Understanding Other Minds — II. Can Experience Be Translated?

In the previous essay, we considered a possibility that most of us rarely entertain: that there may be no such thing as a standard mind.

Even if human beings share many features, each of us inhabits a perspective that is ultimately our own. We encounter the world through our particular histories, perceptions, emotions and habits of thought. The question naturally follows:

How do we communicate these experiences to one another?

The obvious answer is language.

We describe what we see, what we feel, what we remember and what we believe. We tell stories, make arguments, write poems and compose scientific papers. Human civilisation itself depends upon our ability to exchange ideas across the boundaries of individual consciousness.

Yet the more closely we examine language, the more curious it becomes.

Consider something as simple as a headache.

Suppose I tell you that I have a headache.

You probably understand immediately. You may even feel a trace of sympathy. But what exactly has been communicated?

You do not experience my headache. The sensation itself remains entirely within my consciousness. Instead, my words trigger memories of your own experiences. You recall headaches you have had, and you use those memories to construct an approximation of what I might be feeling.

Communication, in other words, often works by substitution.

You do not receive my experience. You generate your own model of it.

This process is so familiar that we hardly notice it.

Indeed, it may be impossible to do otherwise.

Imagine trying to explain the taste of coffee to someone who has never tasted it. You might compare it to chocolate, nuts or burnt caramel. You might describe it as bitter, rich or earthy. Yet each of these words ultimately depends upon other experiences. The explanation succeeds only if the listener already possesses enough related experiences to build an approximate understanding.

The same problem appears everywhere.

How would you describe colour to someone born blind?

How would you describe music to someone who has never heard sound?

How would you describe grief to someone who has never lost anyone they loved?

Language seems less like a direct transfer of experience and more like a system of pointers. Words do not carry experiences from one mind to another. They guide listeners toward experiences of their own.

Most of the time this works remarkably well.

When someone says, "The stove is hot," we do not need a philosophical analysis. We understand the warning. When a friend says, "I am happy," we usually grasp what they mean well enough to respond appropriately.

Language is extraordinarily effective.

But effectiveness should not be confused with completeness.

A map can guide us through a city without reproducing every building, tree and street sign. Likewise, language can coordinate understanding without reproducing the full richness of experience.

Indeed, much of what we value most in language may arise precisely because complete translation is impossible.

Consider poetry.

Poets often labour over individual words, searching for expressions that evoke rather than describe. They know that certain experiences resist direct statement. Metaphor becomes necessary not because language is defective, but because experience is richer than literal description.

When Emily Dickinson writes that hope is "the thing with feathers," she is not providing a definition. She is inviting readers to construct a particular way of seeing.

The poem succeeds because readers participate in the act of meaning-making.

Music presents a similar mystery.

A piece of music may move thousands of listeners while conveying no precise proposition at all. Each listener experiences something slightly different. Yet we still feel that communication has occurred.

Perhaps meaning is not always transferred.

Perhaps it is sometimes created collaboratively.

This possibility becomes even more intriguing when we consider translation between languages.

Certain words are famously difficult to translate. German, Japanese, Arabic, Sanskrit and countless other languages contain concepts with no exact equivalent elsewhere. Translators can explain them, approximate them and contextualise them, but some residue often remains.

Something escapes.

Yet translation still succeeds often enough that cultures can learn from one another, literature can cross continents, and ideas can travel through history.

This suggests that understanding may not require perfect equivalence.

It may require only sufficient overlap.

Two languages need not divide reality identically for communication to occur. They need only share enough common ground to allow bridges to be built.

Perhaps minds operate similarly.

When I speak to another person, I do not transmit my thoughts into their consciousness. Rather, I offer symbols from which they construct a model. The model may differ from my original experience, just as a translation differs from the original text. Yet it may still capture something important.

Understanding, on this view, is less like copying a file and more like translating a poem.

Something is preserved.

Something is transformed.

Something is inevitably lost.

And sometimes something new is created.

This raises a deeper question.

If translation between similar human minds already involves approximation, what happens when the minds involved are radically different?

Could a bat understand a human concept of colour?

Could a human understand a bat's experience of echolocation?

Could an artificial intelligence understand human grief?

Could humans understand whatever forms of significance an alien civilisation might discover?

At some point, the differences may become so large that our familiar methods of translation begin to fail.

The challenge is no longer merely finding the right words.

It is discovering whether the two minds divide reality into comparable kinds of things at all.

