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Is there a word for loneliness without desire for company?
You don't want to be alone. Being around others is even less appealing. You are alone, which you don't like. The alternative is interacting with others, which is worse.
Is there another option? Some distilled experience without the extraneous guts and gristly entanglements? Enjoying company, by yourself?
Are we an alternate universe Narcissus then? One who fell in love not with his own reflection but with someone else's. No interest in the mythological real. Binging on mirrors.
Quick character, unrelated
Red hair and pale skin. Loose galaxy of freckles. Her sketch is enough to cross wires, tickle the hindbrain with confusion. Meeting her is feeling your life divide into history before the encounter and the ongoing history of after. Many find her repulsive, blind to their own fascination. Her nails are neatly trimmed and the pads of her fingers look soft. If she ever meets Molly it'll be the end for everyone.
You don't want to be alone. Being around others is even less appealing. You are alone, which you don't like. The alternative is interacting with others, which is worse.
Is there another option? Some distilled experience without the extraneous guts and gristly entanglements? Enjoying company, by yourself?
Are we an alternate universe Narcissus then? One who fell in love not with his own reflection but with someone else's. No interest in the mythological real. Binging on mirrors.
Quick character, unrelated
Red hair and pale skin. Loose galaxy of freckles. Her sketch is enough to cross wires, tickle the hindbrain with confusion. Meeting her is feeling your life divide into history before the encounter and the ongoing history of after. Many find her repulsive, blind to their own fascination. Her nails are neatly trimmed and the pads of her fingers look soft. If she ever meets Molly it'll be the end for everyone.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-08 04:48 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-12-12 03:32 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-12-12 03:45 am (UTC)From:But if you're looking for a way to be less lonely without actually having other people around (and with the ability to make them go away on command), socializing online may be an option worth exploring. Whether it's through writing your own blog, commenting on others, joining communities, reading message boards, or any of a myriad of other options...
It's entirely your choice. Where, when, how, with whom... There's a world of possibilities at your fingertips. It's up to you what to make of them. It may sound a little corny, but it's no less true for that.
Or maybe that's not what you need at all. I don't know. Like I said... It's up to you.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 03:59 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-12-09 05:23 am (UTC)From:My favorite Eminem title is Lose Yourself and that's for a good reason: the Internet, especially when you use it to express your own thoughts or to read the more interesting thoughts of others, can be an excellent form of escape from the dreariness of your own soul.
Continuing with the Lose Yourself theme, other forms of escape for me can be as simple as reading dead tree stuff (newspapers, books, mags), watching really good movies (which I've been doing a lot of lately), listening to music (if I'm singing/dancing along especially, if I'm alone while singing/dancing along even more especially); longhand writing, coding, cooking, house-cleaning, even walking.
The key is to immerse yourself so wholly that you almost forget you exist outside of that one activity.
I'm not sure if it's the world's best form of therapy (I often think of it as a cool form of anti-therapy, since it usually solves no particular hard-coded problem for me) but it is very soothing (and, at times, very sanity-saving indeed).
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 04:16 am (UTC)From:Your description of escape sounds more like a life I'd like to live rather than a vacation. If that really is an escape then it's a justified one, and worth pursuing.
Practice becomes life, this always. I can sit motionless facing the wall and do this, sometimes play music and do this, occasionally even carry on conversations while doing this. It starts to seem robotic, mechanical in retrospect. Walking a thin line between immersion in experience and unconsciousness.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 04:41 am (UTC)From:*ponders literal interpretation and inability to self-examine deeply enough to know exactly what the hell I meant, but the above explanation is close enough, I guess*
Your description of escape sounds more like a life I'd like to live rather than a vacation.
To me it's all vacation, escape, snatched moments and stolen joy. I steal it from a life that's always pushed me into a mold that doesn't fit and has sucked the joy out of me and forced me to be, every day of my life, everything I'm not.
And yeah, you're right, it's a thin line; been there, done that, got the t-shirt. There is a balance, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 04:53 am (UTC)From:Funny. I don't believe it, there's an invisible wrinkle there. I can only wear the t-shirt ironically.
Your post makes me want to drink whiskey, but all I have is tapwater and tiny sample vials of expensive cologne.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-17 05:00 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-12-19 03:15 am (UTC)From:When I do escape, I do it for adventure. Sneaking out of the cabin after everyone falls asleep. Staring at the stars and lake reflected sky.
The world is a thousand tentacled bindings. Every movement is an escape.
Love is a good escape, doomed love a profound one.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-19 05:29 am (UTC)From:Cabin must be nice. Am lifelong urban megalopolis denizen, albeit in mostly non-skyscraper area of it. Would like rural instead, so long as tarantulas, scorpions and other screaming nightmare fodder stay several hundred miles away. (Seriously. Even the mere words horrify; anything more and my mind just breaks, not in a good way; not so much the second, but very much the first. Don't test.)
