Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Fourteen: Other Minds

Well what is it like to be a bat? Or a cat, or a dog, or a spider? When I turn the shower on and only then notice there's a spider in the bathtub, scrambling to escape the water and then swept off its feet, and I turn the water off and return the spider to dry land and it gets to its feet (feet?) and totters off - is it experiencing anything? Was there a succession of fear, panic, despair, hope, relief? It seems unlikely. Just looking at a spider it seems unlikely. There are legs and more or less body, but no head. Where would experience take place? But then maybe it's simply very miniaturized, like a microchip. So one shrugs and turns the water back on and gets on with the shower.

Or when the cat gets into one of her moods and starts running up and down the kitchen as loudly as possible, stiffening her legs and pounding the floor like a tiny thundering wildebeest instead of the normal feline stealth - what is going on in her head? Is it a game, a joke, a bid for attention, an attempt to confuse and puzzle the human? Do cats do this to puzzle each other, or is this some special behavior they've worked out purely for human-feline communication? And what kind of thing is going on in their heads while they do it, and when they get the urge to do it, and when they stop? Is there just a surge of excitement or energy or playfulness? Or are they trying to make something happen, and if so, what kind of thoughts to they have about it? When a dog remembers where he's left his favourite squeaky toy or Nyla bone, what are those thoughts like?

We don't know, nobody knows, and we always wonder. Just as we wonder what it's like to be other people. We want to know for instance if other people are as uncertain wavering changeable chameleon-like as we are, if they too find themselves changing their minds about everything every five minutes. And if they too are at the same time obstinate and unchanging to the point that it seems a waste of time to think at all, if we're just always going to come to the same conclusion we did yesterday and last month and ten years ago, don't we ever learn and add and modify for heaven's sake? We wonder about people who seem to be like us. Are they as hostile and irritable and critical of everyone as we are, or are we odd? We wonder about people who seem different. Are their thoughts as kind and forebearing and generous as the thinkers seem, or do they just make more of an effort to be good? Do they actually perceive people in a better more merciful light than we do? And if so, how does that operate, what does it feel like - are they blind to the faults that seem so obvious to us, or do they see virtues that we're blind to? Are they more observant, or are we, or is it neither of those but a matter of temperament? Or do we all just see what we expect to see and overlook what we don't - confirmation bias at work.

It's not only a matter of straightforward perception and processing, though it is that too. Does every pair of eyes see the green of a maple leaf ever so slightly differently? Are there six-plus billion shades of that green, and of every colour of every visible object on the planet? Or perhaps one billion, or a million, or a thousand, distributed among the population? Or not. And so on - do we all hear the same sounds, smell the same smells, or not; do shapes and patterns look the same to me as to you, or not. But more than that, we wonder if everything seems, feels, translates the same way to different temperaments, characters, outlooks, experiences - to different minds. Surely the sum total of each of our histories shapes the way we experience every succeeding moment. We're all experiencing something different at any given instant - all of us, all six billion, all over the planet, right this instant, and this one, and this one. We're confident that there's an enormous amount of overlap and common ground, of course, or we couldn't communicate at all; but there is, there has to be, also a lot of divergence. What we're curious about is exactly how much divergence there is, and what it feels like.

And this is where language comes in, and the frozen language of writing and books. Of course we know language only conveys a fraction of what it's like to be anyone, but it's better than nothing. And possibly the fraction that language can convey is the fraction that matters most to us? Or perhaps it only seems that way to us precisely because it is the conveyable part, perhaps we have a distorted idea of how much space language-amenable ideas take up in our minds. But if we do, what then? However distorted the idea may be, it's still the idea we have, so language and books do tell us something of what we want to know. What other people make of the world, how they make sense of it, what they are curious about, what they think beautiful, funny, stupid, shocking, frightening. All that may be only a small part of what it is like to be other people, but it's enough to be going on with.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated mid July 2003

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality
9. Mind the gap
10. Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
11. Done and Not Done
12. Mere
13. Influence

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