While taking a philosophy class, my instructor and I had an argument regarding whether people experienced the world differently or not. That is, I was arguing that each individual had their own unique experience of the world, unlike all others. That were someone to somehow experience my experiences, my foreign experiences would be undecipherable to the other person because the manner in which I think is so unlike how they think. My instructor suggested it was an unreasonable leap for me to come to that conclusion, considering I have never experienced another’s experiences. He argued the counterpoint, that without good evidence, I am more reasonable to assume that others experience the world much as I do. In this post, I believe I now have sufficient evidence to support my side of the debate. Or at least an amount that is compelling.
The first clues to me that individuals probably experienced their worlds differently began when I was quite young. It may be true that I cannot experience others’ experiences, but what I can do is observe others’ behaviors. I can observe others’ actions as they relate to their desires and interests. I believe the first clue came from realizing others did not like the same foods as I did.
I have always liked broccoli. As an adult, this isn’t that big a deal. But as a child, this is unusual. It seems to me that most children hate eating their vegetables, especially the dark green ones. There exists the suggestion that children’s taste buds are still quite inexperienced, and so flavors are more significant to them. Anything with a strong flavor to an adult is even more flavorful to a child. Assuming this is true, it would certainly explain a child’s dislike for many dark green vegetables, as they frequently have quite a strong flavor to them. Even now, I find spinach challenging to eat without something accompanying it. That said, even as a child, I still ate it and eventually learned to like it.
I did this to myself at my young age due to a desire to eat healthy. I recognized that these less palatable foods tended towards better health and well being. My mother has suggested I must have seen this on television and for some reason adopted the idea. Perhaps that is true. Regardless of how it came to be, I still learned to like these foods early on. I liked broccoli back then, as I do still to this day.
This wasn’t the only thing I discovered that made me different than those around me. Music was another of these things that it seemed had quite diverse preferences among individuals. This came as a shock to me when I was in high school, when I discovered that the feelings invoked in me by music were not shared by others. When certain songs played on the radio, I would be brought to such an elative state. My elation manifested in physical changes, such as increased heart rate and flushing in my skin. The hairs on the back of my neck would literally stand up. But others would suggest to me that they merely found the sounds annoying and even painful. For them, the music induced no such physical reactions, or induced very different reactions.
I tend to enjoy electronica and house music. Synthesized sounds. Perhaps this is because I grew up on a computer, enduring Piezo speakers quite early on. The sounds emitted on a computer so long ago were not nearly as developed as they are today. It is possible that this is why I quickly found solace in these sorts of sounds.
I also have a tendency toward negative sounds, rather than positive sounds. I like depressing music, or music in minor keys much of the time. This again seems to be less popular. My observations lead me to believe that most people prefer positive sounds, or music in major keys. Arguably, the best music finds a balance between both.
But differences in preferences of foods or music can be explained through other means. It does not necessarily suggest that what is going on within the confines of my mind are different than what goes on in your mind. The break through for me came about when my father described to me how he literally saw the world.
My father was colourblind. Specifically, he could not differentiate between red and green. This posed a significant problem when playing poker, when he would frequently be seen stacking his $5 chips (red) with his $25 chips (green). He eventually found his own set of poker chips with the values written on them in order to resolve this issue.
But this is also, in part, how I ended up working on computers early on as well. Within the case of computers there exists many wires and connectors. These wires tend to be colour coded, in order to indicate their purpose. As my father was colourblind, he would often get me to help him, my job being primarily to tell him which wires were which colours. I never really thought much about this exercise at the time, but now thinking back on it, it was a rather significant detail in my own life.
About the time I was in high school, my father and I had a discussion regarding this condition he had. He described to me in great detail how he saw the world. Briefly, he suggested that when he looked at the world, what he first saw were the shapes of things, and then would apply colours to those shapes. This is contrary to how I see the world, as I initially see the colours, and then find shapes through recognition of the patterns within the colours. It may seem like a minor and pedantic difference, but it turns out to have rather insidious ramifications.
My father, when he was young, wanted to become a jet fighter pilot. Unfortunately, due to his colourblindness, they would not allow him to pilot jets. However, because of his condition, the military offered him an alternative job as a spotter. A spotter is someone who is a passenger on a jet and simply watches the ground below, trying to identify tanks and other military vehicles. The reason they offered him this job is because he could quickly and easily identify those objects on the ground, despite their being camouflaged.
