Shared Experience
To say that you and I can have a shared experience is a misnomer. My eyes see things in a different way. I might be taller, you might be shorter. Your eyes may dart to the sky, mine to the floor. Our ears work differently. We are sensitive to different aromas and odors on the breeze down a city street, or when gazing down at a banquet at a shared meal.
While we each have some fairly close approximation of the same events, the same experiences, we are separated by time, space, and the sum total other experiences we've had.
I can ask you to taste a piece of chocolate, or rather, the memory of a piece of chocolate. How it sat on your tongue, how it perhaps stuck to the back of your teeth. The weight of it on your tongue. All these sensory references are but small shared experiences, but all unique.
How much cocoa was in your piece of chocolate, and how much milk? Did the shape of the chamber of your mouth change the taste due to physical and biological uniqueness? Did you chew on it longer, or let it rest against your tongue, melting, before it was consumed?
Chocolate is one example of a shared experience, and one I think that so many of us have in common, but I am not hear to speak to you of sweets. I don't have a van to lure you into and no sign saying "Free Candy", but if you've got a comfortable chair, I'd love for you to sit a while longer and keep reading.
When I drive a car, and I sit, my foot upon the brake pedal, awaiting red to turn to green at the traffic lights, I sit in a metal box, like all those behind me. A decaying traction zone of white paint is a boundary, and the car beside me, in the other lane, has a driver who has that same fundamental experience occurring in their consciousness.
The shared experience comes to collapse when we start to look at all the other details that make us unlike, and apart. My car is blue-grey - theirs is white. A Mazda, a Honda, a Toyota, a Whatever. Gravity holds me down more than you, I might blink at a different rate. The light goes green in my vision, and my foot applies force.
But there's the chance for another rare, shared experience. Are you listening to the radio in your car? Did you have the same station on? Was the same song creating a rhythm along the highway in different cars? A shared experience, listening to Elton John's Tiny Dancer while driving along Highway 1, on the 20th of August, 2025.
That's a broad scope of a shared experience. But then it starts to fragment again. You could be on the way home from a funeral, me, on the way back from a birthday party. East, West. North, South.
Few people listen to the radio in the car, anymore. Therefore, the odds of this shared experience diminish, as, too, does the proliferation of routes, seating positions, the rubber rotating on the road, and the device of motive force rumbling away somewhere beyond the chamber of the vehicle.
I was an only child. My shared experience with other only children is likely that of having a vast, rapidly enclosing back seat in a sedan as I grew, and my knees began to hit the back of father's seat. Of less wear on the passenger side, because I always sat behind the driver, often getting cigarette smoke in my eyes.
Dire Straits played from the cassette deck, until mother turned on the radio and Alanis Morrisette burst out on a rainy mid 1990s evening, on the way back from the hospital. Cancer, a grandmother, and another small shared experience.
But my experience is mine, and yours is yours. While there may be places and spaces where those experiences intersect in some way or another, we can never truly share an experience with another, even if we eat from the same plate, sit on the same couch, ride in the same plane, or listen to the same song.
We all have our unique perspectives, which are probably formed by the chains of causality which led us to the shared experience of language, of chocolate, and of trundling on down the roadway listening to a song in an acoustic chamber ever so slightly different.
I really like these kinds of musings, because they spiral into some the very basic questions of philosophy - all the way down to: "I think therefore I am" type of stuff.
As Fran Lebowitz says in her opening line to a very popular video - "The closest thing to a human being is a book." You writing this - is the only way for one to actually confirm a shared experience.
I'm surprised you haven't mentioned 'qualia' in this blog - which address the specific and unique experience of experiencing something - such as a taste, or a color.
But I think, what makes us have a unified experience is the Gap in qualia - the fact that we're not fully aware of the fact that we are parsing information, but rather the shared blur of experiencing joy, excitement, revelation, or fear... I believe that our shared experience is not found in the details but rather in filling of the gaps between said details.
I have some reading to do, curse you :) How have I never heard of that term before? I read the wikipedia entry briefly, and well, what a phenomenon. This is where our shared experience diverges, and perhaps, will come back together again at a later point in time :)
To simplify, my spice tolerance might be different from yours. We can eat the same chilli (literally, cut it in half) and each have different reactions. Our reactions are physiologically the same, but our perception is what differs.
We fill the gap later.
I think?
Am I on the right track?
hahah - the rabbit hole of qualia!!! Somehow I connect this back to your "Construction Signs" post - "Mind the Gap" - the mind is individual, the gap is also perceived uniquely, but the collective "minding" is shared.
Does one neuron know another?
Gotta walk a mile in the other guys shoes, and even then you just get the slightest understanding of what they might be experiencing.
Nice post, I enjoyed being in your headspace in some form. I can relate, to some degree!
My head space asks - What if the shoes don't fit?
