Conversation

Do you ever have concepts 'fade out'? The concept of 'soul' used to be one I used a lot, and now it's kinda dissolved - it's just not an object that shows up a lot in my processing. Similarly, 'love' has faded out for me, replaced by something like 'looking' or 'self-dissolution'

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Replying to

There's a way in which I stopped using the word 'soul', and also a way in which it stopped being 'functional' in my mind - like, when exploring curiosity, the 'soul' function stopped operating; it didn't come up when I wondered about the 'nature of people,' for example.

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Replying to

Not quite. It's a bit hard to point at because our language is limiting - but like, have you ever had someone describe something with a new word or quick frame that made you go 'aha!' - like you knew it all along, but they gave a perfect form for your senses to fall into?

Replying to

and

Like them giving it a name suddenly made the thing you felt, 'real'? Like it became something you could hold onto and handle, like it made your thinking clearer? Words are really, really powerful in this way, and can shape the fundamental way our mind reasons about things.

Replying to

and

I mean that 'soul' felt like it corresponded to Definitely A Thing, almost like an object, in a similar way I think the word 'chair' corresponds to the thing I'm sitting in. Getting rid of soul as a function meant that it stopped feeling useful for the reasoning I was tryin to do

Replying to

and

Like, when I was religious I believed in Definitely Real Theological Terms - they were words that created a form that I used to handle things, to answer questions, to create patterns. After I lost my faith, stuff like the Hypostatic Union suddenly felt empty, like ghosts.

7:41 PM · Jul 3, 2019