Getting into someone else's head
I want to know what you think, but I don't think it is possible. Not the subjects you think about, not the opinions you hold. When you think about one of those subjects or hold one of those opinions, what do you perceive?
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NOTE: This is the start of a lot of writing I'm going to be doing on how people think, how people learn, and how to communicate better. This may be a fragment, but over time the thoughts will come together. I'm writing to work thoughts out, but obviously I'm curious to what other people think about what I'm saying too. Chime in.
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Thought or consciousness is very for different people. The pat way to explain this is that some people are "visual thinkers" and some people are "verbal thinkers". I'm pretty sure that's just the start of it.
I can ask you "how you think", but how does one respond to that?
Let's take an example: if a child who is red-green colorblind asks you what it is like to see red and green as different colors, how do you answer? When you look at one of the dot tests, things happen in your head, but how to describe that to another?
The problem is to communicate we must have terms we understand to mean the same thing. A common frame of reference must exist.
Let's just try to communicate for a second. "Irish B&Bs are quaint." Do you know what I just communicated to you? Do you know what an Irish B&B is? There is a good chance you've never experienced one (change it to French B&B and I haven't for example), but you know there is such a thing as a home that has rooms for people to rent by the night to stay in where breakfast is provided in the morning. An Irish B&B is such a place which is located in Ireland. All set, right?
How about "quaint"?
I bet that quaint doesn't mean exactly the same thing to you as it does to me. But for now let's assume we're in the same ballpark of meaning and so I communicated something to you because we have terms we can use.
When it comes to the nature of thoughts it seems hard to establish that common language. We can agree on the color yellow because we hold up lots of colored objects and point and mutually agree which ones we'll call yellow. Physical things are easy if we can point to examples. Concepts are generally expressed in terms of other words and so we can create understanding (thus the problem with a term that that we can only describe or define in terms of itself).
You can't show someone else what happens in your mind so it becomes hard to describe to others. "Well, it is like looking at a red piece of paper sitting next to a green piece of paper" You assume that what happens in your head is what happens in everyone else's head. We all grow up with faith that because we're all people that other people feel things the same as you. But we know that some people perceive red and green pieces of paper differently than other people. So how do those people describe what those perceptive difference are like to each other?
I've used colorblindness as an example because people can think about it. Blindness and deafness are also easy to think about, but they have to do with sensation more than thought. On the other hand sensation is easier to discuss differences because we assume we perceive things the same so we end up with physical analogs we can discuss (it is like red and green are the same color).
Let's think about another area of perceptive differences. I have at least two friends who are synesthetes. They "hear colors" or "smell sounds", etc. They can say something like "when I listen to music, I see colors". Do I know what it is like to be in their head with a Beethoven Sonata playing? Nope. But they gave me a glimpse. (Of course, that assumes seeing a color is the same for them as it is for me, which I doubt).
So what
Alright, I've prattled on quite a bit. Why worry about this?
I work in a job where a lot of what I do is interview one group of people to understand what they want (or help them discover what they want), and then turn to a second group, with very different communication styles, and ensure that this group understands what the first group requires.
There is obviously a lot more to most jobs than that communication, but there is not necessarily very good information available on communicating with people who might be very different than yourself. As I said, people naturally assume what goes on inside other people's heads is very much like what goes on inside their own. I don't think that is right, and I think that a lot of communication breakdowns come from that.
So I'm not just idly wondering what it like to think with someone else's mind. I want to understand what is fundamentally different in those systems of thought so that I can better ask people questions that they can answer and provide descriptions that they can use. If I can learn to do this better (observe or ask simple questions to determine a style), then I want to be able to teach others to do the same.
There is a lot written on how kids learn. There are Meyers-Briggs-style personality inventories. There are recognized dichotomies that in theory explain "the two different ways" brains work: men/women, left-brain/right-brain (aka logical/creative), and verbal/visual just to name a few.