• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


have you ever thought about it? (har har.)

one could try to answer this question in any number of abstract ways, but I'm curious about the practical experience of having thoughts. you're at a lull in conversation, or you're walking down the street or taking a shower, and suddenly you feel like saying, "now there's a thought." what, exactly, is going on in such moments?

I imagine it's different for everybody, so I'll just talk about how it seems to work for us: the prompt for those moments of "having a thought" seems to be largely auditory, but it's not from "hearing a voice" exactly even if it somehow feels like hearing a voice. what I think is actually going on is that ambient sounds have furnished some kind of medium from which our brain is picking up the semi-perception of words. there's some filtering process going on by which the ambient noise is triggering "thoughts" when certain conditions are met, and subtly modulating how we hear that sound so that we get the impression of words spoken to us.

this implies that if the same situation occurred—the lull in conversation, the walking down the street, &c.—and we got no such impression of having heard a thought...then it seems likely to me that no thought is occurring during that time. the passive reception of one's surroundings? autonomic nervous activity? yes, these things are occurring. but I propose that rational thought only occurs at such moments where you're conscious of having discrete thoughts. if I listen to some sounds and feel, "I've just had a thought," then thought has occurred; but if I listen to the same sounds and never get that feeling of "having a thought", if I feel that I'm just sitting there taking things in, then it really is a "no thoughts head empty" situation.

because we're afflicted with a dissociative disorder, we've ended up forced to spend a lot of energy and thought (hah) on this kind of minute study and self-analysis of how our brain is actually doing things, because it's how we've been able to detect whether we're dissociated or not. "am I dissociated? who's actually functioning right now? where did that thought actually come from?" are vital questions for ourselves that's taken long and tedious practice to get good at asking. a lot of our behaviors aren't thoughtful or "rational"; they're habits and coping mechanism, traumatically conditioned loops of behavior that emerge briefly when certain conditions are met and then submerge again. it's rather strange to be always asking oneself, "did I actually think about this thing that I'm doing?" and I hazard to guess that a major aspect of so-called "neurotypical" behavior is that it's free from such pestering doubts. the NT person, at least from what I've seen, simply assumes that all of their behavior is rational and motivated by conscious thought.

there's a little difficulty with that: I don't think it's actually true. when we were maximally dissociated and unaware of it, we also assumed that we were rational and thoughtful at all times even when we were little more than a mass of chaotic impulses and reflexes. the easiest way to believe that you're always rational is to flee from any doubts that you're not.

I suspect that this might especially be a problem with people who are entranced by the purportedly superior thinking powers of computers; I'm sure it's not just a computer-nerd thing, although I tend to associate this fallacy with snobbish (and hideously bigoted) computer geeks of the John Carmack / Sam Altman sort: they seem to think that human thinking is basically the same as their machines, and no doubt they imagine that their genetically superior genius brains are always "on", always humming away, churning through bazillions of genius thoughts a second just like their favorite toys are always doing. but how often are human brains actually engaged in rational thought?

~Chara of Pnictogen (no thoughts, head empty)


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