I get what you’re saying but also disagree on the conclusion, if I’m reading right. Feels like a form of solipsism which is just … navel-gazey.
Imagining oneself in another’s position is simple empathy, an evolved trait foundational to human civilization. The point is not to be able to perfectly imagine that other life, or to understand it in full detail. The point is to recognize common humanity between yourself and that other person.
In empathizing, I make a basic assumption about another person’s experience, in its intelligibility to myself, despite not having experienced it directly myself. It is like how in physics, we can’t prove beyond all doubt that the laws of the physics are the same in other galaxies (although there is of course strong evidence, e.g. spectral lines). I am reasonably certain of a baseline humanity shared by all humans, and on that basis I feel valid in empathizing.
I get what you’re saying but also disagree on the conclusion, if I’m reading right. Feels like a form of solipsism which is just … navel-gazey.
Imagining oneself in another’s position is simple empathy, an evolved trait foundational to human civilization. The point is not to be able to perfectly imagine that other life, or to understand it in full detail. The point is to recognize common humanity between yourself and that other person.
In empathizing, I make a basic assumption about another person’s experience, in its intelligibility to myself, despite not having experienced it directly myself. It is like how in physics, we can’t prove beyond all doubt that the laws of the physics are the same in other galaxies (although there is of course strong evidence, e.g. spectral lines). I am reasonably certain of a baseline humanity shared by all humans, and on that basis I feel valid in empathizing.