This reminds me of a passage from Aldous Huxley's essay on mescaline, The Doors of Perception:
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are
by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers
desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very
nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights,
fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We
can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation,
every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another
to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our
own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put
ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases
communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the
Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where
ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for
understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which
the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.
As thoughts like these have swirled in my head over the years, I have become somewhat obsessed with the question of how my words and actions are interpreted by others, to the point where I often feel like I have no idea what they are thinking. Sometimes I think I have lost some cognitive ability, but others I feel it is just the acknowledgement of the author's sentiment "I assume that my mind is a pretty good simulation of yours, and it's just not."
Reading this the idea of "modelling" from gestalt therapy[1] came to mind. I think it's quite practical to create an internal model of another person, which can be refined over time through observation. Fringe practices like "tulpamancy" involve actually "running" such a construct, and I think, whatever the truth behind the claims of tulpamancers, there is a lot still unknown about this (see also multiple personality, or dissociative identity disorder, and of course "hearing voices" in schizophrenia).
Edit: [1] Actually it is a "neuro-linguistic programming" concept, which makes it a bit less credible. Still, the concept is clear.
It may be practical in that there might not be any better option, but it would be dangerous to believe that you are gaining actual insight into the subjective experience of the other person (whom, technically we don't even know exists as a separate entity). At best, you can perhaps know that you are gaining insight into your own model of another person.
This is a topic very dear to me, and I'd like to share the brief conclusion to Walter Pater's The Renaissance. The full text is available online[0]; it's very much worth the read if you're interested in literary appropriations to the problem of human connection and the nature of experience.
Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.
To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off–that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
IS IT NOT a very strange thing in this world, where there is so much distraction, entertainment, that almost everybody is a spectator and very few are players? Whenever we have a little free time, most of us seek some form of amusement. We pick up a serious book, a novel, or a magazine. If we are in America we turn on the radio or the television, or we indulge in incessant talk. There is a constant demand to be amused, to be entertained, to be taken away from ourselves. We are afraid to be alone, afraid to be without a companion, without a distraction of some sort. Very few of us ever walk in the fields and the woods, not talking or singing songs, but just walking quietly and observing things about us and within ourselves. We almost never do that because, you see, most of us are very bored; we are caught in a dull routine of learning or teaching, of household duties or a job, and so in our free time we want to be amused, either lightly or seriously. We read, or go to the cinema - or we turn to a religion, which is the same thing. Religion too has become a form of distraction, a kind of serious escape from boredom, from routine.
I don't know if you have noticed all this. Most people are constantly occupied with something - with puja, with the repetition of certain words, with worrying over this or that - because they are frightened to be alone with themselves. You try being alone, without any form of distraction, and you will see how quickly you want to get away from yourself and forget what you are. That is why this enormous structure of professional amusement, of automated distraction, is so prominent a part of what we call civilization. If you observe you will see that people the world over are becoming more and more distracted, increasingly sophisticated and worldly. The multiplication of pleasures, the innumerable books that are being published, the newspaper pages filled with sporting events - surely, all these indicate that we constantly want to be amused. Because we are inwardly empty, dull, mediocre, we use our relationships and our social reforms as a means of escaping from ourselves. I wonder if you have noticed how lonely most people are? And to escape from loneliness we run to temples, churches, or mosques, we dress up and attend social functions, we watch television, listen to the radio, read, and so on.
Do you know what loneliness means? Some of you may be unfamiliar with that word, but you know the feeling very well. You try going out for a walk alone, or being without a book, without someone to talk to, and you will see how quickly you get bored. You know that feeling well enough, but you don't know why you get bored, you have never inquired into it. If you inquire a little into boredom you will find that the cause of it is loneliness. It is in order to escape from loneliness that we want to be together, we want to be entertained, to have distractions of every kind: gurus, religious ceremonies, prayers, or the latest novels. Being inwardly lonely we become mere spectators in life; and we can be the players only when we understand loneliness and go beyond it.
After all, most people marry ad seek other social relationships because they don't know how to live alone. Not that one must live alone; but, if you marry because you want to be loved, or if you are bored and use your job as a means of forgetting yourself, then you will find that your whole life is nothing but an endless search for distractions. Very few go beyond this extraordinary fear of loneliness; but one must go beyond it, because beyond it lies the real treasure.
