[Aiwendil]

HerenIstarion wrote:

On the whole, my prolix discourse (and impersonating) was caused by the word ‘osanwe’ in your post previous but one.

"Osanwe" was certainly an exaggeration. There is of course a huge difference between osanwe in Tolkien's world and conversation via the internet. I did not mean to suggest that what happens here is anything like a direct experience of one another's mind. It is, as you have pointed out, not pure; it is only language. What I did mean was that, as with osanwe, the internet allows its users to interact with each other's minds and their minds alone. Like osanwe, it dispenses with the merely physical and it operates without respect to distance.

A. Information (for me) is: concept plus emotion the bearer of the concept attaches to it

B. Information (for you, as far as I’m allowed to guess) is: concept minus emotion the bearer of the concept attaches to it. (Or minus the bearer?)

Hmm, I'm not sure what exactly to make of this. To me, information is information. An emotion is information. A concept is information. Actually, I could throw us into quite off-topic realms and go on about everything being information, but I won't.

Quite a separate matter is the question of which information is important. I would say that sometimes information concerning a particular person's occurrent emotional state is important. Such information can generally be verbalized, albeit (of course) not with perfect accuracy.

I would say that, for the most part, emotions are far from the most important concepts. But then I did warn you about my being a bit of a Vulcan (though, alas, without the pointed ears).

And all this has an impact on what the thing I call “me” inside the body has to say here and now. I have a headache right now – how can I be sure that had I had it not, the words I chose now to embody my thoughts, or the thoughts themselves would have been the same?

Indeed - they surely would not have been the same, since you wouldn't have written that you have a headache (unless you decided to lie about it). But I really don't think that's relevant.

So Aiwendil is. So HerenIstarion is. But why adopt a nickname at all, than? If you is you and Aiwendil too, why not choose your own name as a nick?

Yes, I take your point that the names with which we choose to identify ourselves give others some information about us; and I agree. This hardly strikes me as "masking" anyone - on the contrary, by offering information about the user, it takes a step toward "unmasking". It seems to me that a self-chosen name is less a mask than one's given name, for the self-chosen name is more likely to correspond well with one's inner state. I am "Steven Linden" - the name says something about my sex and perhaps a little bit about my nationality, but as I see it neither of these things have much to do with what I would say is fundamentally me. When I try to identify as particularly as possible what "I" am, the answer I get is that I am my mind; I am the total of my thoughts and perceptions. The name "Steven Linden" tells you little about that "I" - I suppose it tells you what I believe my name to be, but not much else. "Aiwendil" tells you, as you surmised in your previous post, several things about me. Each is of course only a name in the end, but my point is that if anything the self-chosen one is less of a mask than the other.

So, you are Aiwendil, but Aiwendil is not you – you are more than Aiwendil. You are Aiwendil + your ‘real’ name + something more (which I usually tend to call ‘will’). But for people you interact with online – you are Aiwendil, which is less (or other) than what you see as yourself)

I see what you mean. I think we differ in whether we would call this a "mask". You leave certain things out of your equation. You are HerenIstarion plus George Lashki plus a number of other things - including, but not limited to, a voice, a body, an age, and other physical attributes. If you ask me, it would be more apt to describe these things as a mask. The HerenIstarion that we see does not encompass all aspects of your mind, but it also does not encompass anything which is not of your mind. Every word, every idea, every aspect of HerenIstarion that we on the forum encounter has its origin in your mind and your mind alone. In contrast, those who know you in real life experience aspects of you whose sole origin is not your mind. It is in this sense that I see the internet as "unmasking".