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Mind Projection Fallacy - LessWrong

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The Mind Projection Fallacy is the error of projecting the properties of your own mind onto the external world. For example, one might erroneously think that because they enjoy the taste of chocolate, the chocolate has the inherent property of tastiness, and therefore everyone else must like its taste too. Overcoming the mind project fallacy requires realizing that our minds are not transparent windows unto veridical reality; when you look at a rock, you experience not the the rock itself, but your mind's representation of the rock, reconstructed from photons bouncing off its surface. Sugar in and of itself is not inherently sweet; the sugar itself only has the chemical properties that it does, which your brain interprets as sweet. HISTORY Physicist and Bayesian philosopher E.T. Jaynes coined the term mind projection fallacy to refer to this kind of failure to distinguish between epistemological claims (statements about belief, about your map, about what we can say about reality) and ontological claims (statements about reality, about the territory, about how things are). In particular, the concept was applied in the critique of frequentist interpretation of the notion of probability as a property of physical systems rather than an epistemic device concerned with levels of certainty, Bayesian probability. NOTABLE POSTS * Mind Projection Fallacy * Probability is in the Mind * Examples of the Mind Projection Fallacy? SEE ALSO * Bayesian probability * Magic * The map is not the territory * 2-place and 1-place words

x Mind projection fallacy — LessWrong Main LW Wiki Mind projection fallacy Edited by Eliezer Yudkowsky , So8res , et al. last updated 19th Feb 2025 The " mind projection fallacy " occurs when somebody expects an overly direct resemblance between the intuitive language of the mind, and the language of physical reality. Consider the map and territory metaphor, in which the world is a like a territory and your mental model of the world is like a map of that territory. In this metaphor, the mind projection fallacy is analogous to thinking that the territory can be folded up and put into your pocke

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