I've been doing some thinking about perspective lately - how much our perspective and experiences shape our worldview - and ran across some interesting statements on a BBC message board. Would've gotten into the convo, too, except that the Beeb has some really weird rules about their message boards (only on from 9-12, UK time, etc.) and I couldn't get it to work anyway.

Anyway, it got me wondering: since I am a product of my experiences, of the world that has surrounded me so far, is my perspective going to be at all comparable to anyone else's? In other words, is any given person's perspective close enough to another's that they can bend their viewpoint and really accurately predict how another person reacts to the world around them?

Example: the London bombings a few days ago were viewed by my society, and much of the rest of the world, as horrific acts of violence, and this reaction seems very basic and obvious to us. Yet somewhere, people who are aware of the incident are celebrating it; somewhere else, people have never heard of it.

I'm thinking that many of my "different" interests - computing, linguistics, history - are actually rooted in a much deeper interest in general epistemology.

I don't know how you will react to this, nor do I know if you'll understand what I meant. And if you comment (which I'm not discouraging, BTW), I don't know if I'll understand what you mean. This sounds negative (heck, the whole post sounds kinda negative), but it actually isn't; I'm not seeing this as a bad thing, just as the way it is. Or at least, the way it is according to my current perspective ...

On a lighter note, child-proof tops on jars and bottles are EVIL ;-)