let's entertain this for a moment, putting aside my inner skeptic.
[another pause now, but that's because Grell's moving from her phone to her laptop to type out what she thinks. there's more words than she cares to use her thumbs to write, and Ardyn shouldn't mind if she's going to get a bit wordy.]
it would be more likely to be a shared hysteria and confabulations if people remembered similar circumstances, piggybacking off each other. but have you heard of a single person who remembers the same moment as someone else? we're radically different, the things that i've heard. and there's, like you said, a subjective point of view involved, yet even when confronted with certain impossibilities, just as easily they become impossibly certain. i know i was wielding a chainsaw as if i was born to use such a weapon, i know i do not possess the level of strength to do so as freely as i was. you know you were healing people. you know that a simple touch cannot cure the sick.
the only things we know together are the changes in the world that confuse us all. the chocobos, the fruit. that does beg the question of if we should now consider horses to be part of a past life, but that's a philosophical question i'll have to take up at a later date, as to what defines a past life and can life be past if you're currently living it. that's semantics and points of view.
past lives. it's as likely as something in the water or some government intervention. at this point, is there much we can truly discredit for what's happening? at least that idea gives an explanation for the remembrances and how true they feel.
[He doesn't mind at all. "Wordy" describes both his life and himself very well. He'll not shirk away from a couple of paragraphs, else he never would have made it out of law school. He sticks with using his thumbs for now, though, and so Grell has to wait a minute or two before she gets a reply.]
In the end, no, there's nothing we can discredit, just as if there's nothing we can prove. As entertaining as it is to sit about and toss theories back and forth between each other, the sad reality is that nothing has changed. Speculation doesn't arm us with more answers, nor more tools to take action against whatever is conspiring against us. It's completely and utterly frustrating.
[Ardyn, who does like to have at least some semblance of control when it comes to various aspects of his life, perhaps allows this to bother him more than anything. It's the equivalent of feeling useless and stagnant, while a storm swirls around him and everyone else.]
But I digress. You're right in that it explains why there's a certain level of investment in these memories; at the same time, this theory may be one of the most disconcerting. It goes back to what we had spoken about before: If you remember something less-than-pleasant, what will you do? How will it change you? /Knowing/ that they were once "real" may be enough to tip the scales towards an existential crisis proper, as opposed to believing they're merely implanted.
[god, does she understand the frustration though. the most they can do right now is speculate, theorize, deal with the results. short of storming a building that might as well be haunted, what is there? waiting. waiting, patience wearing thin and constantly demanded. the most she can do is keep herself busy to offset it. sometimes that wrapped around to thinking.]
if you remember yourself being someone that you think you never could be, then what does that say? do you consider you there and you here two distinct entities? of course, that's an extreme scenario, but i'd rather start from the largest scale and work my way down. and if you've done something, does that make it real enough that you should consider that you've done it? that is, assuming that you consider then and now to be the same person.
questions i don't expect anyone to answer. merely consider.
Best to consider it now rather than later. Before the piling up of memories becomes too much to bear.
[Or rather, it's all they can do. Consider. Perhaps their perspective will change with time, but it's difficult to say.]
Do you think yourself a separate entity from the Grell that wields a chainsaw? Is it so easy to draw a line between the two, when you've quite literally felt everything your counterpart did? Elation, sorrow, pleasure, pain, all of it? In those brief moments of "experiencing" these recollections for the first time, do you feel one and the same with them?
Or do you feel like a trespasser, treading into territory in which you're not welcome?
in the moment, i feel as though that was me. everything is my own, and it's only when i wake that there's a distinction. that's why it's difficult to say.
what about you? when you remember, can you draw a line between yourself and what you're experiencing?
No. It's the same as you, then. There's no distinction at all, so much that you can even say that I've temporarily forgotten who I am, and believe my counterpart to be... myself.
Needless to say, I'm nothing short of relieved when the memory fades.
then that's even more confusing. it's not as though we'll automatically accept this strange incidents as things that happened in "our" lives. and if it's our lives at all, if we can't remember them.
i could dive into the purely philosophical off that point, actually, something about asking if no one remembers something, if it happened at all.
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no subject
[another pause now, but that's because Grell's moving from her phone to her laptop to type out what she thinks. there's more words than she cares to use her thumbs to write, and Ardyn shouldn't mind if she's going to get a bit wordy.]
it would be more likely to be a shared hysteria and confabulations if people remembered similar circumstances, piggybacking off each other. but have you heard of a single person who remembers the same moment as someone else? we're radically different, the things that i've heard. and there's, like you said, a subjective point of view involved, yet even when confronted with certain impossibilities, just as easily they become impossibly certain. i know i was wielding a chainsaw as if i was born to use such a weapon, i know i do not possess the level of strength to do so as freely as i was. you know you were healing people. you know that a simple touch cannot cure the sick.
the only things we know together are the changes in the world that confuse us all. the chocobos, the fruit. that does beg the question of if we should now consider horses to be part of a past life, but that's a philosophical question i'll have to take up at a later date, as to what defines a past life and can life be past if you're currently living it. that's semantics and points of view.
past lives. it's as likely as something in the water or some government intervention. at this point, is there much we can truly discredit for what's happening? at least that idea gives an explanation for the remembrances and how true they feel.
no subject
In the end, no, there's nothing we can discredit, just as if there's nothing we can prove. As entertaining as it is to sit about and toss theories back and forth between each other, the sad reality is that nothing has changed. Speculation doesn't arm us with more answers, nor more tools to take action against whatever is conspiring against us. It's completely and utterly frustrating.
[Ardyn, who does like to have at least some semblance of control when it comes to various aspects of his life, perhaps allows this to bother him more than anything. It's the equivalent of feeling useless and stagnant, while a storm swirls around him and everyone else.]
But I digress. You're right in that it explains why there's a certain level of investment in these memories; at the same time, this theory may be one of the most disconcerting. It goes back to what we had spoken about before: If you remember something less-than-pleasant, what will you do? How will it change you? /Knowing/ that they were once "real" may be enough to tip the scales towards an existential crisis proper, as opposed to believing they're merely implanted.
no subject
if you remember yourself being someone that you think you never could be, then what does that say? do you consider you there and you here two distinct entities? of course, that's an extreme scenario, but i'd rather start from the largest scale and work my way down. and if you've done something, does that make it real enough that you should consider that you've done it? that is, assuming that you consider then and now to be the same person.
questions i don't expect anyone to answer. merely consider.
no subject
[Or rather, it's all they can do. Consider. Perhaps their perspective will change with time, but it's difficult to say.]
Do you think yourself a separate entity from the Grell that wields a chainsaw? Is it so easy to draw a line between the two, when you've quite literally felt everything your counterpart did? Elation, sorrow, pleasure, pain, all of it? In those brief moments of "experiencing" these recollections for the first time, do you feel one and the same with them?
Or do you feel like a trespasser, treading into territory in which you're not welcome?
no subject
what about you? when you remember, can you draw a line between yourself and what you're experiencing?
no subject
Needless to say, I'm nothing short of relieved when the memory fades.
no subject
i could dive into the purely philosophical off that point, actually, something about asking if no one remembers something, if it happened at all.
no subject
We'll all be philosophers before this is through.