I was reading an interview with an artist yesterday (I forget who at the moment), and one quote from the interview jumped out at me: “Other people are essentially unknowable”. I see now from a Google search that several others have made the same observation.
The reason this thought jumped out at me was that I came upon it right after that panel yesterday in which we discussed how VR and AR might change communication between people. When I read that quote, something crystalized in my mind regarding that panel’s topic.
Every time a disruptive new communication technology comes along, some people see it as a game changer. “Aha,” they say, “now we will really be able to communicate with each other!” Radio, cinema, television, the Web — each of these new media created its own brief wave of utopian conjecturing. “Finally,” some people asserted, “we have the means to break down the barriers that separate us from each other.”
But of course it wasn’t true. What separates us is the fact that only you have direct experience of the thoughts in your brain, and only I have direct experience of the thoughts in mine.
Any future capability to wave our hands in the air and directly conjure visions for each other — like something out of Harry Potter — is not going to change that.
The great glory of being human is that we have this powerful urge to communicate with each other. And we are indeed continually inventing ever more powerful ways to do so. But no virtual reality technology, no matter how advanced or capable, is ever going to change the fundamentals.
Communication between people always takes place across the great divide between individual human brains. Our hunger to communicate, and our great joy when we succeed, goes hand and hand with our fundamental aloneness.
Because we are human, we are all connected. Because we are human, we are seven billion separate universes.