Tuesday, April 8, 2025

The First-Person Nature Of Phenomenology

Just as how when playing a first-person video game, one only is experiencing what it is like for oneself to look through someone else's first-person perspective while still feeling one's own emotions and having one's own thoughts and sensory experiences, merely seeing indirectly through another person's sight would not actually tell you anything about what it is like to be them other than their visual qualia.  In fact, even if you were to know of every belief, emotion, and physical condition they have--which could not be known apart from telepathy or omniscience to start with--it would still not be the same as experiencing their consciousness.  Knowing what a given worldview is does not mean someone has direct experience with living in allegiance to it, for instance.

I cannot so much as see through another person's eyes, but if I could, I would need telepathy or omniscience to know what things are like for them as individualistic, subjective perceivers.  If a person was telepathic,they could connect with other minds and thus directly experience the thoughts, feelings, and sensory perceptions of others as they do.  If a person was omniscient, they would know all truths, including what other people are experiencing and what it is like for them to experience it.  This is not what it is like for me and all beings with my limitations.  There is only indirect communication with words and the external hints, like facial expressions, that there seem to be other minds.

Seeing someone laugh or cry, hearing their words, and observing their outward actions could never prove that there is a separate mind within another body, as animated as it might appear to be, but even seeing through another person's eyes without actually being that person or being metaphysically intertwined on a telepathic level would not do anything more than hit another epistemological barrier.  Since I am neither telepathic (unless there are no other minds!) nor omniscient, my metaphysical nature restricts my epistemological awareness, in this case, to mere perceptions of what seems likely, although I can also know objective logical possibilities and what would or would not follow from a specific relevant idea being true or false.

Of course, plenty of non-rationalists act all the time as if they can know both the existence and contents of other minds with far less than omniscience or genuine telepathy, and without even having likely ever thought of the difference between the epistemological evidence for other minds and the logical possibility of there being no other minds at all.  All evidence can be illusory since it only proves that there is evidence and only logic can actually prove things.  They do not even get this far, supposing that they know what someone else is feeling or thinking on a selective basis, for they might immediately say they do not know what someone else is thinking the moment it benefits them, such as if it makes them seem distant from the crimes of another person.

The experience of consciousness is inescapably first-person.  Even an omniscient being would still be experiencing the first-person consciousness of others within its own conscious mind.  Some ramifications of this can be liberating or comforting: many of us can likely relate to being glad in certain moments that someone else can probably not see into our minds.  In some cases, this brings safety or relief.  In others, some ramifications of this can be incredibly isolating and saddening.  One might long for the truest mental communion with a cherished friend or spouse (not that a spouse cannot be a friend) only to know that there is no way to achieve this as a human with one's limitations.  Recognizing the separation between minds, if there any any others in existence, can bring a host of different emotions.

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