

Can we ever really know another person? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/ingenious-nicholas-epley

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resu_nimda
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."

[https://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfP...](https://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf)

~~~
colordrops
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.

~~~
azeirah
> The experience of true union exists

> 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.

~~~
gress
Not responding to the parent but these links:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

[http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-
bec...](http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-
batman)

Might shed some light on your question.

------
caylus
> 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.

~~~
vodik
Probably even easier to just show pictures in pairs and have the participant
to select the one they think is more attractive.

~~~
ademarre
So, _Facesmash_ [1] instead of _Hot or Not_ [2].

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not)

~~~
shawn-butler
[http://pickthehottie.com/](http://pickthehottie.com/) was fairly popular and
predated Facemash by several years.

Wouldn't surprise me in the least that Zuckberg would copy it. Seems to be his
modus operandi in life.

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crimsonalucard
>"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.

~~~
bostik
So in a way, we all live in an echo chamber of just one individual.

------
forkandwait
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.

------
peterashford
Now, personally I can fully understand why Americans view 9/11 one way and Al
Qaeda another. Is it really so hard?

That said, I'm neither an American nor a member of Al Qaeda so maybe it
doesn't count =)

------
liamconnell
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."

