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In 2004, Horace Atwater Jr. took in Adrian Hawkins as a foster child. Adrian was a teenager at the time, "this little, skinny kid, about 14," Horace recalls. "You didn't really have any clothes. You had mismatched socks."

Adrian had lived a difficult life as a child. He lived in several group and foster homes before moving in with Horace. "I remember times being hungry, seeing drugs and all kinds of stuff," Adrian tells Horace at StoryCorps in Atlanta. "I mean, some things had to happen for me to be in foster care."

When Adrian asks why Horace, now 61, would "care so much for a stranger," it's clear that Adrian didn't just find a home with Horace; the two found a home in each other. As Adrian describes it, Horace "had it good one time," but then his life took a turn.

"I had a personal experience where I lost everything — a wife, two fine sons — because of drug addiction and anger," Horace explains. "I didn't experience my own sons growing up. I would only see them on visitation periods, but when my wife remarried, she married a man that embraced my sons as though they were his own.

"He has been an excellent father to them," Horace continues. "And I am so grateful that he embraced them the way he did. I'm also grateful for the opportunity that I had to embrace you. So, that's the least that I owe — the least I could do," Horace says.

His foster dad may have made mistakes in his past, Adrian says, "but you're the most influential person in my life," he tells him. "I'm just glad that I met you."

Horace is proud of how well his one-time foster son is doing today. Adrian, now 22, hopes to become a pharmacist. "You know, it makes me look like I'm smart, but you're the one who's smart," Horace laughs. "God, for you to become the man that you are I am so proud of that."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher.

This text is adapted from Alva's book Out of Our Heads.

The start of almost all reflection on this problem is the idea that our knowledge of how others think and feel, indeed, our knowledge that they think and feel and are not mere automata, is based on what we can see and hear and measure. We observe behavior, or, as in the case of patients with persistent vegetative state or locked-in syndrome, we measure neural activity. It can seem, then, that the closest we can come to knowing other minds, in a theoretically respectable way, is having some account according to which behavior and neural activity provide reliable criteria of a person's psychological state.

But this is really to concede that we don't have knowledge of other minds, at least not in a respectable way. For observations of behavior (what people say and do) and measurements of neural activity, don't yield knowledge of other minds. Surely this is an important lesson from persistent vegetative states and locked-in syndrome. Mere behavior is at best an unreliable guide to how things are for a person. And moreover, we really don't understand the connection between neural activity and experience any way.

Would the results of a brain scan ever convince us that our daughter was no longer a living person, especially when she continues to appear to respond to us, to our words, sounds, touch? If what people say and do, and measurements of what their brain is doing, are the best we have to go on, then it would seem that our commitment to the minds of others is epistemically ungrounded, a mere act of faith.

There is another piece of the puzzle about our knowledge of other minds. It is this: No sane person can take seriously the suggestion that our knowledge of other minds is merely hypothetical. However weak our evidence that others have minds may be, it is plainly outrageous to suggest that we might, for this reason, give up our commitment to the minds of others. That my friends and children and parents are thinking, feeling beings, that a world shows up for them, that they are not mere automata, is something that only insanity could ever allow one to question.

So we face a paradox: Although we lack sufficient reason to believe in the minds of others, it would be plainly unreasonable for us to give up this commitment.

Paradox is a dead giveaway that we've made a mistake in our thinking somewhere along the line. There must be something amiss in the way we have framed the question at the outset.

Our challenge: Where did we go wrong?

This week, the Internet radio broadcaster Pandora made what seems like a backward move — technologically speaking. Pandora purchased a local radio station in Rapid City, S.D. The company says it's aiming to get the more favorable royalty rates given to terrestrial broadcasters, but the move has songwriters and composers up in arms.

Blake Morgan is an independent musician whose "Better Angels" was among a number of his songs that got some 28,000 plays on Pandora. "The song earned $1.62 in royalties over a 90-day period on Pandora," he says, "which is a very typical rate."

