How Many of Us Live Like the Deaf‑Blind, While Believing We See the World?

We assume we share one world. The deaf‑blind person exposes a harder truth: there are many inner worlds. The most frightening question is not about them, but about us—how many of us never really wake up to the one we could inhabit?

Living in a bubble

Imagine a person born both deaf and blind.

No sight. No sound. No memories of light, faces, voices, or music. No words ever heard. No pictures ever seen.

For that person, “the world” is not a big landscape you walk through. It is only what the body can touch, taste, smell, and feel from the inside.

If the hand cannot reach it, if the skin cannot sense it, if the nose cannot smell it, it does not exist in that world.

There is no forest. There is no sky. There is no “far away”. There is only what is within arm’s length and skin’s reach.

How many people, with perfect sight and hearing, are moving through life with the same practical comprehension of reality as that deaf‑blind person?

1. The Deaf‑Blind World: Arms‑Length Reality

Let’s stay strict. A person born deaf and blind, before any long, careful education:

• does not know what “color” means,
• has no idea what a “sound” is,
• cannot picture a “forest of many trees”,
• cannot imagine “a city over there”,
• has no concept of “music in the next room”.

There is only:

• the roughness or smoothness under the fingers,
• warmth or cold on the skin,
• the pressure of a surface against the body,
• smells that come and go,
• hunger, pain, comfort, tension, relaxation.

“World” is not a panoramic image. “World” is not a soundscape.

“World” is:

“What I am touching now. What is pressing on me now. What my body is reporting now.”

Outside of that, there is nothing—unless someone invests enormous time and care to build a bridge: teaching tactile symbols, linking repeated touch patterns to stable meanings, creating a slow, fragile language through the skin.

Without that, even Braille is meaningless. Without a reference to shared concepts, it’s just bumps.

This is not “less” of a world. It is a different kind of world altogether.

2. There Is No Single “World” in Experience

We like to talk as if:

• “We all live in the world.”
• “The world is like this…”
• “That’s not how the world works.”

But the deaf‑blind person exposes the illusion. Whatever the Earth is physically, there is no single experienced world.

There are as many inner worlds as there are conscious beings, each carved out of reality by a specific body, nervous system, history, and culture.

So when we say “the world is like this or that”, what we are actually saying:

“My world – as it appears to this body and this mind – feels like this.”

There is no universal “what it is” at the level of lived experience. There is only what this being thinks and feels it is. Everything is what you think it is—not because nothing is real, but because whatever is “real” only ever arrives through a specific body and mind.

3. Sensory Access Without Comprehension

If the deaf‑blind world is arms‑length and closed, how different is that, really, from many seeing‑hearing people’s inner lives?

Think of someone who never questions their basic assumptions, never wonders how other people’s inner worlds might differ, never seriously looks beyond their job, their family drama, their phone, their favorite media, their immediate worries and pleasures.

They can see the news, hear music, watch films about other cultures, and scroll through images of wars, disasters, and celebrations. Yet inside, their world may be no bigger than:

“What touches my routine. What threatens my comfort? What confirms what I already believe.”

Their moral world is arms‑length. Their intellectual world is arms‑length. Their emotional world is arms‑length.

There are many deaf‑blind minds moving through life with healthy eyes and ears.

The deaf‑blind person is limited by the body. The seeing‑hearing person is often limited by fear, habit, laziness, culture, propaganda, and the desire not to be disturbed.

4. Why This Conversation Sounds Like Gibberish – and Why It Isn’t

Most of what we have just explored here will sound like gibberish to many people. Too abstract. Too philosophical. “Not useful.”

And yet, it is as real as a diamond.

The deaf‑blind person exists. Their radically different world is a fact. The conclusion that there is no single experienced world follows unavoidably. The idea that many sighted‑hearing people still live in tiny, closed mental worlds is an observation, not an insult.

5. A Brutal Little Test: Are You Living, or Just Passing Through?

If all of this still feels abstract, let’s bring it down to your own day. Be brutally honest with yourself for a moment. Nobody else needs to see your answers.

5.1 When was the last time you listened to music for its beauty alone?

Not as background noise. Not while driving, cooking, or scrolling.

