: On listening, best guessing, and problem of the other mind
How to believe those who claim to hear strange things? Even people with unimpaired hearing ability use their best guessing to figure out what was the sounds they heard behind their backs, or in the darkness. The expectations held by those who hear strange things may have been the result of their inferences that have not yet been tested in the present.
While there lies a question of what it is like to be the audile one, there's also a problem on how to understand or believe in the listener’s experience that has been told in first person view - or in this case, first-person auditory standpoint.
You can also consider the problem of listening as to the problem of testimonial belief. It's hard to fully believe or disbelieve what we have heard, because the testifier's mind and body might have been unfit to be fully aware of the situation, or because it's hard to believe the contents of the word, as they are far off from what we have as common sense. There are many levels and context that has to be taken into account to judge the trustworthiness of the hearsay.
But testimonial belief is a good point to interrogate ‘conceivability’, since it completely relies on the listener’s belief, while in the absence of physical evidence.
Taking the problem of listening as a tool to expand conceivability involves taking hypotheses or inferences, or the human way of thinking, into a realm that goes beyond human hearing. For example, we can associate Dxing², the hobbyist way of listening to HAM radio, with a sonic conspiracy theory.
The experience of 'listening otherly' to one sound as another. Why does this happen? Maybe because the sound was not extreme enough to be identified at once, or because the listener's beliefs that, which was projected to the sonic event, without her knowing it.
The thing is that, although you can correct the misled belief about the sound you’ve heard, it’s only a post facto. Most of the time you are not allowed to ascertain what sound it was. Or you don't have to, unless you are sleeping inside a house with a broken window.
So why listening is deeply engaged in the so-called ‘the problem of other minds’, concerning that we are confined by each one's own world of nonfungible qualia, or, differently lived quality of each one of us’s present-now³?
There are several ways to reach out the secret. Among them, I was attracted to a certain kind of method, which I have been paraphrasing with different words: fiction, amodal completion, continuity illusion, abduction, inference to the best explanation.. etc.
We infer at our best to know and feel what it is like to be the other being. Inference to the best explanation, or abduction, is a way of reasoning that starts from a hypothesis. 'Fictions that make themselves real', or ‘perceptual best guessing’⁴. Call them what you prefer.
A diagram that represents the bifurcation process of two different modes: believe or not.