I sometimes wonder whether thereās really a āworld of peopleā, and this is just a linguistic accident.
Like, suppose that at some point in our evolutionary history we gradually lost the ability to communicate and reason about the non-human parts of the world with any kind of fluency.
In that case, and in most other ways, weād be exactly like other apes. Thereād be humans around ā human bodies that moved and behaved like ours, feeling pain and pleasure and wanting to eat and sleep and laugh and generally doing all the fun āape-likeā things apes do. But it would be hard to sort out what was going on in their brains, and it would be hard to communicate with them in any deep way.
Their minds would be like mine, when Iām floating in a dreamless sleep, except that they would never be alert. They wouldnāt have any ideas of their own, they wouldnāt be at all conscious of themselves as conscious, and theyād never have thoughts or feelings like mine, either. Theyād be stuck in a kind of unfused āsleeper mode,ā that lasted forever.
These people would live their entire lives without ever having any contact with the actual outside world, and their brains would never be able to talk about it with anyone. They would just live on, never developing the ability to talk about anything at all.
And if you looked at them, you wouldnāt notice a single difference from the ape you had in your cage. But in all other respects, this human would be an endless horizon of nothingness, a thing that never gets any deeper.