I mean: you sat down, chose a piece of music, closed your eyes, and gave it your full attention from beginning to end. For example, a classical piece or some nice jazz music.

You might say: “I don’t like classical music. There is no beauty there for me.”

That is exactly the point.

How do you know there is no beauty if you’ve never truly listened, without distraction, without rushing, without prejudice?

5.2 When was the last time you walked in nature just to sense it?

Not to count your steps. Not to make phone calls. Not to get somewhere faster.

Just to see what there is to see, hear what there is to hear, smell what there is to smell, feel the ground under your feet, and the air on your skin.

You might say: “I’m too busy. I don’t have time for that.”

That is exactly the point.

If you “have no time” to encounter the world directly, what are you actually living for? Are you living a life, or simply maintaining a machine?

5.3 When was the last time you really looked at another human face?

Not to judge. Not to compare. Not to guess what they want from you.

Just noticing the eyes, the lines of age or youth, the way their expression changes when they think or feel.

You might say: “That would be awkward. I don’t stare at people.”

That is exactly the point.

We move through crowds of human universes, yet rarely allow one other world to fully exist in our attention, even for a few seconds.

5.4 When was the last time you let yourself be changed by something?

A book, a conversation, a piece of art, a crisis. Not just “found it interesting”, but actually changed a belief, abandoned a certainty, or admitted you were wrong about something important.

You might say: “I know who I am. I don’t change easily.”

That is exactly the point.

A world that never changes is a dead world. If nothing can get in, nothing new can grow.

5.5 A Simple Exercise: Extending Your Arms‑Length World

If you dare, try this within the next 7 days:

1. One piece of music: choose a style you normally ignore. Sit or lie down. Listen with eyes closed, no phone, no multitasking, from start to finish. Your only job: notice.
2. One walk in nature: go somewhere with trees, water, or open sky. Walk for at least 20 minutes with no calls and no headphones. Mentally label what you sense: “I see… I hear… I smell… I feel…”
3. One honest human encounter: spend 10 minutes with someone, really watch their face, ask one question you don’t usually ask, and actually listen.
4. One belief on trial: pick something you are very sure about. Spend 30 minutes with the best argument against it. Don’t convert; just look for cracks.

If you cannot find the time or courage to do even one of these, you may have perfect sight and hearing—but you are living in an arms‑length world, not very different in comprehension from the world of the deaf‑blind person you pity.

And if you do try them, even once, you will notice something simple and terrifying: the world is larger than you thought. Which means your old “world” was never the whole thing.

6. Empathy and Morality in a World of Separate Worlds

If there is no universal “world” of experience, and every person lives in their own constructed universe, then naïve empathy (“I feel you, or I see you”) is impossible. I can feel myself, I can see myself, but when I look outside, my mind makes a construct of what I feel and see, and it is totally independent of any outer reality. I am the only one who sees or feels what I feel and see. But here is the brutal truth: it is really only my experience, and not the same as anyone else's. 

At best, we imagine how we would feel in someone else’s place. But that is still “me in a different costume”.

So empathy may need to become something else:

Not “I feel what you feel,” but “I accept that your inner world is real, coherent for you, and has moral weight, even if I cannot enter it.”

Likewise, a moral rule like “Do not do unto others the things you would not like them to do unto you” runs into trouble when people genuinely differ on what they like or accept.

We may need to climb one step higher:

“Do not inflict on others what would obviously degrade a human being, even if your own preferences – or theirs – are strange around the edges.”

7. The Uncomfortable Question You Can’t Unsee

Underneath all of this is the question you may not want to rush past:

How many of us are effectively deaf‑blind to life, even while we believe we see and hear clearly?

From an anthropological point of view, most cultures need a shared fiction: that we all see the same world, feel the same basics, and use words for the same things. But that is all, it is fiction.  These fictions help coordination. But they also hide how alone each person’s inner world really is, how fragile our moral formulas are, and how easily we erase other realities because they are “too different to be real”. 

The deaf‑blind person is not just a tragic case. They are a mirror: to our illusions of knowing, to our arrogance about “the world”, to our willingness to call everything beyond our small reach “gibberish”.

Many people, with perfect sight and hearing, live and die in an arm 's-length universe of the mind – and never notice how much of life they never even began to fathom.