To elaborate, a camouflaged tank is a tank that has been painted with various seemingly random patterns of green in order for it to blend in with the surrounding landscape. For someone like myself, who first sees colours and then tries to discern shape patterns from those colours, it becomes challenging for me to see the tanks. But for my father, because he first sees the shapes before he applies the colours, the tanks stand out clearly to him, the camouflage being useless against him. Thus, as a spotter, he would have an easy time spotting those tanks.
My own father literally saw the world differently than I do. It is entirely possible that the differences in how I valuated the world versus how my father valuated the world may have been related to this seemingly innocuous difference. However, it turns out my partner also has a peculiar difference than me as well.
She was hanging out with a friend not that long ago, and they invited me to hang out with them. As we were walking down the street, I brought up visualizing three dimensional objects in my head. I had been told at one point that not everyone can visualize in colour, and that most people only visualized in black-and-white. So I asked her friend about how she visualized. Her response shocked me: she told me she doesn’t visualize at all. And if that was not enough, my partner then asserted that she too did not visualize.
To be clear about this, what I am suggesting is that within my mind’s eye, I am able to see things. I can recall people’s faces and other objects. I can see within my mind presently a nice yellow banana. What is more, I can focus a little and move that banana around. I can rotate it and flip it and do all sorts of things with it, all in my mind. I cannot say where I learned this skill, but I have it. I suspect this has helped me a great deal when I play various video games, and also with the use of Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) applications on computers. Very recently, I designed a little insert to plug up the holes in an Aerogarden for my partner. I was able to produce an appropriate design to fabricate on the second try; she was quite happy with the results from the 3D printer.
So this is what I can do, and I have (as my philosophy instructor suggested I do) assumed that others are able to do this as well. Perhaps not as good as I can, but at least the most basic visualizations, perhaps just in black-and-white. But it turns out I was very much mistaken. My partner and her friend both do not visualize anything at all. We went into quite a deep discussion to establish precisely what was (or rather was not) going on in their minds.
They can understand the concept of a banana, and they can discuss such things without issue. But if I ask them to visualize in their minds a yellow banana, nothing happens in their minds. Honestly, I cannot say I understand what happens within their minds, but what I can say is that it is not the same as what happens in my mind.
A long time ago, when I was still a child, I had a dream once that I played hockey. In my fantasy, I was the best goalie there was. The reason I was, according to my dream, was that when I ate eggs, my mind would accelerate to such a degree that I would experience the world much faster than anyone else. During hockey games, for me, it was like witnessing the action in slow motion the whole time. This provided me a great advantage during the games, as I could more easily follow the movement of the puck, and thus could anticipate with great accuracy where it was going. A goalie like this would be quite effective. Of course, in my dream, in order to balance out everything, after the games were over, I would suffer a terrible trauma as a result of the acceleration: I would suffer a severe deceleration for many hours afterward. During those times, I would experience the world at incredibly high speed, like fast forwarding a video, and would recover quickly (from my perspective). For others witnessing me, I seemed to be very, very sluggish and seemingly unresponsive.
It was just a dream. Just a wacky idea about temporal variation in experiencing my world. And then, recently, I found this Youtube video: How The World SOUNDS To Animals by Benn Jordan. I was blown away watching this video, as here was someone who clearly understood precisely all these things I’ve been talking about. The ideas of not only experiencing the world differently from different perspectives, but also even the idea of temporal changes. He suggests that generally smaller creatures experience their world at a much accelerated rate, and generally larger creatures experience their world at a much decelerated rate. Of course there are exceptions, but the basic idea is there. And toward the end of the video, he even suggests there may be creatures who shift their experience to faster and slower given various conditions, much like I did to myself in my dream.
And so, after all of this evidence, it makes much more sense to me why I would have initially argued with my instructor regarding the different ways individuals experienced their world. With all this evidence that I’ve been accumulating over the many years of my life, it seems to me that we are all very unique and all witness the world in different ways. It is this evidence, that I now present to you, that suggests that perhaps I may be correct in my assessment.
As one final example, I will end this post with this brief cartoon that I have finally drawn out. Then you can see for yourself what you think:
