We spend our entire lives experiencing a particular form of asymmetry. That asymmetry is so baked into our experience that we don’t even think about it.
From the moment you are born, and throughout your life, you have been seeing (and hearing and feeling) the world around you differently from everyone else, because you are seeing through your eyes, while they are seeing through their eyes. Then at some point in early childhood you make the mental leap to accepting that we are all sharing a common reality.
But that is not your actual sensory experience — it is an intellectual construction that you have formed out of your experience. Let’s take some simple examples.
If I hold up an apple, you and I will agree that we are both seeing the same apple. Yet we are literally seeing two different things. You are seeing one side of an apple, and I am seeing the opposite side.
None of this matters all that much in reality. After all, the construct of shared reality that we each place over our respective perceptions serves us quite well.
But it might indeed start to matter once we all begin to wear augmented reality glasses. At that point, your perception and my perception of shared physical reality might start to deviate a lot more.
You and I could be in the same room, both believing that we are having a shared experience, but we might be wrong. Your glasses and my glasses might actually be showing us quite different things.
I suspect that we will need to develop new social conventions to deal with this shift in the relationship between reality and perception. Hopefully we will all end up seeing eye to eye.