will say something I don't expect and you're of course doing the same thing with me but if we both manage to minimise our prediction errors as it were we probably reach some sort of degree of understanding and can go on to the next bit of the conversation Now something like culture, which role does that play for these mutual guessings? Well as I said our guess is depend upon having some sort of prior expectations and particularly with other people these prior expectations but at some extent the things we learn from our upbringing and from culture this obviously relates to things like prejudices and stereotypes about people it's our culture that tells us what certain kinds of people like say medical doctors ought to behave like and we will interact with them accordingly until our peace oppositions turn out to be wrong but that's I think culture is extremely important in providing these very high level expectations about the mental world that we live in But how are these high level predictions shared with each other? I think explicitly by talking to each other about them they were actually told about these sorts of things these high level expectations that's why we read novels that's why we watch what you call them so some television is all telling us about the way people in our culture behave and also in fact the way people in other cultures behave and this is a very slow process of building up these high level expectations which is probably in a sense outside the brain because it's too slow for the brain to handle so in this culture is what enables us to go beyond a single brain and the interactions with others create culture and also create huge advantages for us How slow can these slow processes be? I guess hundreds of years in some cases and we had this interesting talk about the development of calculus which now everybody thinks they understand how to do differential equations and things like this but what was it 400 years ago? It was completely alien to people and there was a great deal of discussion about how you could understand this and that would be a rather high level example but I think they're constant new kinds of tools for thinking that are developed which are basically created by talking to each other and disagreeing and having factions and eventually one faction wins because it's the description that best fits our cognitive the constraints that our cognition applies