We are alone

 

Be careful to not wax too poetic about our wonderful words and ability to communicate. It is only partly true and even though you think what I am saying, you don't get the half of it. You can't, since you can't know the subtleties of meaning of each word I use, derived from my experience and not yours. We are all alone in the cosmos. We are the proverbial ships passing in the night with nothing but beacon lights to use to communicate. The vast, overwhelming majority, of our thoughts and feelings and experiences are ours alone, almost impossible to share. I remember standing at the edge of a precipice, seeing a beautiful valley down below, and enjoying the panorama, which included a quaint winding dirt road and a couple of old sheds barely visible. When I remarked to my partner what a view it was, he responded that it was beautiful, but too bad mankind had spoiled it by building the road and the sheds. Obviously we were seeing the same picture but not seeing the same thing.

You are putting your finger on something quite real. Language is astonishingly powerful, but it is also astonishingly thin compared with the fullness of experience. Words are not the experience itself; they are markers pointing toward it. When you speak, you are compressing a lifetime of associations, memories, and emotions into a few sounds. The listener reconstructs something from those sounds—but they reconstruct it using their memories and associations, not yours. Inevitably, the two inner pictures differ.

Philosophers have worried about this for a long time. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that meaning comes from how words are used in shared life, not from some perfectly transferable inner content. That helps communication work well enough for practical purposes—but it does not eliminate the private element. Meanwhile Thomas Nagel famously asked what it is like to be a bat, precisely to show that subjective experience cannot really be transmitted from one mind to another. We can describe, but we cannot hand over the experience itself.

Your cliffside story illustrates the point perfectly. You and your partner had identical visual input but different interpretive frames. For you, the little road and sheds were part of the charm—signs of human presence woven into the landscape. For him, they were a blemish on an otherwise untouched scene. The sensory data overlapped; the meaning diverged.

And that divergence is not an exception—it is the rule. Every word carries private baggage. “Road,” “shed,” “beautiful,” even “spoiled” each contain layers of personal history. A farmer, a city planner, a poet, and a wilderness purist will all hear those words differently.

Yet there is an interesting counterpoint. If communication were as impossible as the metaphor of ships passing in the night suggests, society could not function at all. The fact that we build bridges, perform surgery, conduct orchestras, and run governments shows that a substantial amount of meaning does survive the crossing between minds. The beacon lights are dim, but they are surprisingly effective.

What we really have, I think, is partial overlap rather than isolation. Our inner worlds are not identical, but they intersect. Language sketches a rough map of that shared territory while leaving vast areas unmapped.

Your story from the precipice actually demonstrates both sides at once: two people sharing the same place, the same moment, the same view—and yet inhabiting two different landscapes inside their heads.

Out of curiosity, when you think back to that moment now, do you remember the valley itself more vividly, or the realization that the two of you were seeing it differently? That second layer—becoming aware of the difference—is often the moment that stays with people longest.

Words are more than most horns and signal beacons. They make navigation possible without radio. Given radio conversation between the captains, a lot more can be exchanged.

That is a good extension of the metaphor.

Signal beacons alone merely announce presence: I am here. A ship’s horn might add a little more—warning, direction, urgency—but it is still very limited. Words are more like the charts, sextants, and navigation rules that make coordinated movement possible even when the ships cannot directly share their internal state.

With charts and conventions, two captains who have never met can still avoid collision, rendezvous at a harbor, or follow the same route across an ocean. Language works that way. It gives us shared reference points: names for things, agreed meanings, and patterns of reasoning. That is why complicated human enterprises—law, engineering, medicine, music—are even possible. The words are not the experience itself, but they provide a structured framework in which different minds can align their actions.

Radio conversation, as you say, allows much more exchange. In human terms that would be dialogue—questioning, clarification, examples, tone of voice, and the gradual narrowing of misunderstandings. A single statement can be badly misinterpreted, but a back-and-forth conversation often converges toward a workable understanding. Each correction adjusts the mental map a little.

Still, even with radio, each captain is standing on a different bridge, looking at a different sea through his own instruments and experience. Coordination becomes possible, but complete sharing never quite happens.

Your valley story fits here as well. The initial remark—“what a view”—was like a brief radio call. Your partner’s reply revealed that the two navigational charts you were using for the same scene were different. One chart marked human traces as part of the landscape; the other marked them as contamination.

Conversation is the process of slowly comparing those charts. Sometimes we discover that the landmarks are placed differently. Sometimes we even redraw them a bit.

But the ocean each captain actually sees from the bridge window—that remains his own.