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+--- Thread: Article Aldous Huxley: Other people’s lives are ultimately unknowable (/thread-18439.html)
Aldous Huxley: Other people’s lives are ultimately unknowable - C C - Jul 24, 2025
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/aldous-huxley-other-peoples-lives-are-ultimately-unknowable/
EXCERPTS: Aldous Huxley brilliantly articulates this unknowable aspect to other people in his 1954 book Doors of Perception. He begins by emphasizing just how impenetrably intricate individuals can be:
"Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source and, in any group we care to study, behavior patterns that are observably similar may be the result of many constellations of dissimilar causes."
[...] The unknowability of other minds causes a number of interesting philosophical conundrums not just in ethics, but in metaphysics and epistemology too.
Philosophers call it the problem of other minds: if other people’s ‘island universes’ are forever inaccessible, how can we even know they have minds and feelings at all? (The philosophical position of solipsism, for instance, claims we cannot).
While positions like solipsism are rather extreme, reflecting on the inaccessibility of other minds does throw up some interesting questions, including:
- How much of what we think we know about others is a mere figment of our imaginations?
- Might we liberate ourselves from certain worries or concerns by doing better to recognize that, while our own minds are busily imagining and constructing certain realities, other people’s minds are busy with completely different realities?
- How do you build bridges into the lives of others?
- Do you agree that connection involves recognition and acceptance rather than possession and (total) comprehension?
- What do you think are the most effective ways to express and communicate shared features of the human experience?
- Why are we more compassionate about things we understand? Given the unknowability of other people’s realities, could things we don’t understand perhaps be just as worthy of our compassion? (MORE - missing details)