I stumbled on this old article from Scott Alexander about how unexpectedly common it is to be completely oblivious to normal experiences and emotions without even realizing it. Though we all acknowledge we don't understand much of the world, we at least think we see the objective aspects of it clearly. That is certainly untrue. Although we have common views of the majority of experiences, obviously, for large swaths of population there are a significant number of aspects of the world that they unknowingly don't comprehend. The article discusses people who do not have a sense of smell. They often don't realize it until late in life. They have learned how to use the language of the scent of smell -- flowers smell nice, dog poo not so much -- but they are empty words to them. Suddenly someone asks them what something smells like for which they don;t have a frame of reference and they realize there is an entire sense they don't have. They simply knew the appropriate words to say about smell, they had no conception of the actual sensation.
It is not just in the physical realm like a lack of a sense. Psychotic individuals do not have the ability to empathize. Like the folks who can't smell, they learn the social cues and comforting words to fit in, but they really have no sense for what anyone else might be feeling.
This works in the other direction, too. Sometimes it's the minority of people who sense something most don't. In that case it's the folks with the superior capability who are the weird ones. This is a recording of Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman. It is considered a seminal work of art by a jazz master. It was produced by the amazing Tom Dowd. Indisputably great jazz artists such as John Coltrane followed suit to the sound. Critics admired it then and still do to this day.
To me, it barely sounds like music. And I am not alone in this. A sample of comments from that YouTube: "...a chicken got killed..." "...this is the music I suggest at a party in order to be kicked out immediately" "...they call it free jazz because nobody will pay you to play like that" "sounds like before a concert when everybody is warming up". These comments are not just saying it's not to their taste, they are questioning whether it is music or just random noise. My initial reaction is to agree with them. I don't hear music. I hear occasional sonorous combinations of notes, but not music.
But others do. Tom Dowd, John Coltrane, and other seriously musical people do. It's a temptation to say they are just posing and being elitist. I don't think so. They have no motivation to seem cool or superior. They do hear music -- beautiful, inspiring music -- and that makes me sad. There are sounds out there that deeply move people but, like a man without a sense of smell, I cannot experience it. My brain is simply not wired in a way to comprehend it.
I have two takeaways from this. 1) The shibboleth that we are all the same under the skin is wrong. Individuals have very fundamental differences and that does not bode well for the idea of a common human bond. And 2) It makes one's BS detector more problematic. How do you differentiate your sense of BS from a shortfall in your own mind?
I have no answers, I merely highlight this as another example of how little we truly understand about ourselves. The set of objective knowns is beginning to seem like it might end up being just a very trivial set facts and observations. As I have pointed out before, my tendencies skew to rationalism and objectivity as being of the greatest value. The longer I live, the further I think we (including me) are from realizing that value or whether it even exists.
