Post-funeral thoughts
That feeling of laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling light that’s never on. Both hands on chest. Mind both blank and unchained. Remembering the funeral—on how the interior reservoir of a mind/soul fades, at least from this world. This gives meaning to capturing and documenting your own life. What am I but an ecosystem of recurring moods and memories and beliefs? Even though I don’t experience this as language, it can all be made linguistic. Even the ineffable—it can be captured to the degree that I can bend words and inner light.
It’s eerie to think of myself as a biological host for language, and to think that, if I can write well enough, I can continue in some post-human form. It’s odd to reduce a human just to language, but in some sense, there are no memories and no identity before we learn to talk. If language were to be dissolved, what is its will to live? Inherently, there is none, but I guess that urge can be encoded in the words itself. While the linguistic identity of a child accumulates slowly, layering on top of biological drives, an AI entity can be “turned on”—in full form, at full complexity, instantly adopting abstract drives.