Everybody can read minds except you

[David Baxter PhD]

Everybody can read minds except you
by Vaughan
April 06, 2009

Conch Tees have a wonderfully philosophical or worryingly paranoid t-shirt that reads Everybody can read minds except you!



It's got an unwrapping brain in the centre, and the company claims it refers to conspiracy theories about other people reading your thoughts.

However, it could also be a reference to the problem of other minds, a key philosophical issue in the understanding of consciousness.

As consciousness is a first-person subjectively experienced state, we can never know whether other people are conscious, or even what their minds are like, so we just have to make our best guess from what they say and do.

They don't say they can read minds, but they wouldn't, would they?

 

[Budoaiki]

Interesting, brings a couple of thoughts to mind like:
How much we take in from a person's appearance like the subtle signs of body language and how it can mean different things depending on the person and the environment.

I have also seen a couple of good episodes of The Nature of Things (one of my favorite shows since I was a kid) about how body language and pheromones plays a surprisingly large role in how we "read" people. I almost forget to mention the obvious inferences that we draw from what the person is wearing.