I commented once on Facebook:

I think Huxley is making the same mistake that Asimov talks about inhttp://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm.

The fact that we cannot see a tree in full perfection does not mean we should give up sight. It is a wonder that we can learn to make sense of the world at all, starting as we do from noisy sense data, there is wonder in the sense that we make of the world (and wonder, for me, even, in how we do the sense-making), and there is wonder in the world that exists beyond our direct sense-making ability. It may be that I can never share my exact mental state, my exact history, with another, but this does not seem to me to be a failing. I seek not for a mirror that reflects me perfectly, in which I'd see myself the way I already see myself, but for a mirror that reflects perfectly how I would see myself through another's eyes, that I may see myself more clearly, and see another more clearly in being seen by them.

And when I can have a conversation with someone where we make guesses about each other's guesses about our interpretations of a sentence that one of us said, SHA-1 hash our guesses to give zero-knowledge verification, and both get things correct-conditional-on-the-information-we-were-using, I'd call that pretty close. When I can stare at someone, and hand them words to describe the bodily sensation of an emotion they were trying to describe, a bodily description that immediately fits and which they say they could not have come up with themselves, I'd call that pretty [darn] close.


I was responding to the post:

“It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don’t actually strike each other. ‘Rather,’ as Timothy Ferris explains, ‘the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other … were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.’ When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.” — Bill Bryson

“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.” — Aldous Huxley

I will still attempt to be as close as I can be.