for - question - the brain believes what it imagines - clarify - John Churchill

Chapeau! Een Belgische website kaart dit aan in de context gezond leven.

for - recognizing true nature - validation of conceptual approach - brain is the bouncer for the heart - Bernardo Kastrup

for - neuroscience - optimal working environment - varies with brain state - different phases during the day - engagement - inspiration - concentration - communication - relaxation

for - Henning Beck - neuroscientist - video - youtube - The Brain vs Artificial Intelligence

for - climate crisis - psychology - wrong approach

summary - Climate scientist professor Mojib Latif explores why our best efforts at rapid intervention to deal with the climate crisis are failing - Near the end of the program, he interviews professor Henning Beck, a neuroscientist who suggests that human brains have evolved to be rewarded for securing more. - Dopamine is released when we get more and we have not designed our intervention strategies aligned with this basic property of our brains

https://coda.io/blog/about-coda/introducing-coda-brain

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-video-saturday-june-10-2023-a-discussion-with-jerry-michalski-on-the-brain-and-tinderbox/6720

Tinderbox Meetup 2023-06-10 featuring Jerry Michalski and The Brain

https://www.braneframe.com/

for - dream theory - dreaming as default state of brain

• Dreaming can be seen as the "default" position for the activated brain
• when it is not forced to focus on
  • physical and
  • social reality by
    • (1) external stimuli and
    • (2) the self system that reminds us of
      • who we are,
      • where we are, and
      • what the tasks are
    • that face us.

Question - I wonder what evolutionary advantage dreaming would bestow to the first dreaming organisms? - why would a brain evolve to have a default behaviour with no outside connection? - Survival is dependent on processing outside information. There seems to be a contradiction here - I wonder what opinion Michael Levin would have on this theory?

Creating a "signpost user interface" can help to uncover directions to take in digital contexts as out of sight is out of mind. Having things sit in your way within one's note taking workflow can remind them to either link things, or move in particular directions for discovering new avenues of thought.

Example: it would be interesting if Jerry's The Brain would have links directly to material in Flancian's Agora to remind him to search or find relevant material there. This could help with combinatorial creativity with inputs from others, though it needs to be narrow so as not to result in rabbit holes which draw away attention.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/iQvo7l1zEe6dZ5_9d9rrVw

Jerry Michalski says that The Brain provides him with a "neighborhood perspective" of ideas when he reduces the external link number for his graph down to 1.

This is similar to Nicholas Luhmann's zettelkasten which provided neighborhoods of related notes based on distance from any particular note.

Also similar to oral cultures who relied on movement through their environment for encoding memories and later remembering them. [I'll use the tag "environmental memory" to track this until a better name comes along.]

https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/a-true-second-brain-xrODaBD2

Recommended by Michael Grossman

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-video-saturday-june-10-2023-a-discussion-with-jerry-michalski-on-the-brain-and-tinderbox/6720

• question

• has ANYONE ever experienced consciousness emerging from matter?

• comment

  • what Spira is getting at is that there is a fundamental category confusion
    • deep down, matter is an abstract concept
    • matter is NOT a phenomenological experience
    • from this perspective, a phenomena cannot emerge from a concept
    • in fact a concept ALWAYS emerges from consciousness, not the other way around
    • the claim that consciousness emerges from brains is a fundamental category error that makes an impossible claim
      • that phenomena emerges from a concept

Thoughts on Vulcan (Philosophy and Commentary) by Harlan (developer)

Mentioned by Jerry Michalski

The Brain in some of its views (see for eg: Jerry Michalski's default brain view) instantiates this sort of directional semantics for ideas.

Note too, that The Brain makes it much easier to help create connections between multiple ideas as a basic functionality.

https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html

I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks' memex demo at IndieWebCamp's Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

I'll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of "networked commonplace books". [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

Some of Kevin's conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski's use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don't think it's got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

I'm also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu's experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

MIT MediaLab's Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark's experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

Next up, I'd love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites... Who will show us those "associative trails"?

Another potential framing for what we're all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian's songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's dream for a "third archive"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOkniMkDPyM

L.A.T.C.H. (five ways to organize information) 1. Location 1. Alphabet 1. Time 1. Category 1. Hierarchy

from the book Information Anxiety by Richard S. Wurman

4.3 Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what “you” want.

Are there examples of people using The Brain in public as more extensive commonplace books or zettelkasten?

https://thebrain.com/

Initially came across this via Jerry Michalski who has an extensive personal mind map of over 24 years (as of fall 2021).

https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/32f9fc36-6963-9ee0-9b44-a89112919e29/attachments/6492d41a-73b2-20d8-b145-3283598c612b

A fantastic example of an extensive mind map from Jerry Michalski using The Brain.

There are lots of interesting links and resources, but on the whole

How many of the nodes actually have specific notes, explicit ideas, annotations, or excerpts within them?

Without these, it's an interesting map and provides some broad context, but removes local specific context of who Jerry is and how he explicitly thinks. One can review the overarching parts to extract what his biases may be based on availability heuristics, but in areas of conflicting ideas which have relatively equal numbers of links within a particular area, one may not be able to discern arguments from each other.

Still a fascinating start and something not commonly seen in the broader literature.

I'll also note that even in a small sample of one video call with Jerry sharing his screen while we talked about a broad sub-topic it's interesting to see his prior contexts as we conversed. I've only ever had similar experiences with Bill Seitz who regularly drops links to his wiki pages in this sort of way or Kevin Marks (usually in text chat contexts and less frequently in video calls/conversations) who drops links to his extensive blogging history which also serves to add his prior thoughts and contextualizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9dK76BqKJ4

Jerry has been using The Brain for 24 years as of ~November 2021.

In October 2021 he had approximately 484,000 thoughts in his graph.

Ideas to explore: Lessons from My Brain

We Are an Amnesic Society

Loose guide:

favicons indicate links to external sources

Colors indicate

• yellow - collections of things
• purple - opinions

It should be easy to surpass the mind's performance in terms of storage capacity as well as lossiness. It might be more difficult to surpass it in terms of the speed and flexibility with which it "follows an associative trail"

where's the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters

it's unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that's my bias speaking