14 DAY TRIAL // Each and every one of us has thought at some point that the things we hold dear are among the most interesting out there in and of themselves, and that the hobbies and interests that other people have are somehow not that interesting, or straight-out boring. In other words, we view things from a different perspective than those around us do, Caspar Hare, an assistant professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, says.
The expert proposes a simple exercise. Consider that 100,000 people will suffer an epilepsy seizure tomorrow. The news is very unlikely to interest you. However, things change considerably if you are to be among the 100,000 victims. Suddenly, the knowledge gains new meaning, and your interest in it goes through the roof. “You regard your own pleasures and pains as being especially significant. We have a tendency to think that what we care about is important in and of itself,” Hare says.
The thing is that no one can claim that their interests or opinions are uncontroversial facts, something that is as clear as life itself. An individual's well-being is therefore not something uniquely meaningful, except when viewed through that person's own eyes. The different perspectives that are formed in this matter have been a subject for psychological studies for many years. Some experts have gone as far as proposing that we don't even have a stable “self.” British philosopher Derek Parfit, for example, says that we are not what we believe. He qualifies humans as ever-shifting collections of mental and physiological states, PhysOrg reports.
Hare, however, underlines that there is a clear distinction between being self-centered, and being entirely driven by self-interest. “It's certainly possible to think your self-interest is important without thinking it's the most important thing in the world,” he says. The expert's work revives the concept of solipsism, which is the idea that an individual's self benefits from a special status in the world. There are, however, numerous critics to this idea, who in essence say that the argument the MIT professor is making goes against common sense.