Their point is that empathy is a (very useful) emotional response. It doesn't give you a correct model of the other persons mind.
Not all people like that at all. Some people really do feel emotions of others before being able to rationalize it.
Yeah, they are called empaths. That's empathy. Rationalizing is another process, which can be done faster with high emotional/social intelligence.
> psychopath - i.e. someone who can rationalize and think about other beings logically, without actually being able to subconsciously empathize.
Exactly. Low on empathy but high on intelligence - psychopath. Low on emotional intelligence but high on empathy - empath. Low on both - unfeeling idiot. High on both - a warm kind person.
You mean, it’s how you can assign anthropomorphised assumptions to the octopus. There’s a world difference between having semi reliable predictive power and actually knowing something.
That is a world apart from seeing an octopus react to something and assuming that anything resembling emotions are involved at all.
And theory of mind is how you can know what someone is thinking without them telling you.