Vachon Imagined

We cannot prove someone’s subjective experience directly.

There is no way to enter another person’s inner world and verify what they feel in the way we verify a physical object. We can observe behavior. We can listen to language. We can measure biological signals. But the felt interior of another person—the actual “what it is like” to be them—remains inaccessible.

And yet, communication still works.

Human life does not collapse under this limitation. It functions because it rests on a different principle.

We assume experience is present because it is the most coherent explanation for what we observe.

When someone is crying, for example, we do not stop to demand proof of what they feel. We recognize that something is moving through them that is larger than language in that moment.

And in that recognition, something simple becomes possible.

We respond with care.

Not because we can verify their inner experience, but because we know something about being human.

We do not tell them to shut up.

We do not tell them to calm down.

Because most of us know what it feels like to be overwhelmed and met with correction instead of presence.

What we often needed was not instruction, but company.

Someone willing to remain.

Someone willing to stand firmly while the experience moved through us.

Someone willing to stay in consciousness with us rather than separate from it.

This is what presence offers.

Not agreement. Not solutions. Not proof.

Just another human being willing to remain long enough for us to remember we are not alone.

This is not blind acceptance.

It is practical empathy grounded in probability.

We do not know in the absolute sense what another person feels. But we recognize that treating them as though they are experiencing something is the most coherent and humane way to meet them.

Without this assumption, language loses its grounding. Every expression becomes suspect. Every emotion becomes a debate. Every interaction becomes analysis instead of relationship.

So human communication rests in a quiet agreement that is rarely spoken but constantly practiced:

If someone acts as though they are experiencing something, we relate to them as though they are.

Not because we can prove it.

But because it is the most coherent way to remain in contact with what is human.

And perhaps that is what listening truly is—not proving another person’s reality, but meeting it with the same care we once needed ourselves.