I see a mouse. You see a mouse. What is the different appearance I see, compared with the different appearance you see? Do I see if from the side, and you see if from the front? Why does this indicate we see a "different reality"? Why doesn't it merely indicate I'm seeing the mouse from the side, and you're seeing it from the front? — Ciceronianus
Why does there have to be an ‘it’ independent of my perspective and your perspective if we can reach agreement? Isnt that the usefulness of the idea of ‘same thing’ or ‘same world’? These concepts of perspective-independent things don’t do a damn thing for us unless they contribute to our getting along with each other and cooperating together. It’s not an identical world that allows us to do science and create complex culture, it’s an intimately reciprocal network of intersubjectivitely connected subjective worlds that accomplishes this.
Our differences arise from the fact that we live in the same world but have different desires, different thoughts, different resources which sometime conflict or provide some of us with advantages or disadvantages others don't possess in competing with one another for resources or opportunities existing in the same world we all inhabit. If we lived in different worlds, there would be no conflicts. If they conflict, how would they be different from one another? — Ciceronianus
If someone disappoints you, violates your moral
principles , rejects you, humiliates you , embraces political views you find dangerous and cruel, acts in seemingly irrational, incoherent or inappropriate ways, ‘same world’ means there are external sources of standards of rationality . ‘Same world’ provides the basis of norms of empirical correctness , which we can then use to determine individual rationality. Since everyone is experiencing this ‘same world ‘ , everyone has the opportunity to test their understandings of the facts of the world using this external existing ‘same’ world as the universal yardstick of truth. This leaves no room for the idea that the facts we perceive are determined by a larger network of values, so that , try as we might, we cannot get your sense of meaning of the facts to align precisely with mine.
The more complex and important the facts are, the deeper they penetrate into what is most vital to our being as social beings , the less your sense of meaning of the facts will align with mine. We’re not talking perceiving mice here, we’re talking political, spiritual, moral and philosophical ‘facts’. We’re talking about our core concept of ourselves, what we stand for, our sense of how those we care about perceive us. Even though those values and concepts that are most precious to who I am as a person belong to a world which is different for me that for every other person , our individual worlds are never completely separate from those of others. On the contrary, they are related at some level even among those from the most disparate cultures. And they can be very closely related indeed among lovers and friends. In fact, only when we recognize this perspectival basis of individual worlds, are we able to achieve a form of mutual
understanding, intimacy and empathy with others that is impossible when we begin from the assumption of a ‘same’ world.
With the latter belief , we are stuck with an explanation of others behavior that relies on arbitrary drives, motives and personality quirks that we can’t get beyond , such as that others have different desires, thoughts and resources( “Our differences arise from the fact that we live in the same world but have different desires, different thoughts”). There is no recognition here that the most important source of conflict is a differences in the way that people interpret socially relevant facts (different worldviews) completely independent of motive.
You ask “If they conflict, how would they be different from one another?”
The conflict between worldviews is two conflicts. That is , it is perceived as one kind of conflict from the first participant and another kind of conflict from the second participant. What makes it a conflict of worldviews is that the two parties can’t agree on the nature of the conflict. Each ascribes it to different set of ‘facts’. They talk past one another , as we see in today’s polarized political world. You would say they simply have different desires, and leave it at that. It’s a short distance from that conclusion to choosing one ‘desire’ over the other as more socially beneficial or moral or rational, and then suppressing the unwanted ‘desire’ or its products.
Realizing this can allow us to bridge the gap between worlds by construing the other’s way of understanding their world in their terms , from our own perspective. Failing to do this leaves us with only motive and intent-based ways of making sense of others, which drives us to punish, blame and condemn with no real insight. So the supposedly dependability and solidness of a ‘same world’ has the opposite effect of what one might think. Rather than allowing for mural understanding, it reifies disagreements by forcing the participants to blame each other’s motives as arbitrarily capricious, malevolent, irrational , lazy, thoughtless , and prevents the creation of a bridge between worldviews.
Not only do each of live in our own ‘world’ with respect to others, but from one moment to the next our own ‘world’ changes into a néw one. We need never notice this because the transformation of sense is subtle enough as to go unnoticed by us most of the time. Only after a long period might we look back at our prior self and find its interest and beliefs to be unrecognizable reprieve to who we are now. So each of us moves into a subtly different world every moment , and that means the gap between us and others is only a variation on the gap from
moment to moment between who we are now and who we were yesterday, how we understand our world today and how we did yesterday.