Here’s a question that you’ve most likely never thought of: Does the happiness you get from eating banana-cream pie feel different from the happiness I get from eating coconut-cream pie? Or, even from eating a slice of this banana-cream pie rather than a slice of that banana-cream pie? How can you tell whether our subjective emotional experiences are different or the same?1
The truth is that you can’t — no more than you can tell whether the “yellow” experience you have when you look at a banana is the same “yellow” experience that I have when I look at the same banana.
Philosophers have been wrestling with this problem for a long time, and they’ve come out of it with nothing but bumps and bruises.2 Why? Well, when it boils down to it, the only surefire way to gauge how alike two things are is for the person doing the measuring to directly compare them. In other words, experience them side by side. And outside of science fiction, no one can actually have another person’s experience. So there goes this grand plan out of the window.
Back in our childhood days, our moms taught us to label that looking-at-the-banana as “yellow.” Being good little learners, we did as we were told. It was pretty cool when we found out that all our buddies at the kindergarten also said they saw “yellow” when they looked at a banana.
But these shared labels may mask the fact that our actual experiences of “yellow” are quite different, which is why many people do not discover that they are colourblind until late in life when an eye doctor notices that they do not make the distinctions that others seem to make.
Even though it might feel a bit far-fetched that people have vastly different experiences when they gaze at a banana, listening to a bird sing, or reminiscing about the fragrance of a recent beach vacation, it’s not so fart-fetched to realise that human beings have vastly different experiences. It would be unwise to equate everything on the same level as experiences can greatly differ across different people and situations.
While for someone, getting a promotion at work is an achievement they can be proud of, for another human being, just getting out of the bed in the morning can be an achievement. We never really know what’s it like to be another human being. The least we can do is give them the benefit of doubt and an ounce of our empathy.
CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE BATMAN?
In his classic 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” the American philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that other animals have conscious experiences that are inherently subjective and hard to describe.
Bats, for example, perceive the world through sonar, and since this is a sense that (the majority of) humans lack, “there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine,” Nagel wrote.
You could envision yourself with webbing on your arms or insects in your mouth, but you’d still be creating a mental caricature of you as a bat. Instead, “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” Nagel wrote. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.”3
I think this goes for human beings too. We never learn what it is like for a person to be that person. We are limited by our own prejudices, biases, and projections. They’re usually way off the mark.
The scientific study of animals was changed by a German biologist of the early twentieth century named Jakob von Uexküll. What he proposed was revolutionary: anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt: their subjective or “self-world.”
Think of umwelt as the unique perspective of an animal, offering insights into its world. Take the humble tick for instance. If you’ve ever carefully checked your doggo’s body for the tiny pinhead signifying a blood-engorged tick, you may already know what I’m talking about. You probably consider the tick as a pest, period. Barely even an animal. Von Uexküll considered, instead, what it might be like from the tick’s point of view.4
The tick’s self-world is different than ours in unimagined ways: what it senses or wants; what its goals are. To the tick, the complexity of persons is reduced to two things: smell and warmth. Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white — these are not part of its wonderful world.5
Even the objects in a room are not, in some sense, the same objects to another animal. A dog looking around a room does not think they are surrounded by human things. They see dog things. What we think an object is for, or what it makes us think of, may or may not match the dog’s idea of the object’s function or meaning. Objects are defined by how you can act upon them: what von Uexküll calls their functional tones.
A dog may be indifferent to chairs, but if trained to jump on one, they learn that the chair has a sitting tone: it can be sat upon. Later, the dog might themselves decide that other objects have a sitting tone: a sofa, a pile of pillows, the lap of a person. But other things that we identify as chairlike are not so seen by dogs: stools, tables, arms of couches. Stools and tables are in some other category of objects: obstacles, perhaps, in their path toward the eating tone of the kitchen.
Uexküll compared an animal’s body to a house. Each house has a number of windows, which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as it is seen from the house.
By no means does it appear as a section of a larger world. Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house. The garden that appears to an outsiders eye is fundamentally different from that which presents itself to the inhabitants of the house.
This easily translates to human beings. Just that, apart from our sense of sight, smell, or taste, our windows are also shaped by our cultures, communities, families, religions, beliefs, environments, histories, and worldviews. Nagel could have easily been asking, “What Is It Like to Be Batman?,” and it still would have made a lot of sense.
The Yanomami inhabit the rainforests of Brazil and Venezuela and are one of the largest relatively isolated tribes in South America. The Yanomami have a matrilineal kinship system, where lineage and descent are traced through the female line. Marriages often involve polygyny, where men may have multiple wives, and the tribe places a strong emphasis on maintaining harmony within the community.
The Kayapó, who inhabit the Brazilian Amazon, are divided into exogamous moieties, where communities are divided into various groups (moieties), and marriages are often arranged between members of different moieties. Each moiety has its own rituals, ceremonies, and art forms.
