other minds are weird

epistemic status: maybe this is just my idiosyncratic view

We humans are constantly falling into the trap of the Typical Mind Fallacy, of assuming that other people’s brains work exactly as yours do. Countless instances of miscommunication and misunderstanding imply that this is not the case. We misjudge inferential distance, we assume the other to have the same feelings and experience them in the same way, to use the same frames as we do. The truism “what you say about others says more about you than about them” seems to fit here too. When trying to explain or analyze someone else’s behaviour, you are often automatically presupposing them to work like you do, therefore giving away information about your inner workings. “They said that because they are stubborn and want to have it their way” - well, how can you be so sure? If you think about it longer than a few seconds, you can come up with many different explanations for any given behaviour. But it sure is interesting that this is the explanation that is your first (and most often, only) thought.

So why the difference in minds? And why do we not realize? The former seems obvious, if you think about it. The brain is a highly complex organ, constructing the mind layer by layer, putting model on top of model until it finally presents as all the contents of your conscious experience. Even small changes in brain chemistry might change how your brain works on lower layers, which propagate and intensify up to higher layers of consciousness. This results in different ways to pay attention, different ways to experience emotion, different brain speed, different preferences, and so on.

We don’t notice this discrepancy, because per default we are not getting the data that let’s us make this conclusion. Quite contrary, we only ever experience reality from the same standpoint, living all our life in the simulation of the same brain without even realizing that it is only that, a simulation. We assume all other people have the same experience, because we are sharing a reality and we seem to work similar, judging from everyday interaction. But this everyday interaction is one that is highly filtered. My alien mind funneled through a myriad of social rules and filters has similar output to all the other, different alien minds. For most people, we never see how they are for real (if something like that even exists), we only see their constructed persona, the interface they use to interact with other people.

Maybe this is what finding people you “vibe” with, finding good friends is about. Subconciously realizing that the mind behind that persons front is closer to your mind in possible mind space than others, then gradually dissolving more and more of the filters until we can see in which dimensions we overlap or are adjacent. It’s probably no coincidence that all my best friends are weird in at least one way that I am too. It’s probably the reason why we are such good friends in the first place.