Is it the same mile if my legs are longer and need less calories to propel them than those of someone's shorter?
Thanks for reading :) I tend to go down the path of too much detail, but I am glad it is appreciated a little bit by some people :)
We are unique and irreplaceable, therefore our perceptions are as different as a camel is from a building. That is Einstein's Theory of Relativity applied to perceptions and the senses.
But still, the most enjoyable part of your post is undoubtedly reading about your experiences, seeing through your eyes, and hearing through your ears while you drive your car. Diversity is always attractive.
A hug 🫂
Thank you. I know that every other voice is valued and should be cherished, but I can't help but lament at the fact that we will never truly know another. Me, my wife, we won't know how or why I enjoy the intensity of chilli so much (beyond her tolerance) - or why I am not bothered by things she is bothered by, and vice versa.
oooOOooh that subject ^§^
me love it
and we can also add, colors are different for everyone, this is to me the most interesting, we see spectrum of colors and different colors.
could be applied also for taste and smell, i guess that is why the food industry uses
all types of added chemicals and flavours, to match a maximum of human preferences swimming into the same ocean, the more synthetic the experience the easier way to manipulate and the smaller the ocean the easier way to control.
all senses in action with different stimulis make that experience even more unique.
but you know you can drink lava ? yes you can, but only once.
beautiful flame post in contemplation of all, the way i like it.
And we see those colours in different intensities, too!
It is the same thing with anything else. You can eat anything, but some things, only once.
This post was really just me dumping out whatever I was thinking at the moment I was typing it, inspired a little bit by a prior thought I had.
This is how my brain ponders all the time. I have been searching for an off switch for years.
Maybe The Flame will be a dimmer switch for it.
forget about off switch , if your brain is connected it will always dig deeper.
and its beautiful.
The trick is translating it into a consumable and recountable form for later perusal.
The depth and breadth of this thought inspire connectivity on a base human level.
Thank you so much.
The translation of thought to text is at times grueling, but things like this come freely.
To be fair, there's back and forth on this. Maybe we were stopped at the same light, listening to the same song, but ours could've been wildly different experiences anyhow. As you yourself point out.
I think there's give and take in a way, because the Internet does expose us to more opportunity of shared experience in some way. There's the chance that I'm here listening to a Florence song, dancing in my living room, and there's someone in Illinois doing the exact same thing. We have the same YouTube page open in our browser. Something that would not have been possible thirty years ago.
And maybe that's lonely, but maybe it's fantastic, also, the vast scope of human experience. It's a sad conclusion, perhaps, but it's the facts. It's not like we had the option of such shared experiences and missed out on them, but that we're separate beings and can only share in this mutual living on Earth to a certain extent. And perhaps that's miraculous in its own way. That coming from completely opposite directions, backgrounds, and continuing along vastly different storylines, you and I can in this moment still share an appreciation for or feeling of freedom at the same thing.
Loved the train of thought here. :)
As the possibility of experiences approaches large numbers, the world begins to become lonelier, and we have less to relate to one another with.
The likelihood also does drop, mathematically. That's a shame. I love the discord feature from covid that let's you watch things together. A few shared experiences there.
The other thing i couldnt articulate well with words was that... Well this post totally gave me a new idea for an art project - looking at people's gazes in the crowd ar a concert and tracking them all with different, grouped colours based what they're looking at.
That's what I did with the header image. I had a lot of fun observing a moment of shared experience and identifying how it diverged, but was still, more or less, the same experience.
It's a good idea, though to be honest, I fear these "together apart" types of thing, you know? I don't think it's the same thing. Obviously, things are different. It can be rally useful if you're an ocean away, but I fear people use such things purely out of convenience, to watch together from two streets apart and just not get off the couch, you know? Which seems to me to reduce shared experiences.
I loved the header, and that sounds like a really unique idea! I can't wait to hear about the results :) Have fun with it.
Sometimes it is just enough to be in the same room, staring at the same screen with another :)
Testing to see if commenting on Flame posts is how people are earning Pyresoul in Discord...
!PIMP
!PIZZA
I do like pizza
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@definethedollar(1/20) tipped @holoz0r
Come get MOONed!
Even the identical twins don’t have the same genetic makeup. When it comes to a pattern of doing things, it varies from person to person and that’s how sovereign the one that has created us is. We can agree in some things but our reasons for agreeing might be different.
There is beauty in diversity and that’s why we should always be opened to learning because no one knows or has it all.
Thank you for sharing, Holo.
Not a problem, I will be continuing to share ramblings like this, perhaps not about shared experiences, but of thoughts. I read a really interesting thing on pre-cognition, which suggests our consciousness is not pinned down to time in a linear sense, and that seems to be an interesting topic to explore in the near future.
Yeah, that would be quite explorative. There are actually a lot of things to explore but I try to focus on what has positive impact on myself and anyone who cares to read.