Pink Monkey Farm: The Blog

Degrees of variation

Take any two human brains and compare them. Their coarse structure will be similar: here a gyrus, there the thalamus. The correspondence is pretty good as you look closer and closer, until you get down to a certain scale. The exact scale probably depends on the local cyto-architecture, but sooner or later you reach a point at which there is no correspondence whatsoever. Now the connections, the wiring of a conscious person, are the result of a particular, contingent, history of sensorimotor interaction.

This guy has a nice account of the kind of variation we might see if we undertook a variational analysis of human experience. I think we should. We have no idea how different two people’s phenomenal worlds can be.