You know, there is a vast difference between loneliness and aloneness. Some of the younger students may still be unaware of loneliness, but the older people know it: the feeling of being utterly cut off, of suddenly being afraid without apparent cause. The mind knows this fear when for a moment it realizes that it can rely on nothing, that no distraction can take away the sense of self-enclosing emptiness. That is loneliness. But aloneness is something entirely different; it is a state of freedom which comes into being when you have gone through loneliness and understand it. In that state of aloneness you don't rely on anyone psychologically because you are no longer seeking pleasure, comfort, gratification. It is only then that the mind is completely alone, and only such a mind is creative.
It's a nice quote but just not true. The experience of true union exists but is so far phenomenologically from the every day life of an average city dweller that most people are unaware of it.
I'm also curious what you could possibly mean by this. I think you either misunderstand the quote, or are referring to something mystical that most people wouldn't buy into.
Can you explain what you mean by the experience of true union? Do you mean perfect communication through words and actions, or some connection on a higher level, perhaps spiritual or drug-induced?
Also, even if, for certain pairs or small groups of people, it is possible to achieve a truly deep level of understanding, in general the principle is still sound and arguably the most important application is to those whose universes are the most foreign to yours.
> Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
I'm sorry but what? Can a union of a blind person and a person with sight communicate "redness" to the blind person such that the both have the exact same representation of red inside their head?
If you have anything on this, I would love to read it.
> What we did is we had them predict on a zero to 10 scale how members of the opposite sex would rate them in terms of their attractiveness
> accuracy was not significantly better than chance
I think this experiment conflates people having different opinions on attractiveness with the inherent difficulty on mapping the attractiveness spectrum onto the scale of 1 to 10.
I'd be interested in an experiment that instead had participants order the attractiveness of many photos from most to least without assigning numbers to them. The photos should range from grotesque to average to supermodels. I think almost everyone would agree on the broad ordering, with some variation in exact ordering.
Then, to capture the personal aspect of the original experiment, subjects could insert themselves into the ranking and see if the opposite sex agrees. My hypothesis is that performance would be far better than chance in this scenario.
>"if you ask people to psychoanalyze themselves, ask them why their brain is doing this; or you ask them to report on mental processes, why did you make this decision versus that one—psychologists find over and over again that basically what we’re doing in those situations is we’re telling stories. We’re making sense of ourselves without having actual access to how our brains are causing those decisions."
This quote is so telling in how little people know about themselves. When you analyze yourself, you're telling a story, not conducting a scientific analysis. Unlike science, stories can be fictional. This is why it's so easy for people to lie to themselves and paint a rational world around what is essentially mob mentality.
It's also why I repeatedly see good, moral people do great evil and be completely unaware of it. They justified their actions to themselves with a story... a fictional story.
It seems completely obvious that individuality is the basic state, and then we come together to form friendships, families, societies. But I would hold that actually our collectivity and connectedness is actually logically and historically prior to any individuality -- we evolved from social animals, we are still social animals, and even the language with which we say "I am an individual" is a testament and an inheritance from this collectivity. In fact, our feeling of separatedness might be the illusion, not our feeling of union.
Of course there is a Marxist angle to this: the relations of production in Capitalism are based on contracts between individuals, so we become steeped in this ideology from before we are even born and it just becomes "obvious", even though it makes even less sense than earth's seeming flatness.
Even the nasty, brutish, short competitive phase of human history was likely not competition between individuals but between groups whose unity and homogeneity was probably almost total. Anyone who was not one with his / her group was probably ostracized, then died shortly thereafter.
My girlfriend just came home and I told her the study about rating yourself 1-10. She replied, "Everyone already knew that. I learned nothing from these two minutes."
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.
As thoughts like these have swirled in my head over the years, I have become somewhat obsessed with the question of how my words and actions are interpreted by others, to the point where I often feel like I have no idea what they are thinking. Sometimes I think I have lost some cognitive ability, but others I feel it is just the acknowledgement of the author's sentiment "I assume that my mind is a pretty good simulation of yours, and it's just not."
https://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfP...