Reflections. III. What do we mean when we say something is the “same” as something else?
The title of this article might seem rather boring, of interest only to word nerds. However, as soon as it is applied to some specifics, it becomes interesting. Indeed, it is relevant to many interesting questions in biology, since most of these involve comparisons, whether implicit or explicit, between entities or qualities. Whether the things compared are judged to be the “same” or not then influences how you view them.
In the previous BioBuzz article, I discussed anxiety in cats and then broadened it to other emotions in animals. I gave two examples of anxious cats and concluded that anxiety is a genuine state in felines (and other mammals). The implication was that anxiety is the same in non-human animals as it is for us. But is that true? When either of the two cats I discussed was experiencing anxiety, was their state of feeling really the same as mine when, for instance, I am in my dentist’s waiting room with a big pain in one tooth. How would one know? Cats cannot describe their feelings in words, unlike people, and cannot report back on their feelings.
However, even between human beings, who can discuss and compare their feelings, is a common language sufficient to guarantee that judgments of sameness (or not) can be made? Even more problematically, when we discuss something in history, can we be sure that the feelings we attribute to the participants were the same as how we imagine them to have been, using our own experience as a guide?
This was explored in a recent article in The Atlantic titled “What if our ancestors didn’t experience anything like we do?” It focused on the ideas and work of a British historian named Rob Boddice, who is now one of the leading figures in the field of the history of emotions, a fairly new field, which bridges history and psychology, but one that is burgeoning.1
Take physical pain and love as two states of feeling. These seem like fairly basic emotions and, initially, straightforward to describe. At the beginning of the article mentioned, the author recounted Boddice giving as an example unintentionally banging one’s thumb while trying to hammer in a nail. He asked whether different people at different times doing this can be described as experiencing the same pain. Surely, one thinks, it would have been the same for a 13th century carpenter, working on a cathedral, as a carpenter building a house today? You bang your thumb, it hurts, and then it throbs. However, when one thinks about it, one realizes that the medieval carpenter might well have brought some religious sensibility to his accident that the modern worker probably would not have. If he had, his experience would have felt different.
Or, advancing a few centuries further, take Romeo and Juliet. They were two fictional characters but convincingly portrayed in the play and in a situation that most people who have been teenagers can relate to: intense teen-age love. Doesn’t the fact that we relate so easily to their words and plight testify to the universality of their experience? Again, not necessarily: in seeing or reading the play, we project our feelings, shaped by ideas about love in our time, onto the 16th century lovers, a period when romantic love was a much less explored emotional landscape.
In effect, outwardly comparable experiences may actually feel quite different to different people because of how they interpret them. In other words, a feeling is not an automatic consequence of some physical sensation or event suddenly impinging on the individual from the outside but is an emotional construction. That construct reflects the impact of several factors that are processed by the individual to yield the feeling. With respect to pain, for instance, it is possible to train yourself to stand it much better. It feels less painful as a result. That would be a true case of mind over matter.
Boddice, however, takes this to what many would regard as a radical conclusion: that we all live in our own worlds. From this perspective, President Bill Clinton’s famous comment, “I feel your pain”, was not only rather presumptuous but had to be false. There was no way he or anyone can really put himself in someone else’s place to know exactly what their pain is like. In effect, while there may be sensations, mediated by our biological senses, that may be effectively universal, feelings involve an interpretive process. Everyone’s brain does this individually, with some degree of difference from other people’s brains. We have encountered this idea before (see Can we trust the human brain?). However, here we are adding the historical dimension, which certainly must add another layer of individual difference.
In a way, this is the most fundamental question we can pose about basic human experiences: how much of it is shared between people and how much is differentiated? It is clear that each individual human life is different from all others, hence the aggregate experiences of two individuals will always be different. However, we need to know about the simpler, component experiences that often occur over only seconds or fractions of seconds. Are the latter relatable between people or not? Similarly, for the longer experiences though lasting considerably less than a lifetime, such as falling in love, is there enough in common, at least within short historical periods and within a culture, for these to be completely relatable between different people?
