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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person

I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?

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Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.

In a sense, I think it’s accurate to say we only really know what it’s like to be us right now. Everything we perceive about ourselves through the lens of memory is an echo if not in fact imaginary.

Safe to say most people are so uncurious about/distracted from their interior states/self reflection that very few if any people know what it is like to be them right now. Mostly we know a limited palette of reactions to stimuli, and every day the stimuli get narrower. LOUD FLUORESCENT SUGARY SEX.

You forgot SCARY, but yeah I got thinking about this too. It’s also true that there is a lot of internal state people aren’t able to be aware of.

My mind drastically changed several times, and I somewhat remember how it worked previously.

Do you, or do you think you remember? Your memories are always distortions, not accurate snapshots of reality.

Have you never thought you remembered something with clarity, only to be told it's impossible because it never happened? Or another example, I often vividly remember something from a book (it was a photograph on this side of the page, lower right corner) and then when I look it up, it was in a different location and it wasn't the photo I remembered. But my mental imagery felt so precise!

I'm with grandparent, I think I would perceive my younger self as simultaneously familiar and alien.

> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc

Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.

Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.

Autistic people have in part answered that question. Some of them feel actual pain at unwanted touches or undesirable textures.

Pain, like vision, resides in the brain; like vision it is mostly determined by reports from our (non-brain) nervous system, but pain, light flashes, even objects and people can be created whole-cloth by the brain itself. And "real" inputs can be ignored, like a mild pain you're desensitized to, or the gorilla walking amongst the ball-passers in that video.

Here's another example: When I look at something I "see" the functionality behind it (for example the pipes in the bathroom), or the chemical reaction, or sometimes even the concept of the atoms that make it up.

An interior designer will see the colors, and the layout and how the things go together or don't. I don't see that, and in turn the designer does not see what I see.

So never mind the physical senses, even on a mental level two people do not see/experience the world the same way.

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