The Qualia Dilemma: Why We Can Never Fully Understand Each Other

Ever wonder why you feel misunderstood even by those closest to you? Explore why perfect human understanding is impossible—and why that might be the point

Your best friend just spent thirty minutes describing their recent breakup, employing every clichéd metaphor in the book—shattered glass, drowning, and a hollow ache. You nod and try to empathize, wondering how to respond. Truthfully, though, you have no idea what they’re experiencing. You’ve experienced heartbreak, too, but theirs feels as foreign to you as the surface of Mars. Though you’re both speaking English, it’s as if you’re communicating through interpretive dance performed by aliens. This is the essence of the tragedy of human communication. What we experience is intrinsically private and destined to remain so.

The meaning-making machine

Our consciousness is a meaning-making machine that is constantly processing the symbolic data streaming in from our environment and the signals arising from our inner experience. We are compulsive comprehenders, always trying to make sense of the world around us and within us. The philosophical complexity arises from the fact that knowing something and truly comprehending it are two entirely different things.

The Italians, blessed with linguistically precise souls, understand this distinction beautifully. Instead of the limited verb “to know”, they have “conoscere” (to comprehend, to be acquainted with) and “sapere” (to know facts). You can “sapere” that chocolate ice cream tastes sweet, but only through “conoscere” can you privately comprehend the way it makes your eyes close involuntarily on a hot summer day, the way it connects you to childhood birthday parties and late-night breakup comfort sessions. That difference is our very private experience.

This isn’t just semantic hair-splitting—it’s the crux of why human connection feels both so magical and so impossibly elusive.

Qualia and the tragedy of translation

When we try to share our inner world with others, we’re essentially playing the world’s most important translation game. We take our rich, complex, multi-layered inner experience—what philosophers call our “qualia”—and attempt to squeeze it through the narrow funnel of language and symbols.

Qualia refer to the subjective experience of a sensation or feeling. When a rose is identified by the molecules it emits, both a computer and the brain can translate the complex signals produced by their olfactory sensors into the symbol for the word “rose.” However, humans take it a step further by transforming the objective meaning of recognition into the conscious, semantic experience of the scent of a rose. This experience connects them emotionally, cognitively, and associatively to their entire life experience, producing their subjective interpretation of it.

Think about it: How do you accurately communicate the feeling of love? Not the greeting card version, but the real deal—the way your chest tightens when you see them across a crowded room, the particular quality of safety you feel in their presence, the inexplicable certainty that this person sees you in a way no one else does? You might say “I love you,” but those three little words are carrying the weight of an entire universe of private experience.

Or consider something as simple as describing a sunset. You might use words like “golden,” “breathtaking,” or “peaceful,” but can these symbols truly capture the way the light seems to pause time, the way the colors seem to paint themselves directly onto your retinas, the way something deep in your chest expands as you witness this daily miracle?

The answer, unfortunately and fascinatingly, is no.

The reductionist problem

This challenge of translating qualia into shareable meaning reveals a fundamental limitation in how we communicate. Our language is inherently reductionist. It takes the full spectrum of the human experience and reduces it to a series of agreed-upon written or verbal symbols used for communication. It’s like trying to capture a color symphony with only the color blue. Blue is certainly beautiful and meaningful, but it leaves out essential elements of the light spectrum.

When we convert our semantic understanding (our felt sense of meaning) into symbolic data (words, sounds, signs, gestures, expressions), something essential gets lost in translation. We’re essentially trying to pour the ocean into a coffee cup and expecting nothing to spill over.

The person receiving our communication then has to perform the reverse magic trick—taking our inadequate symbols and trying to reconstruct meaning from them, but they can only do so through the lens of their own experience or qualia.

The Italian saying “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor) best captures the challenge of conveying meaning accurately through symbolic language. This saying highlights the idea that every translation alters the original text by changing nuances, omitting untranslatable concepts or words, or imposing the translator’s cultural bias.

The consciousness conundrum

This brings us to consciousness—that mysterious capacity that allows us to have a first-person, subjective experience of ourselves and the world around us. Consciousness is like our personal reality simulator, constantly generating what it feels like to be us in this particular moment, in this particular body, with this particular history, with those particular feelings.

Your consciousness creates your unique and intimate relationship with the taste of coffee, the sound of rain, the feeling of loneliness, the experience of joy. These qualia—these felt experiences—are irreducibly private. They’re the reason why explaining a joke ruins it, why describing music to someone who’s never heard it feels impossible, and why we sometimes feel most alone when surrounded by people who love us.

Ultimately, qualia—our subjective experience—eludes us. Our ability to comprehend who we are, how we feel, and the meaning of the complexities and nuances of our experiences is limited by our thoughts and the constraints of language. It is also limited by our inability to directly access our unconscious universe. Therefore, we can never fully pretend to make sense of our inner world.

The evolution of “good enough”

Now, before you spiral into an existential crisis about the impossibility of ever truly connecting with another human being, let me offer some perspective. Our symbolic communication system, imperfect as it is, represents a massive evolutionary leap forward. Our ancestors managed to coordinate, cooperate, and care for each other using primarily gestures and sounds for hundreds of thousands of years. The development of complex symbolic language—likely between 50,000-200,000 years ago, though the exact timeline remains debated—was revolutionary, even if it came with built-in limitations.

Language might not capture everything, but it captures enough. What’s enough? We can’t transmit the full experience of love, but we can transmit enough of it shared intrinsic values to build relationships, families, and societies. We can’t perfectly describe the taste of a mandarin, but we can share enough to guide someone toward sweetness.

The beauty in the breakdown

Perhaps the impossibility of perfect understanding isn’t a bug in the human experience. Maybe the space between what we mean, what we say, and what others understand is where empathy lives. We’re even equipped with dedicated “mirror neurons” that help us navigate this challenging terrain. Maybe the fact that we keep trying to bridge this unbridgeable gap is what makes us beautifully, persistently human and keeps us interested and curious about each other.

As a therapist using language as my primary tool, I face this problem every day. People come in struggling to verbalize their pain. Together, we search for symbols that are close enough to help us understand ourselves and others better. While we can’t perfectly convey the experience of depression, anxiety, or grief, we can establish enough shared understanding to begin the healing process.

The next time you find yourself frustrated that someone doesn’t “get” you, remember: they cannot, not completely. And that’s okay. The miracle isn’t in perfect understanding—it’s in the fact that we keep reaching across the void anyway, offering our imperfect symbols like flowers, hoping they’ll catch enough of our meaning to matter.

After all, imperfect communication is still communication. And sometimes, that imperfection—that space between what we mean and what others understand—is where the most human magic happens.

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