For an Amish community, plain dress and simple living are visual expressions of their commitment to humility and separation from worldly values. The rejection of modern conveniences, such as electricity and cars, reflects their desire to maintain a deliberate distance from technological advancements.
Hindus cremate the dead. Christians and Muslims bury them. While Zoroastrians, instead of burial or cremation, traditionally place the deceased bodies on a raised structure called a Tower of Silence, where vultures and other scavenger birds that inhabit the area are expected to consume the flesh. This process is considered an act of charity, as it allows the deceased to contribute to the cycle of life.
A human being’s house might be bigger than the tick’s or the dog’s, with more windows overlooking a wider garden, but we are still stuck inside one, looking out. Our individual umwelts are still limited.6 It just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know, and ignore whatever doesn’t fit into our worldview. It has grave consequences.
THOSE WHO LOVE TREKKING AREN’T NEIGHBOURS WITH THOSE WHO DINE AT TRADITIONAL EATERIES
In the early 1970s, the American economist and Nobel laureate Thomas C. Schelling published a paper called “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” illustrating how personal preferences regarding the racial or social makeup of a neighbourhood can result in larger-scale patterns of segregation as an unintended consequence.
Even if individuals might only have a mild preference for living among people of their own kind (be it a racial or a social group), neighbourhoods end up getting segregated eventually. Only because individuals slightly preferred being around others who have a somewhat similar umwelt.
Let me illustrate this with a hypothetical (and overly simplified) simulation consisting of two kinds of characters: squares and triangles. These could represent people of different religions, cultures, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, or anything else.
There’s one key metric called bias percentage. It’s a number that represents how important it is to the shapes to have neighbours that are like them. If the bias percentage were 33%, it would mean that the residents need at least a third of their direct neighbours to be like them, or they’ll move. If one-third or more of their neighbours were like them, they’ll stay.
The simulation starts with a random scattering of squares and triangles. Say, you start with an initial bias percentage of 20%. When you do this, a few of the residents became “unhappy” and the simulation rejigs itself until every resident’s 20% minimum similar-neighbour threshold is met. It results in a neighbourhood that is still pretty mixed up.
But then if you bump the bias percentage up to 33%, it makes a few more residents unhappy. To satisfy everyone, the simulation has to make things much more homogeneous. When you bump the percentage up again, this time to 50% — meaning the shapes are still totally fine with variety, they just don’t want to be in the minority in their neighbourhood — we end up with complete segregation.
All it takes is a little bit of bias, a little bit of closed mindedness, a little bit of the need to live among your own kind, for almost everyone to end up surrounded entirely by people of their own kind.
Small individual bias leads to large collective bias. Always! The only way it’s possible for neighbourhoods to stay diverse — racially, culturally, ethnically, politically — is if people prefer diversity significantly more than they dislike being in the minority.
Modern progressives in a society today exhibit diversity not only in their political views but also in their cultural and lifestyle choices — they may tend to be less religious, have pursued higher education, prefer organic and sustainable shopping, read reputable national newspapers, enjoy trekking, and savour local culinary trends.
On the other hand, conservatives, while sharing certain ideological commonalities, may be more inclined towards religious practices, dining at traditional eateries, consuming conservative media outlets, and expressing interest in traditional forms of entertainment.
These are, of course, massive generalisations with a million exceptions — but as the simulation shows us, even if this is a little true, it can have major implications. In other words, people who enjoy trekking end up segregated from people who express interest in dining at traditional eateries.
THE WORLD IS NOTHING LESS THAN A WUNDERKAMMER
Back in the 16th century, a curious craze began to spread through the halls, palaces, and houses of the European wealthies. Many collectors started keeping a type of collection in ornate wooden cases. It was known as a Wunderkammer. A Cabinet of Curiosities. Although the direct translation from the German captures its purpose better: A Cabinet of Wonders.
Items found in a Wunderkammer could include natural specimens like fossils, minerals, shells, taxidermy animals, botanical samples, as well as artistic objects, scientific instruments, antiquities, and cultural artefacts.
Wunderkammern were precursors to modern museums. It was expected that people should pick up and handle the objects in these cabinets. They should feel their texture, their weights, their particular strangeness. Nothing was kept behind glass, as in a modern museum or gallery. More importantly, perhaps, neither were these collections organised according to the museological classifications of today.
The purpose was not only to display the wealth and social status of the collector but also to inspire awe and curiosity, encouraging visitors to marvel at the diversity of the natural world and human creativity.
I think the world we inhabit is nothing less than a Wunderkammer in many aspects. It is full of strange, unusual, and unrelated things grouped together, and it is perpetually concerned with the quality of wonder.
I read a lot of science. Specifically, the history of science. What’s surprising is that we tend to think of science as this unalloyed, objective truth. But of course the questions it has asked of the world and the answers it has proposed have quietly and often invisibly been inflected by the history, culture and society of its time.
