As I draft my (two) book(s) – and a paper for ISSS2025 in July – I find myself revisiting certain key Psybertron posts and pages and unable to refrain from making update / elaboration edits, effectively turning them into potential draft chapters.
As a collection there is significant near-repetition and an incompleteness about only sample / informal references that happened to be topical at the time they were first written. (Every time I draft something new, a document in isolation from the blog posts, the repetition keeps leading me back to – “I’m sure I wrote something that already covered this …”
There’s obviously a good deal of editing / indexing / referencing to be done, not to mentioning joining-up the narrative flow of the whole, but it seems worth making the collection more explicit, standalone, shareable, editable, with subject matter headings, etc. So here goes, in no particular order:
What Am I Thinking? – despite “no particular order”, this post and the PhD Research Proposal, are probably the best recent summary of the whole agenda, even if the particulars are only “examples” of the whole. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/17062 And that PhD Research Proposal. https://www.academia.edu/109958139/Research_Proposal_Ian_Glendinning_Draft_4
John C Doyle and the problem with Zombie Science (2021 talk, 2022 post). The human operating system is evolutionarily badly optimised to deal with 21stC “viral” information. It’s about the architecture, not “things” in the physical layer(s). https://www.psybertron.org/archives/15903
Determinist Reductionism Sucks. Sapolsky, Mitchell, Hossenfelder and Dennett – and commenter Tom Clark – whom I owe a Mitchell<>Clark essay. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/17961
Hold Your Definition – Dennett and Levenchuk on the downsides of definitions as “coffins” for enlightened progress. The right kind of definitions in the right layers of abstraction. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/6539
Dichotomies – really an extension to the expectations for honest definitions. Boundaries. Choice of words. Distinction – non-pejorative “discrimination” – matters, without being divisive of whole camps / linguistic subject areas.
Good Fences. https://www.psybertron.org/?s=Good%20Fences&sort=relevance
More Than Science. https://www.psybertron.org/?s=More%20than%20science&sort=relevance
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Going to use some tools to construct a summary of my own words above.
Famous last words.
Post Note – a single day’s effort and we have progress.
Simply asking ChatGPT to summarise my own thesis back to me – based on the content linked in this post (and any others it discovers in the process) and to suggest chapter headings / structure – was impressive in itself. First off made me realise my own search function is limited to posts but not pages – so I was missing half of my own content, by myself anyway.
Secondly, fixing that threw up an obvious “joining the dots” opportunity.
I’ve mentioned previously, originally day-job motivated, an interest in semantic graphing tools going right back to IDEF0 use in the 1980’s – for business systems process modelling – and seeing so many vector-graphic and semantic-web graphical mark-up tools since then into the 21stC but always being frustrated that having settled on the obvious power of the node<>edge graph dynamic relational model for everything and anything – the most comprehensively true model of reality, the tools were extremely limited in understanding the need for configurable semantics of GOF hierarchical tree-views of taxonomic (class/type) and mereologic (whole/part) ontological views for human organisation and navigation, seeing the wood for the trees.
Hierarchy has become a dirty word, tainted by “power structures” and compounded ever since semantic web people discovered generic network models, but we still need hierarchies. (I feel another #GoodFences essay coming on.)
One more level of interrupt … recall also many people, myself included, noting the knowledge graph model inherent in Pirsig’s creative “index card” – ideas and ideas-linking-ideas – approach to his own writing projects. A fellow Pirsig afficionado suggested the idea that a tool he had created using this “Zettelkasten” (index card box) idea could be used both creatively for writing from scratch or retrospectively to add relational value to existing works, analysed using an LLM Tool like ChatGPT.
Well bugger me! It can do both.
Help me add structure to the mass of writing I’ve already done AND add the value I need to structure the whole thesis & narrative. I’ve gone from using ChatGPT as the occasional alternative to Google searches to find and elucidate “X” to being my helper in adding value to my own work.
Hat-tip to (Pisrigian) Michael Hopwood for already putting me onto Obsidian as a viable Zettelkasten tool, and hat-tip to (Pirsigian) Tom Berman for showing me his “MuDG” tool in action to add ChatGPT value to Wendy Pirsig’s “On Quality”.
I am now thanks to ChatGPT’s help working with a complete Obsidian vault version of my whole Psybertron blog export!!!! Obsidian has a Breadcrumbs plug-in to find and explicitly add the implicit ontological relations. (It’s even teaching me to script and code.)
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