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Max Hodak - Do we live in the same reality?

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One of the classic questions of consciousness is whether any two people experience a particular fundamental percept, like the color red, the same way. How can we possibly know whether my red is the same as your red and isn’t instead, say, your green? The answer is we can’t, really, but I don’t want to get too stuck on this because it’s not what this post is actually about; it’s just a jumping off point to highlight the issue that our experiences may be very different in diverse and fundamental ways, and we don’t generally think about this very hard. We tend to assume that everyone has very similar experience: I think this stems from the deeply held value in our culture that all humans should be thought as as similar, if not equal. This is absolutely the right normative objective, and to the extent it’s not true, it makes sense to me that making it more true should be an important public policy goal. But I’ve been growing increasingly suspicious that our brains, and therefore the nature

Max Hodak - Do we live in the same reality? Max Hodak - Writings Do we live in the same reality? July 2020 One of the classic questions of consciousness is whether any two people experience a particular fundamental percept, like the color red , the same way. How can we possibly know whether my red is the same as your red and isn’t instead, say, your green? The answer is we can’t, really, but I don’t want to get too stuck on this because it’s not what this post is actually about; it’s just a jumping off point to highlight the issue that our experiences may be very different in diverse and funda

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