Samiul Bashar Samin
The only reason language works at conveying ideas that work, is because people can understand each other’s private experiences or sensations. Not all experiences or sensations to be sure, but enough of them to have meaningful discussions about them. Take the example of color. Pick two typical, healthy people. The circuitry for detecting color is exactly the same for both people and light with a wavelength of exactly 450 nanometers gives the same exact response in those same exact circuits in both people. We know all this for a fact because neurologists and physicists have confirmed this. Now let’s take the first person and rewire their brain so that the red and green circuitry is swapped. What will happen to each person’s perception of color? Nothing. They will both still detect the same magnitude of response for the same exact wavelength of color and still agree to call it red, regardless of how the sensation is experienced. So even though their experiences or sensations are technically not the same, they end up interpreting it in the same exact way anyway.
There is one way to have access to each other’s private experiences or sensations. Psychologists call it “mind reading”, although it isn’t literally mind reading. What they are referring to is a combination of rapport, empathy, and shared neurocircuitry. So when we see a video of someone getting their fingers chopped off in a video, the same exact neurocircuitry will be triggered in all human beings who are not brain damaged, as if they had also experienced the same exact sensation of getting their fingers chopped off.
So in the end, interpretation is all that matters, not the actual experience or sensation. While experience and sensation are most often based on real events, interpretation is never real, and exists nowhere but in your private mind. But since interpretation isn’t a physically real thing, interpretation has no limits of where it can “exist”, including in someone else’s private mind. All one has to do is chose to have the same interpretation, and then viola! Then they will have access to each other’s private experiences or sensations.