“You don’t know how it feels to be me.” –Tom Petty1
You have no idea what it is like to be someone else. Their consciousness – the way they experience life –will be inaccessible to you.2
If this seems wrong, consider for a moment the astounding fact that you cannot even be sure that other people are conscious at all. The only proof you have that anyone is conscious is that you are directly experiencing it yourself. Everyone else could simply be acting conscious and claiming to be conscious, when they are merely a collection of atoms going through the motions.2 The universe you think you live in could be an elaborate computer simulation, with you as the only player.
But probably not.
That’s just a thought experiment that philosophers love. It dates back to Descartes who, after calling everything into doubt, famously concluded that the only thing he could be certain of was his own existence. (“I think, therefore I am.”)3
The point of such a radical thought is not to doubt that other people are conscious or to wonder whether or not we’re all living in The Matrix. The point is to recognize just how profoundly ignorant we are of the inner workings of other minds.
The Subjectivity of Experience
Is my experience of the color red the same as yours? We both call it “red,” but what if the way I see red is the way you see green? We can never know.
A more telling example might be taste. I hate olives, but my wife thinks they’re delicious. We both describe them as tasting like olives, but our experiences are radically different.
The same is probably true for the flavor of more important experiences: meeting new people, facing a challenge, being in love. I know what it’s like to experience these things myself, but there’s no way for me to truly know what the experience is like for you.
Judging Books By Their Covers
You’ll never know everything about someone’s background. Your sense of their life story – even if you know them very well – is really just the SparkNotes summary. And for most of the people you interact with, all you know is what you readily see – the cover of the book.
You simply cannot know what it is like to be someone else. To have their unique neural circuitry, to be in their body, to have had all of their experiences.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to understand. But it does mean you should be more humble and less certain of your conclusions about other people.
We should engage with each other with less judgment and more empathy, with fewer assumptions and more curiosity. And this should cause us to be more patient and more kind, more accepting and more loving.
1 Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”
2 Harris, Sam. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014.