Who’s Running This?

I was reading a book about Python the other day. I know basically nothing about coding, so for most of it I was just nodding like I understood what was going on. But I came across something that actually made sense to me.When you write a program, you can see what you put into it. You know the variables you created. You know what each function is supposed to do. If something goes wrong, you can go back through the code and find where you messed up. Imagine two programs interacting with each other. One sends something in, the other sends something back. You can watch the exchange and start predicting what the other program will do. But unless you can inspect its code, you still don't know exactly what's happening inside it. You can understand its behaviour without knowing what's happening inside. You only know what you can access. I think people are a bit like that. I can know someone for years. I can know what makes them laugh, what annoys them, how they react when they're embarrassed, what they usually order when we're eating out. I can probably predict what they're going to say before they say it. But none of that gives me access to their actual experience of being themselves. I'm still working with the output. They say something, I hear it. They cry, I see it. They tell me they're happy, I believe them. But I don't get the source code. And this is where I started thinking about solipsism, which is basically the philosophical version of opening your laptop at 2 a.m. and deciding you no longer trust reality. Apparently, philosophers have been arguing about this kind of thing for a very long time. Descartes got stuck on a similar problem and ended up with “I think, therefore I am.” His point was that he could doubt almost everything, but he couldn't really doubt that he was thinking, because the act of doubting proved that there was a thinker doing it. The problem is simple enough to sound silly. I know that I am thinking because I'm the one doing the thinking. I experience my own thoughts directly. But everything outside my own mind reaches me through something else. My eyes. My ears. My memories. My interpretation of what somebody says. And apparently there's an actual name for this particular headache: the problem of other minds. I can know that I have a mind because I experience mine directly, but I can't crawl into somebody else's head and experience theirs. I can only infer that they're having an inner life from what they do and say. So how do I know I'm experiencing the world as it actually is? I don't. Which sounds dramatic until you realise we do this every day without thinking about it. You see your friend laughing and assume she's happy. You see somebody ignore your message and assume they're angry. Someone tells you they love you and you believe them. You're constantly taking information from outside yourself and building a version of reality from it. Basically, we're all debugging each other with incomplete information. And then I found the Egg Theory. This one was worse. The Egg is actually a short story by Andy Weir. The theory people talk about online comes from that story, where a person dies and meets a god like figure who explains that every human being who has ever lived is another version of the same person. You're supposed to live every human life eventually, which means the person you helped, the person you hurt, the stranger you ignored and every other human being are all you at different points in the process. Which means if solipsism says I can never completely access another person's experience, the Egg Theory comes along and says, don't worry, you'll get there eventually. Excuse me? I don't want that. If somebody annoys me, I want them to remain somebody else. I don't want to discover that I've been arguing with myself across different lifetimes. But then I thought about the programming thing again. A program doesn't know what's happening inside another program just because they can communicate. It only knows what comes back. And that's probably the uncomfortable part about people too. I can spend years with someone and still only know the things that made it out. The thoughts they said. The memories they remembered. The feelings they could explain. Everything else stays somewhere I can't reach. Which is strange because I spend so much time assuming I know people. I don't. I know what I have access to. And apparently, I've been calling that the whole person.

Other insights from Nimmat

Referral Earning

Points-to-Coupons