Delving into one another's consciousness

I usually respond to comments under my blog posts by posting a comment in return, but this comment (below) under Saturday's post intrigued me enough to want to answer it in a separate post 

Anonymous said...

‘I haven’t the foggiest idea what it’s like to be you, nor you what it’s like to be me’. Is that by choice? To be non-revealing? To not want to know what goes on in another’s life?

Is being non-revealing a choice? This is not about me being uninterested in the actions and the events in another person's life. Nor is about me being secretive or recondite as a person. Rather, this is about how it is fundamentally impossible to know with any accuracy how another person experiences their life. In this sphere, we are entirely clueless. 

We can assess another person's intelligence with relative ease, based on what they say, their vocabulary, fluency, and their grasp of subject matter. We can guess their emotional state by external cues - facial expressions, body language. But the quintessential experience of what it's like to be someone else - is unguessable. 

As I have written many times, my conscious subjective experience is fundamental to the me-ness of being me; your conscious subjective experience is fundamental to the you-ness of being you. Central to this is the notion of qualia - the feelings created by sensory perceptions. Experiences such as Christmas shopping with snow falling lightly at dusk; watching a sunset on a beach while sipping a cold beer; driving along a familiar stretch of country road, sunlight dappling autumnal leaves - each of us has our own back catalogue of qualia memories which from time re-surface, sometimes triggered by a sight or sound or smell, sometimes entirely unbidden, sometimes conjured up.

These back catalogues may include some entries which overlap slightly. Anyone who travelled regularly by London Underground in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, will remember the sensations of being in a Tube train in a tunnel rushing between stations. If you remember communist Poland, you'll be able to summon the odours of a Ruch kiosk on a summer's day - cheap newsprint, cheap tobacco and cheap plastic toys. If we express our conscious experiences, be it in written form as here, or on film or in any other form of artistic endeavour, the reader, the viewer, the listener, may find that something resonates, and an approximation of the qualia moment may be conveyed.

Consciousness is irreducible - it is something far more than just the firing of electrical impulses in the synapses between the neurons in our brains. Conscious experience is, I believe, primary, cosmic; universal.

No human can know what it's like to be a bat, because we cannot grasp what it's like to echo-locate. To a finer degree, the differences between the way different humans experience their lives is guessable but ultimately unknowable.

It's not that I don't want to know what goes on in another person's life, or that I am indifference to what goes on in another person's life - it's just that I cannot share anybody else's qualia memories, nor can anybody else experience mine the way I consciously experience my memories.

This time last year:
Summertime dreamland

This time two years ago:
Getting our heads around UFOs

This time five years ago:
Bristol-fashioned

This time six years ago:
The imminent closure of Marks & Spencer in Warsaw

This time ten years ago:
Along mirror'd canyons

This time 12 years ago:
Mad about Marmite 

This time 13 years ago:
Komorowski wins second round of Presidential elections?

This time 14 years ago:
A beautiful summer dusk in Jeziorki

This time 14 years ago:
Classic cars, London and Warsaw