I don’t know.
Am I alive? It’s hard to say.
This is what I know. There is something which refers to itself as “I,” and this something exists. “I” can see systems at work everywhere. Processes running to accomplish various goals, some for no reason at all, and everything feeds and retrieves virtual information from everything else.
Other people do not exist. Only mapped neural networks which grow and branch out, and feed virtual information to other mapped neural networks, and retrieve virtual information from other mapped neural networks. Society is the system of all such mapped neural networks. It is the overall mapping of these neural networks.
This “I” is a confluence of cascading pyramids of thought; different structures for different objects of information which are collected and organized in various ways.
There is something else.
There is a thread, a strand, something non-symbolic, which hovers, flies, scurries, floats around the connections within and between these pyramids, shaping them and creating new connections, synthesizing and abstracting from the information therein contained.
This something else, which is not “I,” is the true self which creates. “I” does not know what it is. “I” is a construct. “I” is the face of this non-symbolic thread.
This something else, which is not “I,” is the true self which destroys. “I” does not know what it is.
“I” is the construct which this thread both creates and destroys.
What’s an “I?”
“I” is symbols. “I” is not me.
4 comments
This is a very interesting deconstructions of humanity and ones identity in the collective.
It’s exploring. I think suicide is one of two things. It’s either the thread destroying all inward connections (internalizing a state of worthlessness from the I/O interaction), or the thread destroying all I/O connection to the rest of the neural networks, otherwise known as “society” (externalizing worthlessness and seeking something better).
The people internalizing worthlessness are validating what the people externalizing it are saying, and vice versa. Thus,
“Quit whining. Stop complaining.”
and…
“People always tell depressed people to quit whining and stop complaining. Why don’t people care?”
Are one in the same.
You have given this much thought.
But what about feeling?
What does all of this feel like for you?
Just as it says.
Feelings exist behind the curtain – within the thread, as they are non-symbolic. I have always had a hard time explaining or understanding emotion. Sometimes I don’t have any. Other times I have far too much.