It is only by studying history that we realise how we have always unconsciously and inevitably viewed the natural world and its phenomenon as a mirror of ourselves, reflecting our own world-view and our own needs, our thoughts and our hopes.7
In the 19th century, phrenology gained popularity that claimed personality traits could be determined by studying the bumps and contours of the skull. This theory was shaped by prevailing social attitudes and biases of the time, including stereotypes related to race and gender.
Ancient Greek philosophers proposed the idea that everything in the natural world was composed of four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. It wasn’t until the development of atomic theory that a more accurate understanding of the composition of matter emerged.
Back in the day, the prevailing view was the geocentric model, which placed the Earth at the centre of the universe. This worldview was heavily influenced by cultural and religious beliefs, with Earth seen as the focal point of creation. It took centuries for Copernicus and later Galileo to challenge this notion and propose a heliocentric model.
The development of science, and by extension, the progress of the human race, has been exercises in interrogating preconceived human ascriptions and assumptions. It is something that I believe is of the deepest possible importance in our present day: finding ways to recognise and love “difference.” The attempt to see through eyes that are not our own. To understand that our way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like us. Instead of only celebrating the sameness in things, to also rejoice in the complexity and diversity and differences among them.
I found this question in the super excellent Stumbling on Happiness by Danny Gilbert.
You need the name “yellow” for the construction of a narrative, but not when you engage in action. For example, this absence of the word “blue” in ancient Greek explains the recurring reference by Homer to the “wine-dark sea” (oinopa ponton), which has been quite puzzling to readers.
Our projections onto animals are often impoverished — or entirely off the mark. We might judge an animal to be happy when we see an upturn of the corners of his mouth; such a “smile,” however, can be misleading. On dolphins, the smile is a fixed physiological feature, immutable like the creepily painted face of a clown. Among chimpanzees, a grin is a sign of fear or submission, the furthest thing from happiness. Similarly, a human might raise her eyebrows in surprise, but the eyebrow-raising capuchin monkey is not surprised. He is evincing neither scepticism nor alarm; instead he is signalling to nearby monkeys that he has friendly designs. By contrast, among baboons a raised brow can be a deliberate threat.
Ticks are super interesting. They are parasites. Members of the family arachnid, a class that includes spiders and insects, they have four pairs of legs, a simple body type, and powerful jaws. Thousands of generations of evolution have pared their life to the straightforward: birth, mating, eating, and dying. Born legless and without sex organs, they soon grow these parts, mate, and climb to a high perch — say, a blade of grass. Here’s where their tale gets interesting. Of all the sights, sounds, and odours of the world, the adult tick is waiting for just one. It is not looking around: ticks are blind. No sound bothers the tick: sounds are irrelevant to its goal. It only awaits the approach of a single smell: a whiff of butyric acid, a fatty acid emitted by warm-blooded creatures (we sometimes smell it in sweat). It might wait here for a day, a month, or a dozen years. But as soon as it smells the odour it is fixed on, it drops from its perch. Then a second sensory ability kicks in. Its skin is photosensitive, and can detect warmth. The tick directs itself toward warmth. If it’s lucky, the warm, sweaty smell is an animal, and the tick grasps on and drinks a meal of blood. After feeding once, it drops, lays eggs, and dies.
A rose is a rose is a rose. Or is it? To a human a rose is a certain kind of flower, a gift between lovers, and a thing of beauty. To the beetle, a rose is perhaps an entire territory, with places to hide (on the underside of a leaf, invisible to aerial predators), hunt (in the head of the flower where ant nymphs grow), and lay eggs (in the joint of the leaf and stem). To the elephant, it is a thorn barely detectable underfoot. And to the dog, it’s neither a thing of beauty nor a world unto itself. A rose is undistinguished from the rest of the plant matter surrounding it — unless it has been urinated upon by another dog, stepped on by another animal, or handled by the dog’s owner. Then it gains vivid interest, and becomes far more significant to the dog than even the well-presented rose is to us.
We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can. We are not privy to the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. We can’t trace the invisible trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can. We can’t feel the air currents created by a buzzing fly the way a wandering spider does. Our ears cannot hear the ultrasonic calls of rodents and hummingbirds or the infrasonic calls of elephants and whales. Our eyes cannot see the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes detect or the ultraviolet light that the birds and the bees can sense.
For example, we see, talk about, and imagine animal behaviour (especially pet animals) from a human-biased perspective, imposing our own emotions and thoughts on these furred creatures. Of course, we’ll say, they love and desire; of course they dream and think; they also know and understand us, feel bored, get jealous, and get depressed. What could be a more natural explanation of a dog staring dolefully at you as you leave the house for the day than that they are depressed that you’re going? The answer is: an explanation based in what dogs actually have the capacity to feel, know, and understand, not what humans have the capacity to feel, know, and understand.