[jm__87]

None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.

[adityaathalye]

https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html

Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.

[cl3misch]

That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!

[the_af]

> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person

I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?

[jm__87]

Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.

[thunky]

> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc

Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.

Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.

[IAmBroom]

Autistic people have in part answered that question. Some of them feel actual pain at unwanted touches or undesirable textures.

Pain, like vision, resides in the brain; like vision it is mostly determined by reports from our (non-brain) nervous system, but pain, light flashes, even objects and people can be created whole-cloth by the brain itself. And "real" inputs can be ignored, like a mild pain you're desensitized to, or the gorilla walking amongst the ball-passers in that video.

[ars]

Here's another example: When I look at something I "see" the functionality behind it (for example the pipes in the bathroom), or the chemical reaction, or sometimes even the concept of the atoms that make it up.

An interior designer will see the colors, and the layout and how the things go together or don't. I don't see that, and in turn the designer does not see what I see.

So never mind the physical senses, even on a mental level two people do not see/experience the world the same way.