I’ve long been fascinated by the kind of mental blinders we get saddled with, or we saddle ourselves with, as we go through life. It always has seemed to me that one of the greatest difficulties we humans have with accurately understanding the World around us is that by the time we start actively contemplating that World we already and subconsciously have filtered it into various mental constructs that inform our understanding of it. And those unconscious constructs are not necessarily accurate.
One of the biggest such unconscious filters is the implicit assumption that most people understand the World and their relationship to it the same way we each do. We have a strong tendency, whenever we meet somebody new or we abstractly contemplate what “the people” think, to believe that a new person or “the people” think pretty much along the same lines that we ourselves do.
Very probably, at least some of this results from the fact that “[w]e are cursed by the limits of our own perception to see ourselves as the center of the Universe.” It is simply impossible for us to understand our unique experience of the World other than with ourselves at the center of it because that is how we are forced to perceive it. This is what is meant by the lament that it is impossible to really place yourself in the position of anyone else. If you try hard you might be able to imagine what somebody else is experiencing or thinking, but you can’t really know.
Then there is that cliched phrase “the fish will be the last to discover water.” This is generally true for each of us. Immersed as we are in the necessarily singular and exclusive point of view we each are saddled with, we assume that of course everybody experiences the World the same way we do, and forget that in fact nobody experiences the World precisely same way each of us do.
