2021 04 25 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

• Towards the study of, and contribution to, the development of a social zettelkasten system.

  • This social knowledge system is different from those that a few groups are trying to develop, at least those I know (Roam, Notion, Wikipedia?). There are a few differentiators:

    • They start from the perspective of a knowledge system, second brain, designed for one individual; then they build out and ADD other minds to the same system. It's assumed that the mechanics and structure of an individual "second brain" work the same as those for a "collective consciousness"
    • This additive pile-on isn't going to work. We need to start from the premise of a whole system that will have interacting parts. NOT from the perspective of that individual part, that just gets replicated a bunch of times and we hope for something to "emerge" that magically holds in place the individual parts
    • Seems that everyone is focused on speed of the tech, how to track "edits", privacy, how to give credit to original thinker, how to keep track of multiple changes and go back to past iterations, etc. But these seem like simple problems to me (or at least they are technical, and solvable now). The hard problem for me seems to be how to move collective intelligence towards coherency and consensual "aha's." Real discovery will need to be (a) recognized by the community, (b) quickly iterated upon (tweakable), (c) irreducible to one individual (both in terms of it being impossible to track the true author (if the system is working right and there have been many, many interactions that give rise to novelty in nolinear ways), and in terms of tracking the genesis and development of the idea itself (sometimes creativity really is emergent and if the individuals in a creative collective accept the profundity in that, it may be impossible to follow the points back easily to point to the causal thought or input that flipped the system). That's a good thing... unless you have a collective culture that does not feel the divinity in this phase transition.
    • To be continued...

  • The ultimate goal of this social zettelkasten should not be the proliferation of nodes, but the cultivation of better, and ever-improving, connections by which I mean:

    • more connections (think number of synapses)
    • thicker connections (i.e., used more and more frequently; they are increasingly relevant to a wide range of problems; a few select pathways provide the foundations for self-organizing solutions across a broad array of domains)
    • faster connections (the related nodes on a pathway arise more and more quickly as problems are recognized as like kinds earlier)
    • Points 1-3, that is more, thicker, and faster connections, should give rise to novelty. That's the golden grail.
    • REALLY important: That novelty should not be trivial. A bunch should be said about what is nontrivial but for now, it doesn't increase noise and randomness in the world or in one's head, but rather works towards coherence, and least some temporal coherence
      • As per Darwin's Dangerous Ideas, we don't "believe in" or accurately describe much of what happens in science or any other human-constructed cognitive domain as "progress" per se; but it seems like we need a term for a reaching out for something that is more true, more real, more accurate... whatever the measure of "more" might be
      • temporal coherence isn't perfect, and it comes from the identity literature so can be super confusing given that's not what I'm talking about (i.e., identity isn't relevant at all)
      • But it is kind of attractive in that it means making meaning and finding relevant truths from our past, piecing those together in a way that is logical, explains more "data" and phenomenology that is being experienced in the present and, importantly, provides some beacon for suggesting, new, potentially shattering and emergent novel solutions/understandings/worldviews.

  • For IG, it seems we need to go back to several sources of inquiry to find principles that might help imagine an augmentation system for social thinking that works with (or against) our biology, evolutionary history, and the rapidly-changing tech that is now available at birth.

    • This point about rapidly changing current tech is key.
    • Whereas in the past, tech such as literacy affordances (writing, reading) started to augment intelligence and communication from about 5 - 8 years old, our current tech could start earlier with this augmentation (the dramatic brain functioning changes/augmentation from literacy processes don't happen the first few years in a child's life and don't happen immediately when they can read or write simple stuff; literacy skills need time to iterate and lock into other systems). The impact of literacy-based tech on thinking processes is different than the current tech augmentation that may be literally starting from birth, with phones in cribs which may impact on baby's sense of agency, causal reasoning, working memory, emotion regulation and its related cognitive consequences).

  • Where might we start thinking about designing optimal systems for augmenting creative collaborations? Part of this question for me starts from understanding how did a sense of "I" emerge out of the collective "we" and what are the interesting differences in designing an augmentation that starts with the "we" vs starts with the "I". It seems important to go back to what we know about humans in social contexts and the principles by which they have evolved to work in different domains, for different purposes both developmental and evolutionary. These principles are pulled from at least five places for IG:

  • (1) theories/data that address the co-creation of the self in ontogeny (developmental psychology) and phylogeny (evolutionary science) separately,

  • (2) theories/data addressing recapitulation between these levels (see also: ontogeny recapitulates phylogenyontogeny-phylogeny)

  • (3) complexity science and its explication of processes of change and stability --i.e., emergence, feedback, phase transitions at interacting and different time scales

  • (4) Buddhist or Tao philosophy and insights illuminating (yet not resolving) the tension between experiencing the self/individual vs the "we" (or the lack of self perhaps more accurately) as the fundamental unit of experience (see also: Tao Te Ching

  • (5) art or art-based experiences (both the making and experiencing) as an exercise of defamiliarization which primes the explore-mode and then can also be subsequently followed by a collapsing into unitary personal meaning (or not, depending on tons of factors). (see also: https://twitter.com/bryankam/status/1385143914458460161?s=20)

As above but for BK. Many were listed on Co-creation of the self.

