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The Impossibility of You - Confession 20

2014.07.30 19:55:10
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image A thought game I frequently come back to is how impossible it is for the human mind to imagine being anything but itself. More specifically, we are not able to properly imagine what it would be like to be someone else. This is interesting because we so often like to pretend that we can.

One good example of this is that a frequent saying in crime novels and movies is that the detective or police should ‘think like the criminal’. This is a silly thing to attempt, because it's impossible to simulate the mind of someone else completely, let alone accurately, not to mention without much information to go by in the first place. Now, I realise that of course for a case example such as this a complete reproduction is not necessary.

Another example of this is that people like to play thought games the likes of ‘what if I was living like .., what if I was born in ..’ and so on. These scenarios are complete bogus. Your consciousness, your attitude, your personality and your entire mind is the result of the summation of your past modulated through your biological traits. If your body came to be in some other circumstance, it would not form the same personality at all. Yet we seem to be unable to make this logical leap instinctively. We cannot imagine being… not us.

Now this may seem insignificant at first glance, but this problem applies to situations that do have a social impact. Most importantly when we try to share in the negative experiences or feelings of others we tend to say ‘I know that feeling’ or ‘I understand’, regardless of whether we do or even can actually understand at all. Of course, it is impossible to properly share in the feeling, partially because expressing the mental state in language is at best a partial description if not a wholly inaccurate one, but also partly because we again simply cannot grasp what it is like to be someone else.

Of course, our intention for saying something like that is because it bothers us to see other people suffer, even if that may be for very egoistical reasons. However, because of our incomplete understanding of the situation involved this may also have negative outcomes. Even if not in such a direct situation it's often very difficult for us to figure out how to best help a person simply because things are too complicated to even grasp. Not to mention that even if we were able to understand, it would still be a long way to knowing how to solve the problem.

A very different aspect of the same phenomenon is the saying ‘be yourself’. Well. How obvious, of course. You can't be anything but yourself. What we really mean is that people shouldn't try to force themselves to act differently. Regardless of whether you force yourself to act or not in both situations it's still you. Trying to be different is an aspect of yourself as well. And generally I think it's even a dumb thing to advocate not to try to act differently, as long as the goal being aimed for in itself doesn't have bad consequences. As such I think it would be better to say ‘hey, trying to be like that is stupid for reasons. Don't do that’.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here isn't that we're terrible at solving problems or caring about other people; it's merely a fascinating game to me to think about all the situations in which we believe that we are able to make our minds work differently. I think it's also a good practise to consider yourself and your own limits of empathy. Though I suppose that should be general practise of respect towards others.

In closing, I hope I have more substantial topics to talk about rather than the ramblings about a pastime of mine.

Written by shinmera