HW #1: Response to Banach's Lecture

I agree with a lot of his ideas, mainly those about how we all perceive our world through our senses, there's really no way to tell weather someone next to you is seeing the exact same thing. We all agree on certain things like the names for colors and other things, but those are just names. We communicate mainly through sound so we can only share sounds with each other, we can't express what we see unless you can draw very well or take photographs, we can't share smells or tastes or textures that we feel.

The only way we can share these things is through common experiences, there's and old zen teaching that's very reminiscent of this. They say "How do you explain sweetness to a man who has not tasted sugar" the only way to explain sweetness is to give that person sugar or something else that's sweet. We all name things under the same names, but how do we know that they're really the same things? The answer is that we don't, there's really no way to test that unless we can switch bodies, which is impossible. We have to assume that since people interpret ideas differently in their minds that the brain has something to do with this interpretation. The same brain that interprets ideas differently will interpret senses differently. The brain (and by extension all of our senses) acts as a filter, screening out the true reality of what things are. Other Philosophers will call this the "Metaphysical", the true reality of something.

Not only are our sense limited by our mind's "screening" process that narrows down the information we gain from our surroundings, but we're limited by the number of senses we have as well. Just as a blind or deaf person wouldn't understand what it's like to see or hear, we can't comprehend other planes of experience, other animals have several senses beyond our five that we can't comprehend, there are infinite ways of gaining information about an object, each object holds an infinite amount of information in each sense, there are potentially an infinite amount of senses and there are an infinite amount of things, both abstract and physical, in this universe. If humans were to gain all this information we would have a sensory overload and probably go insane.

Through this reasoning we can see that people have an incredibly small range of what we can see and learn compared to the universe, not only can we not experience the whole world ourselves, but we can't experience the world of the person next to us. This may make us seem infinitely meaningless in the grand scheme of life, but everything has purpose and even though we may be alone in our small plane of experience we can at least relate to everyone else because they can't experience anything more than we can. In other words, we all experience similar worlds because we're all alone in our different worlds. We all have the same lonely worlds which we either don't think about or can connect to each other because we at least think we share the same experiences.

At the very least we're all connected because we all think we're alone, even before this article came into our lives a couple people I've talked to have had these same thoughts, at the very least we have the common experience of being alone. Perhaps that one common experience we have is what human nature truly is, the need to have someone understand us and the need to share experiences. Maybe we're all just lonely people looking for someone who can understand them, and ultimately people won't be able to relate to you completely, but this still won't effect people's lives because we all think we can relate to each other, and if everyone is told the same lie then it feels like the truth. Sharing one common experience, especially one as big as feeling completely alone, can be enough for us to still relate to each other, and in that way we aren't alone