Though a good countering metaphor: if the world is tentacled bindings, and it is, then movement is just the twitching while we're already stuck on the web. Happy holidays!
Love, well--some long-done interactions I retroactively recognize as such are a good chunk of what brought me to my current POV. It's only an escape when it's not a delusion.
Which is not to say I don't love the woman I live with. But what I mean by the word is different in this case, and more a verb than an all-encompassing condition.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-20 03:47 am (UTC)From:This is where I post a picture of a spider and we laugh.
Then arrest you for misappropriating my metaphor.
I claim the opposite! Delusion is crucial to a good escape.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-20 02:07 pm (UTC)From:This is where I post a picture of a spider and we laugh.
Or rather, the broken-minded thing that had been therainingtree laughs insanely as it takes its unholy revenge. Just sayin'.
All metaphors are misappropriated. That's how they became metaphors.
There's delusion and delusion. A good escape doesn't have a horrible wallcrash at the end of it.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-20 09:05 pm (UTC)From:I want you to read this: Neuropath
I'll buy it for you for Christmas.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-20 09:36 pm (UTC)From:Fine.
Date: 2012-12-21 12:14 am (UTC)From:Re: Fine.
Date: 2012-12-21 01:02 am (UTC)From:Re: Fine.
Date: 2012-12-23 02:14 am (UTC)From:??
Re: Fine.
Date: 2012-12-23 05:49 pm (UTC)From:So, Neuropath
Date: 2012-12-23 10:19 pm (UTC)From:None of which is to deny the novel's overall effectiveness as a horror novel (and a work of proper science fiction); the ending has me rather hoping, for the family's sake, that they are under surveillance from the Powers That Be trying to keep things quiet, and that an air-to-ground missile is already heading for their car. But I assume you wanted me to read this because of our discussion a few months ago about consciousness, and whether there's any "there" to it. And I would still argue that yes, there is--even though, yes, that "thereness" is a contingent, emergent effect that changes into something else or goes away when you pull the neuronal strings.
I mean, sure: mental activity as a machine? You don't need deep neurophysiological knowledge to know that, just watch someone drunk. (Or in my case, watch my diabetic mother's personality change during some episodes of insulin shock, or utterly go away during others--and then watch her come back when the EMTs save [fix] her.) Yes, we're output and we're changeable/erasable. But at any given moment, that "consciousness mask" the brain is generating exists, even if it's a layer over something else (which I certainly buy that it is). In the novel, the various alternate consciousnesses which Thomas gets transformed into are real. He effectively becomes different people--all of the victims do--but those altered consciousnesses are there, until they aren't.
And that's at the crux of my argument about AI: whether it's an actual example of experience, or a simulation meant to imitate the actions of a consciousness to us outsiders running or interacting with the AI. Both (consciousness created within a mechanism, i.e. us; vs. an imitation of the action a consciousness would perform, generated by a mechanism that does not itself experience, i.e. AI up to now) are programmable, changeable, erasable, utterly contingent, utterly reducible to mechanism--but one does experience, even if that experience is completely falsifiable, while the other arguably does not, at least yet.
Re: So, Neuropath
Date: 2012-12-23 11:26 pm (UTC)From:I understand what you mean about experience being there. In my ongoing conversations with my (patient) friend I've realized that I can't outright deny experience as "something that happens." It's an untenable position. The crux of the matter for me is the dead horse called choice. The brain and the self as a mechanism or interaction of mechanisms gives rise to the experience of consciousness, which is "real." But within that real experience are fabrications, some obvious and some not so much. Now, the experience of those fabrications is a real experience! But our understanding of the whys and hows is where I see the problem.
A purely mechanical model of the brain doesn't account for choice, not even in terms of emergence. One thing causes another, and even if a series of events is too complex, too fast, or too slow for us to make sense of it doesn't change the fact that any given system is bound by it's initial state and whatever rules it follows.
It doesn't really seem to matter that experience could be a sort of consciousness mask because, as you point out, we still experience it... Even more, the trickery is the event. It happens, even if it's being transformed and controlled by some weird science device. What does matter is that if choice is a fabrication, if the experience of choice is a sort of cover up for what is essentially a predetermined series of events... well that rocks my world a little bit.
In this model, we are not driving the car. We are a passenger. However, our passenger seat is tricked out to make it seem like we are driving!
Re: So, Neuropath
Date: 2012-12-24 12:42 am (UTC)From:Re: So, Neuropath
Date: 2013-01-02 01:39 am (UTC)From:But! I am not a discrete entity. Everything I think of to be myself is the artifact of many interacting systems. The I, the ME, is the crest of a wave. A wave that believes itself to be the ocean, knows that it is making decisions and having internal struggles - all the while blind to the forces determining its course. Not just ignorant, but categorically incapable of understanding!
Anyway-
Opposing subsystems. Tectonic plates pushing against each other. Conclusion foregone don't mean no explosions.