Henri Frankfort in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946) (later retitled Before Philosophy) argued that non-literate people had philosophy and speculative thought, they just didn't have a written method of expressing it.

Open questions: How might they have expressed it other than orally? How might one tease these ideas out of the archaeological record? Does Frankfort provide evidence?

Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

Focusing on literacy as one of the features that makes humanity special is a major flaw. In fact, it is likely our earlier orality and the attendant portions that come with that which made us unique within the animal kingdom. While transmission of knowledge and information may be quicker with literacy and even with computer technology, our ability to cope with it stems first from our orality.

The definition of ownership here is at odds. The person invented the thought, they're just storing it somewhere else that isn't their own brain. This doesn't release ownership necessarily.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/three-layers-structure-zettelkasten/

Could one create a rhyzomatic wiki or similar tool for thought?

This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?

Which direction gives rise to more complexity?

Specifically highlighting that the "focus must be on the 'using', not the 'thing'".

This quote is very reminiscent of John M. Culkin's quote (often misattributed to McLuhan) "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Linus Lee</span> in Towards a research community for better thinking tools | thesephist.com (<time class='dt-published'>12/01/2021 08:23:07</time>)</cite></small>

https://frankmcpherson.blog/2021/12/03/i-think-folks.html

https://thesephist.com/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Frank McPherson</span> in Frankly... (<time class='dt-published'>12/03/2021 12:49:46</time>)</cite></small>

Several things to notice here:

• learning in public
• posting knowledge on a personal website as a means of sharing that knowledge with a broader public
• specifically not hiding the work of reading in notebooks which are unlikely to be read by others.

The primary value of the card catalogue and index cards as tools for thought is that it is a self-contained, uniform and mobile carrier that can be arranged and processed based on strict systems of order. Books have many of these properties, but the information isn't as atomic or as easily re-ordered.

Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580

process and practice of surfing waves. Practicing eprime.

https://nowcomment.com/

In a category of tool like Hypothes.is. Worth checking out for UI and functionality.

Even i am renouncing till now with extrospective arguments

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

What is missing in this train of thought is search. The real challenge is recalling of information easily, whether that is traditional search or something more AI-ish that can uncover connections between items that I don't see myself. What I want is a tool that can search across all my repositories, and that requires either APIs for communication or standard data storage formats. I prefer APis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_personal_information_managers

"The Zettelkasten takes more of my time than the writing of books." —Niklas Luhmann (via vimeo.com/173128404)

Some people complain about the amount of time that working in their zettelkasten or notes may take, and it may take a while, but it is exactly the actual work of creation that takes the longest. The rest of the process is just the copying over and editing.

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.

The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.

For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw

At the moment, I guess I’m currently doing this in Drafts, but without any real rigour. What I’ve intended to do is host my atomic notes in iThoughts. But maybe this is part of my system that needs closer attention. Maybe there’s legitimate cause for another tool in the stack? Or maybe this just calls for another workspace? I think this is the space I wanted Project Meta to fill…

I've got serious reservations about this Gerst fellow. His answers are too vague and contain too many bald assertions. The form of his answers fits what I've noticed to be a "style" of regressives seeking to promote obsolete traditions and social norms.

Granted, it's difficult to present precise information in "interview format" articles like this one, but education is too important to get get wrong - again.

I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).

I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.

Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/brain-mind-cognition.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Joel Chan</span> in on Twitter: "@RoamBookClub next book? Extended Mind draws on distributed cognition, which is a powerful theoretical perspective for understanding #toolsforthought and #BASB" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>09/14/2021 10:01:01</time>)</cite></small>

Perhaps this is some of the value behind the ability to resort index cards within a zettelkasten over the prior staticness of the commonplace tradition? The ideas aren't anchored to the page, but can be moved around, rearranged.

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_005.mp3

This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.

https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

I love that he's not only externalized his thoughts from the book as annotations/notes and then synthesized them into a longer essay, but he's further expanded and externalized them by thinking about how to put them to use!

This is one of the key benefits over the use of index cards in moving toward a zettelkasten from the traditional commonplace book tradition. Rearranging one's ideas in a separate space.

