Aliveness

I personally get better mileage out of Ziz posts when thinking of them as "this is way of thinking / series of metaphors that make sense to Ziz" as opposed to "this is an attempt to form a canonical new jargon term." (I don't have much idea how strongly Ziz intends things in one direction or another)

In this particular post, I initially had a reaction of "Alive is a super loaded term that I already have a bunch of intuitions about that have nothing to do with what you're describing here." (My intuitions were also different from the thing Davis linked)

But after finishing the article, I found a) it was getting at an important thing, b) at least to some degree, it was importantly contrasting with my default intuitions/connotations about the word, c) I had an easier time working with the post if I mentally inserted a sentence at the beginning going something like:

I have an important concept I want to get at. I think it's easiest to think about the concept with a metaphor - being alive, being dead, and being various kinds of undead.

Upvoted for minding long-term evolution of the structure. On the fence about whether it's worth it. Maybe "livingness"? (Would that help much or be almost as confusing?) I don't think I could pick anything but a synonym and not obscure the concept.

Hmm. Problem with crossposting is that in-text links aren't really visible here. Last time I tried it, at least one person didn't notice a link to a post, without which they misunderstood my post. Have discussed this with some devs, and remain convinced I need visible links. Y'all go your way, I'll go mine.

Edit: Actually I have more reason not to want automatic crossposting than that.

This sounds like it was written for one of my draft posts to be a response to. Excellent.

Edit: summary is, your conception of productive is probably distorted by your refusal to engage the circuits that a reframing like this turns off. If you refuse a gate, you end up in a parallel universe where the actions you take seem correct and the gate seems unusuable anyway. If you go through, it feels like there's nothing you can do about it and you've destroyed hope for nothing, until you start to rebuild your mind in the more complete view of the world.