Monday, December 30, 2013

Point of View

A few weeks ago I was driven near mad by something I just couldn't fathom.  I wanted to know how cats see the world when their pupils are all thin and slivery.  Is it like they're constantly looking through a crack in a wall or a slit in a picket fence?  I had no idea so I brought it to Facebook, but I don't think I was understood.  One response suggested that I purchase cat eye contact lenses (which I'm planning to do anyway for other reasons), but even if I were to do so I'm still seeing the world through a circle whereas felines view it through a thorn.  This conundrum also affected the story I'm working on, Northern Lights, although I was able to cleverly sidestep the question in narrative, it still bothered me intrinsically.  It also didn't help that I'd changed my work desktop background to Grumpy Cat so every time I booted up I was forced to stare at her near luminescent green eyes with slit pupils in her trademark, irritated face.  I've always been good at point of view and empathy, but this seemed beyond even my skill.

Then one day at work I was helping out my friend Andrew on something or other and I mentioned that he should look at the column highlighted in pink.  His response was something along the lines of "Which column are you talking about?" and that's when I remembered that Andrew is colorblind, like totes colorblind, green is pink and down is tooth-fairy.  I can't make this stuff up.  I had to pause for a moment because then I remembered the concept of qualia.  I first learned about this from VSauce on YouTube (and you should totally click those links, because this stuff is just fascinating).  It's complicated and philosophical, but what can be easily taken is that you can never understand how someone else sees the world.  Essentially, you are alone in your experiences and that makes one feel both very humble and very lonely.  Even with the words of a thousand tongues, it's not possibly to convey exactly what you're seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, or tasting nor is it possible for you know what someone else see, hears, smells, feels or tastes.  Because we can only live in our own heads, we can never know how someone else experiences reality.  As a writer this should seriously bother me, because that's what we constantly strive to do, but understanding the antithesis is very useful, because knowing the limitation is liberating; it doesn't have to be a flaw.

Recalling the concept of qualia brought me such peace of mind.  There is absolutely no way I can ever know how a cat sees the word with constricted pupils, just like I can never know how someone who's color blind sees the color orange.  Maybe my concept of orange is really wrong and what I'm actually seeing as orange is purple, but because the majority of the world sees and agrees that orange looks that particular way that's what we call it.  But there's a chance an alien species will come here and declare, "Nah brah, that's purple" and which one of us will be wrong.  This isn't even scratching the surface that we can only see a minute fraction of the visible spectrum, which means were not even on the level of the bees.  Not being able to know is a comfort, because it means I can stop driving myself crazy in wondering about this impossible point of view.

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