Here, the reader may be sensing that I am subtly (or not so subtly) transforming the question from the question of whether two different experiences that happen to two different people are the “same” to whether they are similar enough to be talked about and mutually understood.
In a way, however, that is the crux of the matter. Boddice must be right in the strict literal sense: two experiences happening to two different people, especially in different cultures or different times, no matter how outwardly alike they appear to be, are not the “same”, in the sense of being identical. They will not be identical in duration or in intensity, however the latter might be measured. They will also involve different neurons and at least slightly different neural pathways (given the fact that different individuals’ neural systems always have some differences.) The most important thing is whether they are similar enough to be understood as to their basic character by the individuals involved or by others interacting with them or describing them.
On that question hinges whether we humans have enough in common in our feelings and in the way we communicate about them to hold together in societies. Empathy to the degree implied by Bill Clinton may be a myth but without a large degree of empathy (“fellow feeling”) social groups, from pairs of friends to families to countries, would fall apart. The feelings need not be identical. It is good enough if we can sense each other’s emotional states, our feelings, enough to interact with each other in a positive way. And, as emphasized in the earlier piece the fact of evolutionary continuity and relatedness guarantees that there are a lot of commonalities between human beings, including in how we feel and think. Those shared features in turn enable us to have, often (not always but often) a large measure of understanding of each other.
Yet, Rod Boddice’s point, that we are not identical and that our states of feeling, even when they look the same, are not, is important. There are always differences between living things, even twins, and sometimes the differences, produce big differences in outcome. If we remember that, our understanding can be enlarged and we might be more generous in our judgments. Imagine that you have a good friend whom you know to be both reliable and generous. But one day you learn about something that your friend did that seems quite out of character, something that seems ungenerous, even selfish. You feel let down and wonder whether you ever really knew him.
Then, about a month later, you meet up with him and gently bring this up. It turns out that the day before he did the thing that you found upsetting, he learned that his mother had died and that the next morning, he had received a massive tax bill that he knew was inaccurate. Suddenly, you realize that the poor guy had been deeply stressed. Not only can feelings be different from person to person in seemingly comparable situations, but the same person need not always be identical to their normal selves. Then think about characters in history who did certain odd things, whether “in character” (as reconstructed from the known facts about them) or quite different. How completely can we understand their actions, especially when they deviate from their previous behavior patterns? The answer is that we can never be certain that we have understood them. We should never assume that we perfectly understand the state of feelings behind particular actions.
Returning to the larger picture of shared features versus differences, which is more important? You have, I am sure, guessed the answer: it depends. That answer not only provides no clear guidance but is even worse than it appears. It depends not just on the particulars of the situation and its broader context but on the person making the judgment and what they think is important.
Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the science of taxonomy – classifying living things in terms of their degrees of resemblance. People naturally tend to put things in categories and there have been rough taxonomies as long as there have been human civilizations. Taxonomy as a modern science, however, was established by the great 18th century Swedish scientist, Carl von Linné or Linnaeus as he was called. There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of taxonomists since him but they tend to fall into either of two groups. These are the “splitters” and the “lumpers”. Splitters tend to emphasize differences and establish more categories while lumpers do the reverse, finding similarities between groups and downplaying the significance of differences. It really is a matter of taste – and temperament. Rarely, if ever, does a splitter turn into a lumper, or vice versa.
In a sense, one can even see this difference back 2500 years ago, in the great philosophers of classical Greece. Plato, the founder of the first great school of philosophy felt that everything we see and experience in life was a reflection of some eternal essence or “form”. Things were united by their underlying similarities. Plato, in my view, was a classic lumper though I have no doubt that he would have hated that characterization. Aristotle, one of his students, had little time for this kind of thinking. He was fascinated by the particularities of things, the differences between them. In my view, he was temperamentally a “splitter”. (For readers who know a lot more philosophy than I do, I can only ask you to excuse my rough characterizations of the thinking of these two men.)
I will be taking a break over the winter holiday period. I send Seasons Greetings to all of you and will resume in early January.
See Beckerman, G. (2025). What if our ancestors didn’t feel anything like we do? The Atlantic. 06/12/25. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026)01.human-ancestors