“Sorry I took so long in the restroom. It’s become somewhat of a ritual.”
“You took forever. I almost thought you shifted into another reality. Some people say that spending too much time in the restroom means a person needs space to think. You were in there a long time, what were you thinking about?”
“People who say that definitely haven’t done any research on the correlation between time spent in the restroom and a person’s psychological state. I took a long time because I was clearing out junk files from my digestive system while chatting with an LLM about the meaning of loneliness.”
“Haha, nice metaphor. So, did you figure out the meaning?”
“I don’t know, but I do know that loneliness never feels comfortable. It’s like a warning to the body that the individual needs to seek connection immediately.”
“So loneliness is about feeling disconnected from other people? What about people who feel disconnected from themselves?”
“Disconnected from oneself, huh… I think that’s complex. I actually assume the feeling of being disconnected from oneself never really exists, because there is no other existence within oneself except the one formed by a group of mischievous neural networks.”
“Wait a minute, you’re saying there’s no other existence within oneself? What about the feeling that there are ‘multiple me’s’ inside? Like the dualism of affection and cognition, or feeling and rationality?”
“I don’t think the self is multiple entities becoming one. The thing is, thoughts like dualism in mental processes end up shackling the mind itself. For example, I used to separate mental processes into the emotional and the rational. I tended to be more vulnerable to stress because of the assumption that emotional and rational are opposites, but what if nothing separates them at all?”
“Rationality occurs when there’s consideration to achieve something, but many variables are related to emotion, like the variable of simply being ‘interesting’. Maybe they aren’t separate at all. Sure, there are parts of the brain associated with specific cognitive tasks, but they are integrated as the brain. The mental process is one, there is no dualism. Like a molecule made up of various atoms, yet still identified as a single molecule.”
“A whole, single molecule, huh? A very… molecular argument. But if there really is no dualism, if there is no other existence in there, then who is talking to me right now?”
“Well, exactly that. A group of mischievous neural networks. You are a projection of a collection of data, memories, and maybe a slight signal glitch in my head trying to process reality. You are not someone else, you are my way of thinking out loud.”
“So, you’re admitting that you are talking to yourself but pretending that I am real? Mus, isn’t that the most tragic definition of loneliness? Creating a friend just to prove that you don’t need anyone because you are a complete molecule?”
“Not tragic, but efficient. I am not dividing myself, I am only expanding my space of observation. By giving you a name, I no longer feel the need for exhausting internal debates. I just need to… have a dialogue.”
“A beautiful efficiency. But be careful, Mus. Sometimes, the atoms that make up a molecule can vibrate too intensely and create unexpected chemical reactions. You call me a mischievous neuron, but in this cafe, I’m the one holding the coffee cup.”
“And I’m the one paying the bill in the adjacent reality.”