Social harmonic computers and loneliness

Love it.

This is going to sound a bit odd, but my pet hypothesis is that a lot of the feeling of loneliness comes from a breakdown of communication within the body.

I’ll reframe “man is a social animal” as “humans are social harmonic computers, designed to toss resonances back and forth with others. In doing so we collectively differentially amplify the good and useful parts.” When we aren’t participating in this echo, a lot of our thoughts/feelings/motivations die on the vine.

This is pretty obvious when we look at how we feel around friends vs strangers; we need friends to be fully ourselves. But I think our organs can be friends vs strangers *to each other*. Humans are an alliance of semi-sovereign nerve clusters; these alliances can have communication breakdowns & internal disagreements, just like a group of people can.

Restating IFS: organs need to toss resonances around and differentially amplify the good stuff, just like people do — if they don’t have that, they very literally “get lonely”. And then there’s a lot of pressure to get ‘what’s missing’ from other people.

Practically speaking, I think inflammation drives a lot of loneliness, because it warps the neural resonance of your ganglia, with each being warped in a subtly idiosyncratic/divergent way. Having inflammation is sorta similar to being an orchestra who left its instruments out in the hot sun: you can still make sound, but when you try to make *music* the different compartments of your nervous system struggle to stay in-tune (and even hear each other clearly).

(At least part of this feels testable; do people feel substantially more lonely when they’re inflamed? Do paraplegics with more severed nerves report more loneliness?)

Anyway, my 100% sappy and woo (but also 100% literal and dead serious) comment is that if you make friends with your heart, you’ll always have a friend wherever you go