The possibility of such radically different forms of meaning will be the subject of our next essay.

For if experience can only ever be translated imperfectly, we must ask a more unsettling question:

What if another consciousness inhabits a world of meanings so different from ours that translation itself becomes uncertain?

Understanding Other Minds — I. The Fiction of the Standard Mind

"The greatest obstacle to understanding other minds is not that they are different from ours. It is that we quietly assume they are not."

Most of us move through the world with remarkable confidence that other people experience reality much as we do. We assume that when someone says "blue", they see something like the blue we see. When they describe pain, joy, fear or beauty, we imagine experiences that resemble our own. Communication appears so effortless that the possibility of profound difference rarely occurs to us.

This assumption is so natural that it often goes unnoticed.

Yet it is one of the largest assumptions we ever make.

We know, of course, that people have different personalities. We recognise differences in culture, language, education and belief. But beneath these visible variations lies a much deeper presumption: that everyone inhabits essentially the same kind of mental world. We may disagree about what exists, but we suppose we experience existence in fundamentally similar ways.

It is difficult to imagine otherwise.

Our own consciousness is the only one we have ever directly inhabited. Every thought, every sensation, every memory and every emotion arrives through a single perspective. It becomes the reference point against which every other mind is measured.

In this sense, each of us quietly treats our own consciousness as the standard model of consciousness itself.

This is hardly surprising. If we possess only one window onto reality, how else could we begin? The problem is not that we start from ourselves. The problem is that we often forget that we have done so.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked what it is like to be a bat. His point was not merely that bats use echolocation instead of vision. Rather, there may be an entire subjective world available to a bat that no human imagination can genuinely reconstruct. We can describe echolocation. We can study its physics. We can build mathematical models of how it works. But none of these tells us what it feels like to inhabit such a world.

The same question can be turned much closer to home.

What is it like to be another human being?

We often assume this question is straightforward because other humans resemble us. Yet even among people, experiences differ in ways that are only beginning to be appreciated. Consider colour blindness, synaesthesia, autism, chronic pain, deafness, blindness, exceptional memory, aphantasia, or the remarkable diversity of emotional experience. These are not simply different opinions about the world; they may involve genuinely different ways in which the world is presented to consciousness.

If two people perceive differently enough, can we still assume they mean the same thing by the words they use?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Language is wonderfully effective at coordinating action. It allows us to build bridges, organise societies and conduct science. But success in communication does not necessarily imply identical experience. Two people may use precisely the same words while privately attaching experiences that differ in subtle or profound ways.

Indeed, they may never discover the difference.

Imagine two people who have each learned the word "red" from childhood. They stop at the same traffic lights, identify the same apples and describe the same sunsets. Behaviourally, they agree perfectly. Yet we have no independent way of comparing the private qualities of their experience. Their worlds may be identical. Or they may differ in ways that language cannot reveal.

This is not merely a philosophical puzzle. It reminds us that communication often measures coordination rather than shared experience.

The assumption of a standard mind extends beyond perception.

We expect others to divide the world into familiar categories. We suppose they naturally distinguish objects from events, causes from coincidences, individuals from groups, facts from values. These distinctions seem so obvious that we rarely notice them.

But are they obvious?

Or are they habits of a particular kind of mind?

History offers many examples of cultures organising reality in ways that initially seemed strange to outsiders. Modern psychology reveals equally striking differences in cognition among individuals. Even within a single family, siblings may describe the same childhood as though they inhabited different worlds.

The more carefully we look, the less obvious the standard mind becomes.

This need not lead us to scepticism or despair. We are not forced to conclude that understanding is impossible.

Rather, we may need to become more modest about what understanding involves.

Instead of assuming that others experience what we experience, we might begin by recognising that every act of understanding is also an act of interpretation. We do not peer directly into another consciousness. We infer it from words, actions, expressions and shared circumstances. Much of the time these inferences are extraordinarily successful. Sometimes they are not.

The important point is that success should not make us forget the inference itself.

Perhaps there has never been a standard mind.

Perhaps there have only ever been billions of unique centres of experience, similar enough to cooperate, different enough to surprise one another, and mysterious enough that no consciousness can ever become entirely transparent to another.

If that is true, then understanding another mind is not a matter of discovering an already shared reality.

It is the beginning of a conversation whose outcome neither participant can completely predict.

In the next essay, we shall ask whether experience itself can ever be translated—or whether every attempt to describe consciousness inevitably leaves something behind.