Raymond Llull attempted to do this within his memory in the 12th century, but there are easier ways of doing this now.

https://roambrain.com/how-my-road-led-to-roam/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381953081697562625.html

https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou

Boris Mann has created a lu.ma community for Tools for Thought!

https://asuth.com/about

Founder and formerly of Quizlet, Invite to Gardens and Streams event.

http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/2021/09/01.html

Or more powerful, in a read, write, remix, and edit space.

Somewhat related to:

The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb 2011-06-23 at OSBridge2011 having lunch with Ward, Tantek exclaimed

https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki#Inspiration

Episode 002 – Organizing Information for Use

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_002.mp3

This is an interesting series, but I'm starting to wish that the episodes were longer and/or interview/discussion based.

Andy only gets to scratch the surface of some of his topics.

http://scripting.com/2021/08/01.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Andy Sylvester</span> in Episode 001 – Introduction - Thinking About Tools For Thought (<time class='dt-published'>09/01/2021 11:39:20</time>)</cite></small>

http://scripting.com/2021/06/24/150234.html?title=theGlossaryInLittleOutliner

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dave Winer</span> in Scripting News: Sunday, August 1, 2021 (<time class='dt-published'>08/01/2021 19:31:13</time>)</cite></small>

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-001-introduction/

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_001.mp3

I know that I certainly snuggle doing that.

Example of clearing the mental clutter by writing using Julia Cameron's Morning Pages concept.

I take this more inclusive approach to note taking as well.

The goal of note taking and tools for it is to make capturing ideas and creating connections between them as easy and friction free as possible. This allows note taking come closer to actual thinking with better long term retention.

While this may be Nicholas Carr's statement, it's actually pre-dated significantly by Marshall McLuhann

There's something in this quote that sounds more like old school blogging to me. Putting ideas out there and allowing the community to react and respond as a means of honing an idea can be useful and powerful. However, are writers actually doing this meaningfully over time? Are they objectively doing this and providing thoughtful updates over time?

A quick overview of the basics and general history of critical race theory.

This idea is a bit on the extreme side, but it does suggest that having a multi-card comparison view in a PKM system would be useful.

Drawing on Raymond Llull's combitorial memory system from the 12th century and a bit of Herman Ebbinghaus' spaced repetition (though this is also seen in earlier non-literate cultures), one could present two (or more) random atomic notes together as a way of juxtaposing disparate ideas from one's notes.

The spaced repetition of the cards would be helpful for one's long term memory of the ideas, but it could also have the secondary effect of nudging one to potentially find links or connections between the two ideas and help to spur creativity for the generation of new hybrid ideas or connection to other current ideas based on a person's changed context.

I've thought about this in the past (most likely while reading Frances Yates' Art of Memory), but don't think I've bothered to write it down (or it's hiding in untranscribed marginalia).

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Matthias Melcher</span> in About | x28's new Blog (<time class='dt-published'>07/06/2021 11:09:19</time>)</cite></small>

You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way. —Niklas Luhmann

(Source of the original??)

This is interesting, but is also ignorant of oral traditions which had means of addressing it.

It's rarely ever the case (my cognitive bias statement), that anything springs fully formed from the mind.

Generally there's an infrastructure, a system, a method by which ideas or physical things are aggregated, accumulated, and edited into existence.

When seeing them well done, they appear magical because we don't see the work or the process. We will often call them genius, when in reality, they're the result of long hard work.

Take the Pyramids of Giza. They look large and magesterial---and likely moreso in their non-degraded form. But is it so mystical how they may have been built if we were to see the structure and scaffolding that likely went into constructing them?

this is the general pattern for commonplace books and zettelkasten

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in control and surrender, architecture and gardening – Snakes and Ladders (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 09:49:29</time>)</cite></small>

Alan Jacobs seems to be delving into the area of thought spaces provided by blogs and blogging.

In my view, they come out of a cultural tradition of commonplace books becoming digital and more social in the the modern era. Jacobs is obviously aware of the idea of Zettelkasten, but possibly hasn't come across the Sonke Ahrens' book on smart notes or the conceptualization of the "digital garden" stemming from Mike Caulfield's work.

