I recently read How to Take Smart Notes and this quote from Niklas Luhmann touched me.
I think TW is a great example of Smart Notes theory, and Spaced Repetition System, like Fishing plugin, should be used in it to create relatively Smart Notes which prompt application, synthesis, and creation.
Key, though, is the inverse – “one cannot write without thinking”.
And the “thinking” here, in many modes and forms, is usually, if not inevitably, bound up with //reading//.
“How do I write so well? That’s easy. I read. A lot,” said every great writer, ever.
That said, Hum an upward minor sixth. Thanks for that. Quite a challenge 
Funny how I can hear it, but can’t voice it without an instrument to help “bring it out”.
I also think the second, or external brain idea is relevant here, with reading and writing as well as tiddlywiki. We effectively extend what our brain can perceive and do buy making use of tools to store, visualise and record.
However before reading and writing we have language. I heard of a fellow who was deprived of language when young. He was still able to operate quite well, however once he was “rescued” it was difficult for him to develop language, but when he did it was difficult to recount the time when he had no language because his thinking back then was not maintained in a language.
I think we can think even without language, but language can help us think, and when dealing with more complex ideas it is difficult to think without writing or other tools.
In some areas I can’t think as well, without coding, at least pseudo code.
The OP of @oflg asserts “One cannot think without writing”. Luhmann was an avid writer. And his statement has truth.
But it is also true that you can think without words. For instance feeling your left-leg now is not word-conceptual but certainly cognised and recallable.
Language (word strings) is, at root, a process of symbolisation that has shared conventions. A kinda toolset of easier sharing.
Reading / Writing / Speaking … the variations on accomplishment in all three and transition between them are near infinite.
Writing is about TEXT.
Language in general is broader.
I would say that currently the net is dominantly text based. That is changing, albeit slowly?
Just a riff off the interesting post by @oflg
TT
I agree with this;
But would add although language has shared conventions which help with communication, recording and seeking feedback, perhaps sharing also helps us to learn and practice language. It also gives us great powers within our own minds, for own own thoughts to use as concepts and tools whether or not we share them.
Despite languages great powers we must always remember our language can also control us sometimes, stopping us thinking in particular ways when we “don’t have the words for a thought”, or some words that involuntarily trigger others (this is after all one tool of indoctrination) .
One partial remedy to the negative in our language is to learn, or have some use of other languages, to increase the diversity of language and thinking tools available to us.
There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the communal actively shared aspect of language use IS central to all linguistic learning.
A human being, of course, pre-exists lingo. And there are other modalities (recursive modalities) available too that are not text based. Right now the net tech can’t really convey the image that my left thigh is hurting.
Just a comment, TT
Loosely speaking, some perhaps. But as you go on to imply, thought pre-exists writing. Writing, evolutionarily (is that a word? It is now) is a very recent invention.
Fascinating area of study, thinking and learning at the physiological level. I, along with many other people, am (was) of the opinion that there are many “styles” of learning, some I may prefer over others. Example quote:
I learn better reading from books than sitting in a class listening to a teacher.
Turns out, that’s merely a preference, chosen before the moment of learning takes place. But the actual change that takes place between not having learned and later having learned something, is manifested the same way in all of us. “We all have the same cognitive architecture”, to quote my wife (currently studying the neuroscience of learning at Johns Hopkins).
IOW, learning takes place in the brain. Not in a book, not in a classroom, not in front of a computer, but in the brain (or in the embodied mind, as some like to call it).
But music? I refer those interested in having their minds blown (without the need of recreational drugs) to…
I understand the scope of of what the mind can achive without external reference however language AND text not only acts as an external brain and a communication channel where ideas can be peer reviewed by other brains, giving our own ideas strength thru feedback and criticism.
But these external to the brain mechanisiums provide what is perhaps humankinds biggest evolutionary advantage, a platform on which to evolve and transmit memes. Call it cultural or otherwise memes allow evolution in a life time, you can pass memes on to the next generation even after they were born. Somewhat lemarkian in nature this is the key to humanities recent (in geological time) sucess.
I believe a key issue we face is how do we apply more selection pressure to memes so the false and negative ones are removed from the meme pool before they destroy us. For example Qanon.
