• memory and identity

  • The ways that memory functions develop over ontogeny are important for understanding the emergence of the self, identity, and the co-creation of the self. Memory is such a massive rabbit hole because it pulls in every domain of psychology, biology, and selfhood (to name just a few broad categories) and is very important to consider the intersections of ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes as they relate to memory.
  • Starting with the broad brushes of developmental time:
    • 1. Episodic memory doesn't develop wholly until 4.5 years old, which has massive implications of how we think about individual identity and self issues
    • 2. Autobiographical reasoning grows across age and gets super interesting as we age well into adulthood
    • 3. Strategic forgetting vs / and attention selection create either coherent or divergent selves
    • 4. All of these process are largely considered individual but I think we could go interesting places thinking about their co-creation over evo time, cultural constraints/time, and then from birth to adulthood
    • 5. Identity stories simplify post middle age. They also usually become more positive.
  • Working memory
  • Long-term memory
  • Autobiographical memory
    • link to narrative identity
    • social nature: its function is to contextualize the self in a field of time and others

• BK: Add Rovelli to Memory page: rg memory ~/books/order-of-time.txt

• https://twitter.com/ctbeiser/status/1367879838145540098
  • Englebart “Augmenting Human Intellect”
  • As We May Think
  • Plans and Situated Action
  • Inventing on Principle
  • Mindstorms
  • Someone compiled it into this
• Do our current technologies help or hinder thought?
  • Twitter not collaborative: no push for coherence. Just a pile-on.
• Letters as max rate of thinking?
  • Best collaborations might have been letters
  • Von Neumann and Gauss
• Delusions of grandeur
  • Turned on by feeling of connection does not actually push thought forward
• BK to search McGilchrist for universal knowledge base
• Anything that piles a miscellany of facts into a database is the opposite of what we're talking about
  • And yet: There may be historical collaborative systems of thought that had nothing to do with computers
  • Orality and literacy
  • Navigation systems with low tech
  • Communicating about time
  • And yet see Kuhn: "morass" in which he argues that fact-finding "at random" is necessary for pre-paradigm to lead on to paradigm

What is the point of collaborative thinking and tools for this thinking?

• PROBLEM: Individuals can't hold in working or long-term memory the amount of information necessary to work through or solve complex problems and to write those problems and solutions out in order to share them. They need to augment memory and associative thinking processes in powerful, reproducable ways
• Also, your brain isn't good at dealing with abduction and induction (it does well with deduction on things in front of it)
  • SOLUTION: the zettelkasten system is both a model to think about knowledge work as well as a concrete tool/methodology by which to do that knolwedge work (cards, index system, hierarchical atomic thoughts)
• PROBLEM: People working together have a comparable problem. Can we (and how do we) accelerate the process of collaborative thinking with tools that are currently accessible (or could be accessible now)?
• Taking notes while the other person is speaking; taking notes on voice notes
  • SOLUTION: We're looking for both a model of collaborative thinking and a tool to do this thinking that actualizes that model.
  • So far: Hacked/emergent ways of specialization or division of labour
  • Is there a tool that we can devise? A process?
  • Social Zettel needs to take the individual contributions and design systems to catalyze creative solutions that are emergent and can't be reduced to their constituent parts/contributions
• Communication: making it frictionless to generate/explore
• Ratcheting: prevent from losing linear threads. Exploiting past progress. Allowing frequent return.
• Orientation: keeping direction in a process, avoiding going rambling without a destination (which is a necessary part of it, but also needs ability to )
• Accelerant: 400 years to write the Odyssey. 50 years to write War & Peace. Pace of scientific progress was once intergenerational. In the twentieth century it became intragenerational. Now we're trying to accelerate it further.
  • Originally: Everyone does everything. Then: specialization/division of labour. Intergenerational farmers, brewers, smiths. In 20th century, careers changed between generations. In late 20th century: career changes became possible. In the 21st century they are becoming required.
  • No vocations anymore. No master/apprenticeship relationships anymore. Learning how to learn. Seligman: Learning to accelerate learning, non-linearly.
  • Individuals iterate through huge number of experiences.
• Organic models. Orality and Literacy: tradeoffs. What are organic or symbiotic relationships like?
• How do slime molds learn? Non-neural learning models?
• Flow states: what is the relationship between the Zettelkasten/collaborative process and flow? Between conversation and flow?

Is it over-stated to say that this would lead to a position where the pre-reflectively experienced world, the world that the right hemisphere was to deliver, became simply ‘the world as processed by the left hemisphere’? I do not think so. I would contend that a combination of urban environments which are increasingly rectilinear grids of machine-made surfaces and shapes, in which little speaks of the natural world; a worldwide increase in the proportion of the population who live in such environments, and live in them in greater degrees of isolation; an unprecedented assault on the natural world, not just through exploitation, despoliation and pollution, but also more subtly, through excessive ‘management’ of one kind or another, coupled with an increase in the virtuality of life, both in the nature of work undertaken, and in the omnipresence in leisure time of television and the internet, which between them have created a largely insubstantial replica of ‘life’ as processed by the left hemisphere – all these have to a remarkable extent realised this aim, if I am right that it is an aim, in an almost unbelievably short period of time. Heisenberg, in the 1950s, wrote that technology no longer appears

as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man.130

I could hardly believe my eyes when I came across this passage, because it expresses precisely my contention that the innate structures of the left hemisphere are, through technology, being incarnated in the world it has come to dominate.

History also suggests, however, some reasons for the difficulties encountered on that road. In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar. Furthermore, in the absence of a reason for seeking some particular form of more recondite information, early fact-gathering is usually restricted to the wealth of data that lie ready to hand. The resulting pool of facts contains those accessible to casual observation and experiment together with some of the more esoteric data retrievable from established crafts like medicine, calendar making, and metallurgy. Because the crafts are one readily accessible source of facts that could not have been casually discovered, technology has often played a vital role in the emergence of new sciences.

But though this sort of fact-collecting has been essential to the origin of many significant sciences, anyone who examines, for example, Pliny’s encyclopedic writings or the Baconian natural histories of the seventeenth century will discover that it produces a morass. One somehow hesitates to call the literature that results scientific. The Baconian “histories” of heat, color, wind, mining, and so on, are filled with information, some of it recondite. But they juxtapose facts that will later prove revealing (e.g., heating by mixture) with others (e.g., the warmth of dung heaps) that will for some time remain too complex to be integrated with theory at all.4 In addition, since any description must be partial, the typical natural history often omits from its immensely circumstantial accounts just those details that later scientists will find sources of important illumination. Almost none of the early “histories” of electricity, for example, mention that chaff, attracted to a rubbed glass rod, bounces off again. That effect seemed mechanical, not electrical. 5 Moreover, since the casual fact-gatherer seldom possesses the time or the tools to be critical, the natural histories often juxtapose descriptions like the above with others, say, heating by antiperistasis (or by cooling), that we are now quite unable to confirm.6 Only very occasionally, as in the cases of ancient statics, dynamics, and geometrical optics, do facts collected with so little guidance from pre-established theory speak with sufficient clarity to permit the emergence of a first paradigm.