He's also acquainted with Robin Sloane, though it's unclear if he's aware of the idea of Stock and Flow.

Some interesting thoughts about thinking and writing in public.

Annotating books provides a way of creating modality shifts from the original form into others, and this is likely one of the reasons that it's an effective thinking, learning, and study tool.

I like this concept of deep reading.

Compare/contrast with close reading and distant reading.

What other types of reading might we imagine?

My own intellectual vibrations are ensconced into the annotations I make as I read.

I'm curious how this habit will change my thinking over time.

But are Google's tools really making us more productive thinkers? One might argue that it's attempting to do all the work for us and take out the process of thought all together. We're just rats in a maze hitting a bar to get the food pellet.

What if the end is a picture of us as the people on the space ship at the end of WALL-E? What if it's keeping us from thinking?

What if it's making us more shallow thinkers rather than deep thinkers?

Cross reference P.M. Forni.

Similar to the way in which people begin to resemble their dogs?! :)

Daniel Bell defines "intellectual technologies" as tools that extend our mental capacities.

More history here on the page than I would have thought.

Definitely worth digging into some of the older examples going back to [[Conrad Gessner]] and [[Johann Jacob Moser]].

There are a number of bloggers who have to some extent, specifically used their blogs for this purpose though. I've documented several at https://boffosocko.com/tag/thought-spaces/

A relatively comprehensive view of Wouter Groeneveld's commonplacing workflow. There are a few bits missing here and there, but he's got most of the bigger basics down that a majority of people seem to have found and discovered.

He's got a strong concept of indexing, search, and even some review, which many miss. There's some organic work toward combinatorial thought, but only via the search piece.

I should make a list of the important pieces for more advanced versions to have. I've yet to see any articles or work on this.

One needs to re-read and reprocess things from time to time. This is a part of the combinatorial creativity that having notes is for.

This is reminiscent of the CAA addage: "If you read something and then don't tell anyone about it, you may as well not have read it in the first place."

a stark statement to make about one's website

What is the best word/verb for this sort of pseudo-searching via word or idea association for generating new ideas?

I've used the related phrase combinatorial thought before, but he's also using the idea of artificial intelligence to search/find and juxtapose these ideas.

This is much better than simply building a brand or a platform.

This idea is far from new and is roughly what Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was doing with the science portions of his Waste Books in the late 1700's where he was running experiments, noting wins, losses, and making progress using the scientific method.

This sounds a lot like a broader case than rubber duck debugging, which is obviously not a "new" thing.

http://www.verzetteln.de/books/monographs/4_paper/

I like the thought of not only the history of thoughts and ideas, but also the history of the tools that may have helped to make them.

I'm curious to delve into Pietist autobiographical writing as a concept.

This is a fascinating quote and something I've thought about before. Ties to McLuhan's "the medium is the message" as well.

ruminant machines is an interesting concept, it sounds like a cross between a cow and Memex.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Daniela K. Helbig </span> in  Ruminant machines: a twentieth-century episode in the material history of ideas - JHI Blog (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2021 21:12:46</time>)</cite></small>

This certainly fits into the broad general ideas surrounding note taking, commonplace books, and zettelkasten as tools for thought. People generally seemed to have used relatively similar methods but shoehorned them into the available tools they had at the time.

This also, incidentally isn't too far off from how indigenous peoples the world over have used memory techniques (memory palaces, songlines, etc.) to hold together and pollinate their own thinking.

Raymond Llull took things a step further with his combinatoric methods, though I've yet to see anyone attempting that in the area of digital gardens.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'></span> in Via: Gimmick Book — Gordon Brander (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2021 14:04:29</time>)</cite></small>

This looks fascinating. I'm not so much interested in the coding/programming part as I am the actual "working in public" portions as they relate to writing, thinking, blogging in the open and sharing that as part of my own learning and growth as well as for sharing that with a broader personal learning network. I'm curious what lessons might be learned within this frame or how educators and journalists might benefit from it.

Rough translation via Google Translate ^^

This is a good description about how working in public can be beneficial to oneself, even if no one else is looking.