Before we started talking about this, here is what got me interested in the question:

1. Genesis creation accounts
2. A. C. Graham pointing out that Chuang-tzu is rare among ancient literature in having an individual perspective/personality (read this circa 2005)
3. Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy
4. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939)
5. Andy Clark: Extended Mind (1995)
6. Simler: Press Secretary
7. Simler on Dennett Neurons Gone Wild
8. Freud: Oceanic feeling (which RCH discusses in The Entropic Brain) (2014)
9. RCH's description of the Default Mode Network in Entropic Brainn
10. Robert Wright: Why Buddhism is True (2017) on modular view of the mind
11. Culadasa: The Mind Illuminated (2017)
12. Combining Anil Seth: Being a Beast Machine (2018) with Cecilia Heyes on Brain Science 168
13. Michael Polanyi: Republic of Science (1962)
14. Don Kulick, A Death in the Rainforest (2019)
15. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
16. Vygotsky as described in Our Inner Narrator
17. Noga Arikha, citing Tsakiris in The Interoceptive Turn
18. See my thread: Kuhn on consensus
19. Locke on Identity
20. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1999): Surnames
21. Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2008)
22. Jaynes: Late bronze age collapse
23. Jaynes: On the difference between Amos and Ecclesiastes
24. Jaynes: obdurately bicameral children (i.e., children incapable of selfhood) were killed
25. Sartre: Being and Nothingness on "the look" and consciousness/self-consciousness
26. Turchin on "moralizing gods" in Can History Predict the Future? - The Atlantic
27. Hägglund on Hegel's opposition to subjectivism (ask me about this if it sounds interesting)
28. Husserl on intersubjectivity; probably also Nietzsche on consensus (and more generally)

Since we started:

1. Nietzsche on guilt
2. Invention of invention
3. Althusser: my podcast and Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
4. Rovelli on selfhood
5. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (2018)
6. Joseph Henrich: WEIRD (showing continuing strengthening of individual selfhood more recently)

• worked on this 2021-4-25 and then gave it its own page social zettelkasten because I think it serves as a good place to put a bunch of related ideas. Feels distinct but wholly related to the Joint Salon: Networked Minds
• hard to distinguish between journal pages and separate keyword pages but it doesn't really matter as long as they're linked properly
  • BK: They're also easily moved...
• I'm kind of worried about this becoming a cut and paste from my own Roam if there isn't much communication within these pages, but curious to see how the constraint of not co-working in real time will change, enhance, and/or shift the experience towards redundancy and frustration.
  • I don't mind the simple cutting and pasting, of course. That just feels like sharing I do all over the place, from inside my database
  • What WILL be a shame and perhaps frustrating is the emaciated version that gets moved over if it doesn't also have the interlinks that my own database has. So far, I've either deleted the links to my own content in my database that's not in here or I have linked it to a similar page here (e.g., ontogeny-phylogeny). But I already see loads of writing that I'd like to extend here in MM. Feels a little like dropping the same set of seeds into two soilbeds and seeing what may grow and what may die (I have not been a great gardener historically)
• Rules be damned, but some sort of convention is helpful for naming each other in this database (Just don't know if I'm to use "IG" or "I" or just keep on keeping on with the writing with no reference to the self) and where to put meta communications; In my mind that wants to combine systematic movement towards something and random explore mode, I continue to crave a "meta mind" section where we not only leave notes suggesting changes or commenting on the process (i.e., IG does so), but we also CHANGE that process when we agree how; I may be wrong. Maybe these random notes at the top of journal entries, as a set, will be the artifact that culminates our co-working production.
  • BK: Do whichever you want. I don't see a reason to agree rules with me, since I don't like them anyway. I'm happy to conform to whatever convention you come up with but don't really like the constant discussion of convention, which seems like staying at the meta-level rather than working.
• I would love to be able to know when updates are made to MM; traditionally I'd be sent a link. I guess that still happens?
  • BK: We've already discussed this. I can either program an automatic function or just tell you.
• Note: IG is increasingly convinced that a coherent, detailed mapping of the key schools of philosophy as they relate to these questions and upcoming modeling is essential to be articulated. It's important not only because these philosophical traditions are the underpinnings of changing models of the mind and self; they've led these changes sometimes, not just documented and analyzed them afterwards. - BK: Agree that this could be useful (assuming it's possible). I think the list may be much longer than you think, since I wouldn't have thought of any of the five you listed (though I can see how they're related)