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NOTE
This cannot be resolved in life, or love. It isn’t unique to me. But I’d feel a special closeness with someone who feels this deeply and communicates it with me, and that kind of connection that we would have in being together in this expansive solitude.
I don’t understand how anyone can feel anything but being completely and utterly alone.
So much of my day is spent completely in our heads.
When I think of a way that I experience life, it’s not so much a garden with plants and vines all connected together. What the social space feels like is Outer Space exactly - not relatively, points and moments with large gaps of empty space between them. (This doesn’t mean I am not connected in terms of resources, my entire existence requires others - I am perhaps thinking more of social connection.)
It must be this way for everyone, even the most socially engaged. You figure you sleep such a large part of your life, and that is isolation. When you wake, you’ll do things by yourself. Have a few conversations, with a few people. The space of being alone so outweighs the space of being directly together.
All your life you interact with ghosts of people. You interact with models of them. You spend a day with someone, and they leave an impression. Then they leave your presence and they are just that, an impression. They continue to move and live their lives, changing and deviating from your model of them. You don’t know what your father is doing now. He is living his life, with a little model of you in his head.
You know celebrities like you know the surface of Pluto. The space of your last conversation is here to Mars. The vastness we see when we look out at the stars, that vast emptiness and isolation, it isn’t just in space. That vastness is here, mimicked.
Friends from the past, you’ll think you know them but it is just snapshots (almost literally). You are interacting with a model of them.
I realize this when it comes to jobs. Very few people, including family, will I have even a close understanding of what their work day is like. I understand someone I know is a nurse, or a student - but their entire day is unknown to me.
Also think of times when you are talking in a group. It’s almost like a third person arises from every two speaking. You’ll be either actively listening to that other person, or in your head. You are talking to someone, they are waiting… barely listening, formulating and waiting for a moment to interject their response.
In text, in reading something someone has written there might be direct connection but it is one way.
Think of all the things you create in a day, or produce and how little of it is observed.
Think of language as well. Nobody even interpreting the same symbol in the same exact way, never landing the exact same place. No simultaneously equal experience, a billion people reading the same book in a thousand different ways.
I’m not saying that isn’t a brilliant and beautiful thing, but it is also harrowing and isolating. I can think of it like being in my own room, and imagining one day someone walks in. Or you walk into a room, and find someone there.
I’m also not saying that the only way we can connect, is to find a clone. I don’t want to find myself fully in another. A shared understanding is something we both come at.
Sharing
This is what love is to me. To actually share a moment.
For me a certain anti-loneliness, love would look like this: You wander and wander on paths exploring things that interest you. And you stop one day at look at something that is meaningful to you. You might rest in the shade, or gaze up at something in the sky.
What you notice then is that you actually aren’t alone. Someone else has come and is looking at the same thing you are looking at.
They might not even notice you. But by virtue of you both being there, you know something about them. You like the company.
Maybe they wander off. Maybe they don’t notice you there either. But you got close to something there.
On propositions:
So some recent views of propositions have taken them to be mental. Although propositions cannot be particular thoughts since those are not shareable, they could be types of cognitive events or properties of thoughts (which could be the same across different thinkers).
Blinks
Did you ever blink and it felt like an infinite stretch of darkness? Like if you closed your eyes for a second, it would last forever and that’s all it would be: dark.
NOTE
I think what I am trying to express here is a wonder of if our subjective, relative understanding of things is skewed or deceptive, to allow us to function. A blink does last forever. If we thought of our aloneness, we’d be harrowed and scream. We’d hug and never let go.
I recall being a kid and learning about the expanding universe and not having a proper understanding of what it meant at the time. I’d look at my hand, and improperly believe that it was expanding like everything. Scaling, rapidly. It’d be at once my hand, and then my hand the size of what once was the solar system - unnoticed by the fact that everything was scaling with me.
Fever dreams sometimes do this as well, and I’ve heard other people express this. You reach toward the ceiling or a distant object, your hands fully outstretched, and feel as if an impossibly large distance exists between them. Might as well be Mars.