I've come across about 20 reference for Ivan Illitch over the past month. Not sure what is driving it. Some mentions are coming out of educator circles, others from programmers, some from what I might describe as "knowledge workers" (digital gardeners/Roam Cult/Obsidian crowds). One tangential one was from someone in the hyperlink.academy crowd.

Here's a recent one from today that popped up within a thread shared in IndieWeb chat:

Ivan Illich continues to be even more more relevant than he was at the height of his New Left popularity. Conviviality in the digital tools we use has continued to wither https://t.co/D88V6KL7Ez pic.twitter.com/OFDYTjXyCn

— Count Bla (@123456789blaaa) March 15, 2021

Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality look very interesting. Perhaps they've distilled enough that their ideas are having a resurgence?

I personally identify with this since I'm porting my annotations and thoughts to a notebook as part of a process for active thinking, revision, writing, and eventual publication.

Looks like an interesting way to transport Hypothes.is annotations to [[Obsidian]].

A command line tool for placing Hypothes.is annotations into [[Obsidian]].

This could be an interesting feature for a personal website/blog. A generator that takes pre-existing taxonomies from one's website and suggests combinations of them as potential writing prompts when one has writer's block.

I wouldn't phrase it this way. Instead, I consider intellectual thought a healthy way to go.

Existentialists have gone about this by considering every choice in life as reborn; by being conscious of what we do, we shape not only our own consequence but also that of others.

In other words: behave like you're experiencing everything for the first time, except with wisdom.

Technology is providing us with the ability to build the most amazing commonplace books, thought spaces, and thinking machines, but somehow we're ignoring the power they have.

A fantastic example of the value of networked thought based solely on the ability of everyone's commonplace books to talk to each other.

What if we add in a dose of Llull's combinatorial thought to the idea of a search engine? What if the search engine can remember the top 50 categories in my personal commonplace book and show overlapping searches of those terms? What if it's even more combinatorial and randomly chooses overlaps from any words in my commonplace? Is that more or less valuable as an idea generator?

Is it more fruitful to randomly work on various entries every day in an effort to tie them into our other thoughts?

The internet isn't a new invention, it's just a more fixed version of the melange of text, ideas, and thought networks that have existed over human existence.

First there was just the memory and indigenous peoples all over the world creating vast memory palaces to interconnect their thoughts. (cross reference the idea of ancients thinking much the way we do now from the fist episode or so of Literature and History)

Then we invite writing and texts which help us in terms of greater storage without the work or relying solely on memory. This reaches it's pinnacle in the commonplace book and the ideas of Llull's combinatorial thought.

Finally we've built the Internet which interconnects so much more.

But now we need to go back and revisit the commonplace book and memory techniques to tie them altogether. Perhaps Lynne Kelly's concept of The Third Archive is what we should perfect next until another new instantiation comes to augment the system.

Interesting examples of remixed work.

Remixing content can be an important tool. Is there a direct relation to the ideas of Raymond Llull hidden between here and there?

This concept here is an interesting one of being "meta".

They also turned their reading into writing, because commonplacing made them into authors. It forced them to write their own books; and by doing so they developed a still sharper sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. The authorial self took shape in the common man’s commonplace book, not merely in the works of great writers. It belonged to the general tendency that Stephen Greenblatt has called “Renaissance self-fashioning.”

This fits into my broader developing thesis about thinking and writing as a means of evolving thought.

There's surely a link between this and the idea of thought spaces in the blogosphere or the idea of a commonplace book/digital garden/wiki.

As a thought experiment, what sorts of evidence of a physical barrier like this would still exist for future scholars to study to surmise its existence a thousand years hence even if all physical remains of the wall were torn down and no written records exist?

The backdrop of the narrator's story is westward expansion, and this is important to keep in mind because it can correlate to lines like this. Here, the narrator demystifies the moonstone of its superstition by fitting it into a western geologic history. Notice that he does not totally demystify it. Our narrator may not be superstitious, but he is a little stitious.

A Thought Diary will help you find triggers when you write down things that went wrong and your accompanying feelings.

An example would be how not meeting a deadline made you feel. What happened right after you realized you didn't meet the deadline?