Article Title: Can we understand other minds? Novels and stories say: no

Article Summary

This article aims to answer the poignant question can we understand other minds? Novels and stories say: no. The background of the article is that so much great literature was written by men who could express perfectly detailed visual descriptions of the female body, and yet possessed such an impoverished understanding of the female mind. This is why the philosophical project of trying to map the contours of other minds needs a reality check.

Another aspect mentioned us that if other humans are beyond our comprehension, what hope is there for understanding the experience of animals, artificial intelligence or aliens? Over thousands of years of literary history, authors have tried and failed to convey an understanding of others. Fiction shows us that nonhuman minds are equally beyond our grasp.

The conclusion states that as the US philosopher Thomas Nagel claimed in 1974, a human can’t know what it is like to be a bat, because they are fundamentally alien creatures: their sensory apparatus and their movements are utterly different from ours. The problem is that sometimes we don’t realise this segment of just a glimpse of something bigger.