[Gamma on...] Isolation

In this age of unparalleled connectivity, where anyone in the world can connect to and communicate with, often times with at least voice (if not visual) communication, many of us find us inexplicably isolated. Perhaps this is, for some, a choice. Not everyone enjoys being immersed in the sea of social interaction. Surely all of us, however, enjoy sharing a connection with another human being, even if it’s only one. Why do we find ourselves, even for short periods of time, disconnected or even completely severed from human connections? Why do we experience loneliness? Why do we feel, for lack of a more specific term, sadness brought on by lack of connection?

I find myself contemplating this as I sit on the porch of a beach condo I’m sharing with no less than five other people, yet alone. Perhaps everyone needs their alone time. Indeed, that sentiment brought me out here in the first place. I was attempting to get away from the usual setting of my life to find some form of creative inspiration that would help push my thoughts out of my head and into words. What that creative burst inspired, however, was a feeling of confusion. I don’t understand what drives us to be alone in the first place. It’s more than that really. It’s more of a wondering what it is to be alone.

I’ll be honest this article isn’t taking a super focused direction, more of a shotgun approach to a subject. I’m still articulating my thoughts on the subject even as I write down what I have already refined after two days of contemplation. I’m driving at what the nature of what it is to be “alone”. Surly we can all describe what alone means. There’s an easy enough word to understand. But what does it really mean, in a deeper sense. Just as words have meanings, they are only symbols that we use to represent a physical thing or an essence of a concept. Alone means, for the most part, to be without others, it’s a combination of “a” and “lone”. Easy enough, right? What does it really mean though? Being without others can be but one of its possible “true” meanings. We can be alone in a room full of people. We can be alone in the presence of our closest friend. We can be alone at any time. I put forth that we ARE alone at ALL times.

We are, at our core, simply individuals. We can only ever hope to be in the presence of other people, but never truly “with” them. I say that because we cannot hope to share a point to point, lossless connection with someone. We cannot co-exist with another in a shared point with a shared consciousness. We can only scrap together bits of noises and random flailing to try and approximate communication of what’s going on in our minds. Does that constitute being together? Yes and no, or perhaps more accurately, yes and know. Yes, because on a basic level to be together can (and usually does) mean to be around someone, to be in their presence, to share a common area with them. I say know because what we know of this is purely based on the limitations of our current abilities. We have never experienced shared consciousness with anyone, and most of us wont. We’re not psychic, and our current technological level doesn’t allow for such events (as of today anyway). I think that the ultimate experience in life, in regards to communication, sharing, knowing, and learning, would be the sharing of consciousness with someone. Being intertwined with their thoughts and feelings and likewise sharing ours with them. To me, that would be what it would mean to be truly “together” with someone.

While science has made some pretty impressive leaps with understanding and skillfully manipulating the brain, we’re not quite at the level of artificially sharing consciousness with someone. We can’t even really approximate feelings synthetically yet. That would be the first of many steps, and a huge leap forward, towards truly understanding someone else. Imagine, if you can, knowing exactly how someone is feeling, because you can feel it too. Not only can you feel it, but you feel it EXACTLY as they felt it. You can replay their emotional state as a recording and experience it for yourself. Can you conceive the level of understanding that would bring between people? It would be so much easier to put yourself in another person’s shoes (as they say) because you’d actually be feeling it.

Why stop there? As long as we’re hypothesizing, why not have entire memories for sharing and playback. Let’s make it experiences that you can upload to other people or download from other people. Share your experiences; learn from other peoples experiences as if they were your own. At that point, they are your experiences, because you’ve experienced them.

I guess, in the end, the point is that language isn’t a prefect tool for communication, and that the internal experience each person has is rarely shared well enough to break down all feelings of isolation.