The Kindle made ebooks popular, but the ipad and other mobile devices are making us question both the form and the function of books. Authors, publishers and academics are all interested in the future the book. I am at an MIT event about the future of the book. This is an academic event but I have already learned one interesting fact: when printing first became popular-in Europe, the fonts in the newly printed books resembled the cursive writing in the (handwritten)manuscripts.

As visual creatures, we are prone to thinking that sight reveals the world as such. If you are asked to name the attributes of a tiger or a cup, you will most likely name its visual features – large, yellow with stripes, handled etc. Touch and audition come second: you might have a good idea of what a tiger sounds like and what it feels like to hold a cup, but nevertheless, it seems as if touch and hearing reveal properties of objects while sight reveals the object itself.  Even within vision, shape takes precedence over texture and color as the revealer of the essence of the object.

When I was a college student, I would recognize my roommate’s imminent entry through the sound that his slippers used to make, but I never confused the sound for the person himself. It would almost be like confusing the signature of a person on a sheet of paper for the person himself. Vision on the other hand isn’t experienced as a signature. When I see someone, I see her, not a vision of something that looks like her. Touch is like vision in that when we touch something we are touching it, not doing something that feels like touching the object. The difference between a signature and the object distinguishes our experience of vision and touch (and to a lesser extent, taste) from hearing and smell. Touch and vision are also experienced as exterior to the self, while sounds and smells are as much interior as exterior. One can get lost in the interior landscape of a song or a poem, but once you open your eyes, you are bound to see the world out there.

Both our experience of the objective world and our ideas of the objective world are affected by our tacit reliance on vision. There is a danger here though: if our ideas of objectivity and external reality are really projections of our experience of vision, we run the risk of over-generalization. A dog is perhaps (if at all that comparison makes sense) as good at smelling as we are at seeing. Isn’t it possible that vision and smell are inverted in their objectivity as far as dogs and humans are concerned? If so, what would a dog think as objective?

By focusing on a visual experience driven concept of objectivity, we run the risk of being shut out of the sensoriums of other species. It is not that I cannot know what it is like to be a bat per se, but that if we “to-know” means to know something in the way that vision reveals it to us, then of course, we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. However, if we relax our ideas of knowledge into a wider sensorium, we might be able to enter the bats world after all.

From Descartes to Nagel, there is an argument that consciousness is utterly subjective, that another person cannot feel my pain. A mild version of this argument is obviously true: you are not standing where I am standing, you do not see the coffee cup in front me in exactly the same way that I do. However, this mild argument for the exclusivity of consciousness isn’t particularly troubling. After all, I don’t see the world the same way as I did a minute ago as soon as I move from one location to another, or even turn my head. But there is a clear sense of continuity from one frame to another. Contrary to William James‘ intuition, we do not experience the world as a blooming buzzing confusion. One of the key insights of modern perceptual science is the continuity, coherence and stability of perceptual experience despite the dynamic character of the input to our senses.

Why is the transition from one organism to another in space any bigger than the transition within an organism in time? Unless you assume that the self is an impermeable entity, there is just as must reason to believe that my experience is continuous with yours as there is to believe that my experience is continuous with my own past experience.  Of course, one can never experience exactly what another person experiences, but that standard of exactness and certainty is too high a standard. As long as my experience is continuous with yours, your consciousness is accessible to me even if I don’t see the very same thing as you do.

Only if you believe, as Descartes probably did, that the self is impermeable and that the only form of valid knowledge is certain knowledge that we are stuck with the isolated subjectivity of consciousness. Knowledge of others’ experience that is continuous with their subjectivity rather than an exact replica of their experience is still enough for a science of experience.

1. Private schools are increasing in popularity across social classes.
2. The government is making a huge investment in higher education.
3. We have an ever larger population that needs to be educated in employable skills.

1. Pool as much data/resources/links on education in India that we can.
2. Start modeling some of the data with plausible assumptions.
3. Visualize the results.

These models will help you to better understand the world, to be a clearer thinker, to better use data, and to make better decisions.

Portrait of René Descartes, dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", after Frans Hals c. 1648 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Experience is too cheap to meter. We take it for granted and assume that it is a given, too obvious to be questioned productively. 26 dimensions and black holes are mysterious but the fact that we experience the world is usually not seen as a mystery. At the same time, experience  is almost coterminous with existence itself. Descartes was clearly right in that regard when he said Cogito Ergo Sum, since our unconscious sense of existence is tied to our experience of existence.

The Qualiapedia is an exploration of experience in all its diverse manifestations: waking, dreaming, normal and abnormal, human and non-human.