What if my thought process is actually deterministic, but very sensitive to initial (or recurring) conditions? I stumbled across chaos theory when I was studying for a research assistantship in a lab about signal processing. Research showing that non-chaotic systems might be less resilient to change. I felt my mind drawing connections and thinking about the implications of such findings on my own life and the lives of those who are close to me. Maybe we struggled to live chaotically; maybe our fear of uncertainty & rigid thinking made us more vulnerable, more sensitive to different peturbations, the kind that life always throws at you and some people seem to react to better than others.
Maybe this is the reason why it’s only when I’m feeling a lot calmer can I listen to and appreciate new music. When I know that I can be exposed to more unpredictable and novel stimuli and perhaps I am stable enough to be able to have more agency in where my thought processes go.
On a related note, recently my mother has been approaching both my father and myself as “sensitive” people. It felt a bit offensive and defeatist at first, as that is the emotion historically elicited by any comparison that is made between me and my father. But I think that, listening to what she thinks (and what my dad thinks) is actually going on here, her theory makes more sense (“Imagine if there was an alien species who had the ability to see one’s level of sensitivity and they came to earth! If your dad is covered with a million, maybe two billion, antennae, I’m only have maybe a dozen…”). Being more sensitive and introspective about social matters, as well as a lot of other things (the way in which the neighbors have cut the trees, but maybe that’s just a secret blight that affects new homeowners), is like a lot of other things: just a tradeoff between being able to be more observant and to pick up on lots of things that are true, and the burden of noticing all of these small things that don’t matter.