Noise Floor

As the noise floor rises and includes new sources of noise, human speech becomes more and more difficult to understand. Before long, people are hearing speech that was never spoken, because their interpretive faculties can’t filter out enough of the noise to produce coherent derivations.

This is an analogy of our vulnerabilities in our experiences of meaning… especially the meaningfulness of our own lives and identities. In our modern society, the noise floor is constantly being pushed skyward in nearly every dimension; sound, light, pace, machines, timelines, accounting, advertising… disinformation… and the faculties we might otherwise use to buffer all that poison are easily overwhelmed. Once that occurs, we lose not only our capacities to derive coherent meaning from our situations and experiences… we lose the root of our own identity. It gets tangled up in the mess from outside, and begins to break down, losing crucial aspects of personal and social coherence. Presuming there ever was much of the latter.

If we are unable to address these changes, the eventual result is that our identity gets obliterated. What remains in its place is memories, accusations, declarations, courtroom-like dramas, and narratives of cause and what might have been. But even that is just a phase of the breakdown. Beyond that … it can become impossible to experience anything resembling a coherent identity, though one might still have the sense that something like that once prevailed within us.