If his song were played over iHeart Radio — a streaming service owned by Clear Channel — he would get paid even less. That's because Clear Channel, which owns hundreds of terrestrial radio stations — pays the same amount in royalties for online streaming that it does for broadcasting the same songs. Pandora attorney Christopher Harrison says that's not fair.

"Pandora shouldn't be discriminated against simply because we don't own a radio station," he says. So, this week Pandora purchased KXMZ, a small adult contemporary station on the main street in Rapid City — population 70,000 — in an effort to get the rate enjoyed by iHeart Radio.

Royalty rates are negotiated mostly with rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI, which represent hundreds of thousands of songwriters and music publishers. Back when rates were established, playing a song on the radio was considered a free advertisement for a record. Since rights holders were getting money from record sales, they got less from radio royalties. Paul Williams, the president of ASCAP, says broadcasters pay the same in royalties for radio and streaming because those streams account for a tiny portion of their audience.

"The fact is," he says, "they're very, very different models. Internet radio and terrestrial radio use music and generate revenue in different ways."

He says Pandora's purchase of KXMZ isn't going to reduce its rates. "This is what I would refer to as a stunt — a way to do an end run to reduce the price of what they pay just one more little notch."

It should be said that ASCAP and Pandora are already in court battling over what the Internet radio service claims are unfair business practices.

Pandora, which is the No. 1 Internet radio service, saw more than $125 million last quarter in revenues — 55 percent more than the year before. But the company still isn't profitable, in part because it pays over 60 percent of its revenues to acquire music. Harrison says if Pandora gets into the radio business it should pay the same rate as Clear Channel does for its iHeart Radio.

"From our perspective, what we're trying to do is make sure that we operate at parity with our biggest competitors," he says. "If iHeart Radio's personalized Internet radio service pays a particular rate, we think we're entitled to operate under that same rate."

But the future is clearly in Internet radio services like Pandora. According to a survey by the NPD Group, people under 35 spent a quarter of their listening time on the Internet in 2012 — up 17 percent from the year before. Time spent listening to radio went down 2 percent.

At the same time, people are buying less music. Musician Blake Morgan says the only way for him to make a living going forward is for streaming services to pay a fair rate.

"I have a new record coming out — most people have new records coming out," he says. "These are things that we've worked on for months, if not years, and we're not looking to be paid unfairly. We're simply looking for a fair working wage for the music that we make."

Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren sent out emails to musicians trying to get them behind Pandora's attempts to even the rates between terrestrial and Internet radio. Morgan wrote back to Westegren furious: "He cashes in a million dollars of stock every month on the first of the month and he's done so over the same 14-month period that recording artists like me earned $15.75."

That's not likely to change anytime soon. The issue of Internet radio royalty rates will almost certainly wind up in court.

Facebook and Microsoft Corp. say the government has given them permission to reveal orders they've received to hand over user data, but that they are still prevented from giving anything other than very broad figures.

Facebook says it received 9,000 to 10,000 requests during the last six months of 2012, while Microsoft says it got 6,000 to 7,000 requests, affecting as many as 32,000 accounts.

"These requests run the gamut — from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat," Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot said in a blog post late Friday.

"The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts," Ullyot said. He compared that to the 1.1 billion Facebook accounts worldwide, saying the requests affected "a tiny fraction of one percent" of the social media giant's users.

John Frank, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, wrote in a similar blog post that the requests it had received impact only "a tiny fraction of Microsoft's global customer base."

Among other things, Microsoft owns the Hotmail email service.

As NPR's Jim Zarroli reported earlier this week, companies like Facebook and Microsoft are very much caught in the middle of the current debate about national security and privacy.

And both Ullyot and Frank expressed frustration with the limitations on what they were allowed to reveal to their customers and the public.

"In light of continued confusion and inaccurate reporting related to this issue, we've advocated for the ability to say even more," Ullyot wrote.

Frank said Microsoft believes "that what we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help the community understand and debate these issues."

Both companies said they remain involved in discussions with the government to gain permission to publish more specific data.