Some of the most powerful memes we have found is around the scientific method which supports critical thinking, and these memes need to be nurtured and promoted and only work because they can be tested seperately from inside one brain, the other place memes reside.
Like in culture memes can fester untested generating falshoods and perverse outcomes from cults to false conspiracy theories unless they are nurtured and the weeds delt with.
I think we’re moving into the area of temporally distanced conversations. In the TW context, you’re (we’re) holding a conversation with our future selves – certainly in private wikis, anyway.
“But that’s a monologue, surely?”
Well, kind of. But since you can edit the monologue, I see that as conversing with the text.
Fascinating topic, gents. More please.
Actually, reading that back, it sounds like a load of twaddle.
I like that. At least
How very Varela of you!
Languages Are Not Only Words
By way of illustrating more of what you, @CodaCoder (music example), are getting at: here is György Pálfi’s presentation of cinema’s purely visual (few words) “language” (tropes / visual clichés / recurrent themes) … (It’s 1.5 hours long, a brilliant achievement).
A relevant side comment
TT
IF I Only Talk To Myself I’m Lost … ?
@TW_Tones, FYI in modern philosophy Wittgenstein’s critique of “The Private Language Argument” in the Philosophical Investigations remains an astute assertion there is nothing in words but shared language. By definition, he asserts, that words to be words are necessarily comprehensible only in a cohort of listener / sharers.
A relevant side comment
TT
The Modern Novel Does This Extensively
Very true. A landmark work on self-correcting, self-reflection is / was Robinson Crusoe.
Side comment
TT
Are You A Meme Or A Theme?
Dunno. I seems to me that a “meme” is just jargon for “a common trope on communal steroids”. It is maybe an apport of the word-matrix of the net. When Dawkins coined the word in 1976 as the social compliment to “gene” it caught interest.
I don’t, myself, think it is anything other than what already existed and the terminology “meme” adds nothing.
Just an opinionated side comment
TT
Is This Non-Word Film Better Or Worse Than A 1,000 Worded Blog Entries?
This is an insightful wordless full length documentary about the food industry … Our Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, clip …
Additional side comment
TT
When this happened I was there, lapping up the science of biology, the meme was an observation that evolutionary theory can apply elsewhere. Only in recent years has it being used alongside “viral” for internet fads. Don’t be fooled, the meme is a very important idea, somewhat diminished in the public view by its popularity. Prior to meme we may have talked about the “idea” having a “life of its own”, only with the concept of the meme did we learn they, “Ideas/memes”, live in an ecosystem itself subject to similar rules observed in evolution.
Back then we thought there was positive selection pressure on memes, perhaps there was. But Today we discover there is not enough selection pressure and perverse and perverted memes abound, no doubt assisted by advertising and internet backwaters in which insufficient criticism of them occurs inside bubbles.
TiddlyWiki is replete with ideas and memes of its own making and some which we bestow upon it, These memes I believe are critical to understanding, using and the future of TiddlyWiki. After all we stand on shoulders of the suite of memes within coding as well.
But I reject the uncritical memes
As an anthropologist already I knew there were social “themes” that dominate eras. I did not need “memes” to know that.
But a big part of the issue (still) with the “Dawkins meme thesis” is the implicit link to biological theory. It is incoherent.
It is part of the general problem with “sociobiology” (see, for instance, Marshall Sahlins’ – The Use & Abuse Of Biology).
Just technically saying
TT
Except perhaps, brevity, the conveyance of idea, notion, and imagery, such that they are…
You’re putting me in mind of Pinker’s Stuff of Thought. And, dare I say, the ouroboros:
Still @TiddlyTweeter do themes evolve and undergo selection?
Sociobiology is missused and abused and i do not recall it having any place in Dawkins - the selfish gene.
Dawkins himself gets unwarented negative assesments by those who dislike his atheist position and full frontal attacks on religion. If you comprehencivly read Dawkins and his peers they reject much of the derivative BS that abounds. We should not confuse those who miss read with those who wrote.
That said the relative values of ideas and memes is very personal and importiance of one over the other is both a personal perspective and contextural.
This.
