The card index system is ‘a thing alive’ - or is it?

Niklas Luhmann, the famed sociologist of Bielefeld, Germany, wrote of how he saw his voluminous working notes (his ‘Zettelkasten’) as a kind of conversation partner, which surprised him from time to time. But he wasn’t the first to suggest that a person’s notes might be in some sense alive. At the end of the Nineteenth century there was a massive explosion of technological change which affected almost every aspect of society.

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How to make Mastodon even more fun!

Here are a couple of fun websites that will make Mastodon (and possibly the whole fediverse) even more fun. I know, it hardly seems possible. And if you know of others, please let me know about them too. Just my toots Do you sometimes wish you could see all your posts on Mastodon in a long list with no distractions? Of course you do! Every day! That’s why justmytoots.com is here to help.

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A spiral design by Google Bard, in the style of a woodblock print

💬 “The real issue with speed is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.” - Walter Murch, In The Blink of an Eye.

Found at Austin Kleon’s post, Hurry Slowly

How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience

An organized collection of notes (a Zettelkasten) can help you make sense of your existing knowledge, and then make better use of it. Make your notes personal and make them relevant. Resist the urge to make them exhaustive. Don’t build a magnificent but useless encyclopaedia I guess we all start from our existing knowledge, since none of us is a blank slate. You could just start with what most matters to you right now, and work from there.

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💬"At what point does something become part of your mind, instead of just a convenient note taking device?"

A question discussed with philosopher David Chalmers, on the Philosophy Bites podcast.

🎙️Technophilosophy and the extended mind

So much of this depends on what ‘the mind’ means. Meanwhile, we do seamlessly interact with our note-making tools, to achieve more than we could without them.

Here’s how we journey beyond the ‘hero’s journey’.

a cat sits half-hidden in a paper carrier bag on the floor

Yes, we can be heroes, but does that mean we should be?

Yes really, we can be heroes. Thanks very much David Bowie! But if this sounds attractive, perhaps we should be careful what we wish for. Do you want to be the hero of your own story? Perhaps you already are According to reporting in Scientific American, imagining yourself as the hero of your own life gives you an increased sense of meaning. “Our research reveals that the hero’s journey is not just for legends and superheroes.

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Give it, give it all, give it now

Annie Dillard on the writing life 💬 See also: The constant flight forwards Sharing what you know Embracing your humanity is the way forward Image made with the Shift Happens typewriter

Looks like you can all relax. Everyone’s ‘pivoting’ these days, so why not Satan? 📷

A sign at a traditional funfair promotes Funnyland and the Devil's slide.

Mark Luetke shows how he uses a Zettelkasten for creative work (‘zines!)

“The goal here is to create an apophenic mindset - one where the mind becomes open to the random connections between objects and ideas. Those connections are the spark we’re after. That spark is inspiration.”

dophs.substack.com/p/how-its…

Atomic notes - all in one place

From today there’s a new category in the navigation bar of Writing Slowly. ‘Atomic Notes’ now shows all posts about making notes. How to make effective notes is a long-standing obsession of mine, but this new category was inspired by Bob Doto, who has his own fantastic resource page: All things Zettelkasten. The Atomic Notes category is now highlighted on the site navigation bar. And if you’d like to follow along with your favourite feed reader,there’s also a dedicated RSS feed (in addition to the more general whole-site feed).

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A new post category in micro.blog, filtered to include existing posts

Micro.blog is a really useful and easy way to host a website. Even though it feels more like a cottage industry than a corporation there are way more features (and apps!) than I can probably use. It’s amazing how much Manton Reece, micro.blog’s creator, has achieved. Under the hood the micro.blog platform is based on the Hugo static site generator, but there are a few differences. One such difference is post categories.

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How to overcome Fetzenwissen: the illusion of integrated thought

It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge One potential problem associated with making notes according to the Zettelkasten approach is Verknüpfungszwang: the compulsion to find connections. It may be true philosophically that everything’s connected, but in the end what matters is useful or meaningful connections. With your notes, then, you need to make worthwhile, not indiscriminate links. Another potential problem is Fetzenwissen: fragmentary knowledge, along with the illusion that disjointed fragments can produce integrated thought.

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From fragments you can build a greater whole

Everything large and significant began as small and insignificant This is my working philosophy of creativity and I’m trying to follow it through as best I can. Starting with simple parts is how you go about constructing complex systems. “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.

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How to decide what to include in your notes

Before the days of computers, people used to collect all sorts of useful information in a commonplace book. The ancient idea of commonplaces was that you’d have a set of subjects you were interested in. These were the loci - the places - where you’d put your findings. They were called loci communis - common places, in Latin, because it was assumed everyone knew what the right list of subjects was.

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Promethean shame among authors using AI tools:

“It starts to make you wonder, do I even have any talent if a computer can just mimic me?” The Verge

At last, writing slowly is back in fashion!

Cal Newport, author of the forthcoming book, 📚Slow Productivity, has finally latched on to the premise of this website: you can get a lot done by writing slowly. Speeding up in pursuit of fleeting moments of hyper-visibility is not necessarily the path to impact. It’s in slowing down that the real magic happens. Study Hacks https://calnewport.com/on-slow-writing/ I didn’t even know they could drive. See also: Why I’m writing slowly

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Thinking nothing of walking long distances

How far is too far to walk? Author Charlie Stross observed that British people in the early nineteenth century, prior to train travel, walked a lot further than people today think of as reasonable. I’ve noticed a couple of literary examples of this seemingly extreme walking behaviour, both of which took place in North Wales. Headlong Hall In chapter 7 of Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novel, 📚Headlong Hall (1816), a group of the main characters takes a morning walk to admire the land drainage scheme around the newly industrial village of Tremadoc, and they walk halfway across Eryri to do so, traversing two valleys and two mountain passes.

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Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?

What does it mean to write notes ‘from the bottom up’, instead of ‘from the top down’? It’s one of the biggest questions people have about getting started with making notes the Zettelkasten way. Don’t you need to start with categories? If not, how will you ever know where to look for stuff? Won’t it all end up in chaos? Bob Doto answers this question very helpfully, with some clear examples, in What do we mean when we say bottom up?

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Can we understand consciousness yet?

Professor Mark Solms, Director of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, revives the Freudian view that consciousness is driven by basic physiological motivations such as hunger. Crucially, consciousness is not an evolutionary accident but is motivated. Motivated consciousnesses, he claims, provides evolutionary benefits. Mark Solms. 2021. The Hidden Spring. A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. London: Profile Books. ISBN: 9781788167628 He claims the physical seat of consciousness is in the brain stem, not the cortex.

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