The problem of other minds

the solitude of subjectivity

I've always found it mysterious and upsetting that I'll never know what it's like to be someone else. We get hints about what other people's lives are like all the time, but we never get the full picture. Imagine if, when holding someone's hand in just the right way, your minds melded together, and you could experience their subjectivity, see what it's like to look at yourself from the outside, see what it's like to hold all their memories and fears and aspirations in your subconscious.

Philosophers call this the problem of other minds. They ask: how do we know what other people are experiencing? How do we know that they're experiencing anything at all? There are some things you can see extrinsically: the smile on their face, the way their eyes dart across the room, the way they cower and contract in agonizing pain. But you don't feel the pain itself, you don't hear the ringing in their ears, you don't remember the weird absurdities of their dreams.

I've spent some time going back and forth on the epistemic questions. I heard Descartes’ I think therefore I am and got worried that maybe I'm the only person who actually exists and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. I never found the perfect logical refutation to this doubt, but I did decide that it was somehow framing the question in the wrong way, that engaging with the world and noticing people’s expressions and stories is convincing enough for me. I read about panpsychism and wondered if the entire universe is conscious. I meditated intensely and imagined that maybe there is a bigger mind I have some connection to, a mind I inhabit every time I identify less with myself and more with the pains and the joys of the people I love.

thanks to Mel for this one

As a practical matter the problem of other minds drives much of what I do. I could spend hours asking you about your story and trying to understand every little detail of how you experience things. I’ll remain engaged for as long as you remain honest. I write and read to establish a bridge between my mind and yours, to remember that I'm not the only one who's experiencing these strange things. These days when I think about the big questions, I'm less preoccupied with the correct answer and more preoccupied with understanding, as clearly as I can, how every individual person thinks about it. To penetrate the truth that people craft in their heads, to see why it is that people misunderstand each other so blatantly. I think the biggest problems we face stem from our tendency to turn off our access to other minds, to decide that this other person's experience doesn't matter or isn't real.

Andy Weir has a short story called The Egg in which, when you die, you realize that you are every person who has ever lived and will ever live. In his Nobel prize speech, Richard Feynman said that John Wheeler once told him that he finally figured out why all electrons have the same mass: because they are all the same electron, moving forward and backward in time. It’s clear to us that we share one world, that we can see each other and make contact through the haze, but it’s too easy to convince ourselves otherwise, to believe that we exist in islands of our own, to imagine the haze between us is an impenetrable wall beyond which nothing exists.

Why is it that when you look inside someone's skull—the place that supposedly stores all their memories and visions and desires—you don't see any such thing, all you see is a blob of pink goo, and looking any closer at it doesn't help, because now you see a blob of pink goo with a bunch of ions dancing back and forth across gelatinous membranes?

Of course, the ions mean something, and we're getting to the point where we can read back a colorful field of vision from them. But why is there this intermediary, why can’t we get the experience itself, why can’t we hold someone else’s feelings? Perhaps if our experiences could bleed right out of us, if inside our skull was a bunch of mind-stuff, if all of reality was a bunch of mind-stuff, the world would be much like a dream, with no sturdiness, all the clocks would shapeshift every time you looked at them, every moment would be punctuated by non-sequiturs, airplanes in the aquarium followed by high school but it's a shakespearean play taking place on a trampoline in outer space. Maybe we need these boundaries, these sturdy walls, this capacity to imagine that we are alone, for the world to make any sense.

creds: a wild jelly

I was talking to a friend about this and I said, “what if we were both characters in the same mind”, what if Someone Else was just imagining us, having us recite our individual scripts. We closed our eyes and imagined it together. And there was a moment where it felt exactly like that: like her and I were different voices in the same head, melded together, no sense of separation, no longer alone. Of course, the mind is suggestible in ways like this, with the right cues you can lose your sense of identity, or imagine that a rubber hand is your own hand. Various forms of self-deception and trickery. Right? Probably. Maybe.

I'll never know what it’s like to be someone else, but I'll keep trying. It’s what I do when I watch a film or read a novel or play a game or even dance: take myself momentarily outside of myself, so I can be someone else, something more. The more we share, the more we are honest and open, the more inventive we are with the ways we talk and express ourselves, the closer we will get. I don't think it'll ever be enough for me. But it's a start.