stream-of-thought #3.5

(I would read #3 first)

What if we’re already hitching a ride in someone’s head, right now? What if we have no control over our situation? What if we don't have to get hung up over every victory and defeat? There is no reason to be invested in anything--as we will all die eventually. And there is probably no reason to believe that we have free will.

So all in all, our situation is perhaps no different from a baby's in the womb--except that we think it's different.

And our situation, if we take all this to be true, is still crucially different from what I described in stream-of-thought-#3 is that no one is control of the situation for us.

We think something else when we're children. When I was a kid, I remember just assuming that my parents were omniscient and omnipotent; they always seemed to know how to deal with arcane problems like ordering food from restaurants, paying bills, driving, doing taxes, buying Christmas presents, gardening, and so on. I felt like everything was being taken care of. I could relax; I had nothing to worry about. Someone else who was responsible, good, kind, and skillful was making sure everything was okay. I'm sure other people have similar experiences.

Things start going differently sometime around early adolescence, when we begin to become aware that our parents are not omniscient or omnipotent, that their lives are just as broken as our own (if not more so). We begin to feel that our choices can have profound effects on our lives (think college admissions and other career-related issues.) We realize that we are well and truly on our own.

If we can realize further that there is no way we can have any real control over our situation--because we are just biological machines, conspicuously lacking an inner ghost--does this make the situation better?

I have come to realize this intellectually, but I am far from realizing it viscerally. So I often get caught up in the effects of my decisions. I don't think I really believe that I don't have free will--and I'm not sure if I have reason to.

What happens to the fear of death when we let go of (possibly, the illusion of) control?

I'm not sure if it would work. Being "just along for the ride" is great, but is it great when you know that the ride--that everthing--is going to end?

But then again, the ride is only trivial, fun, and "safe" in the first place because of its terminal nature.

It seems I have reached yet another catch-22.

stream-of-thought #3

And this is the truly terrible thing--that we are incapable of anything but absolute aloneness.

For if you exist with other people, you can only communicate with them indirectly--through language, touch, music, etc. And if you could communicate with them directly--if you could directly contact another person's thoughts--well then, you would no longer feel like separate people, just as you feel like one person even though your brain is in two halves, connected by only the corpus callosum. You would be all by yourself again--utterly alone.

Sometimes I think what we truly want is experience without responsibility. Imagine if things just happened, and you had no control over them, little investment in them. Pleasure would be nice; pain would be not so nice but free from guilt and self-pity. You could accomplish this by "hitching a ride" in someone's head, temporarily. I feel like that is the desire underlying some romantic relationships. It is certainly a reason why people play video games.

What would it feel like to die, then?

When I imagine it now, it does not feel so bad. But perhaps I am repressing the fear (as most of us do throughout our everyday lives).