I've been reluctant to blog. There is, at present, a cacophony of voices online. Everyone with a personal spinand perspective competing for everyone else's attention. I've opted out.
But something keeps coming back to me. I am very interested in written language as a tool to extend, organize and clarify thought. Written language allows us to move beyond the present moment to consider the past or anticipate the future, provides a stable, permanent symbolic representation to reflect upon, creates the opportunity for more formal thought in extracting principles from decontextualized ideas, facilitates finding new connections in ideas and information that would otherwise exceed our working memory capacity.
I've always struggled with writing. Somewhere during undergrad, I learned to write in an extremely passive, dense scientific style. I am generally trying to cram my philosophy of everything into each sentence. Writing is arduous enough that my sketchbook/journal is full of written fragments, abbreviated phrases and shorthand. So what happens if I push myself to document what's on my mind in written form using this blog as an external stable memory store. This then is my own personal thought experiment: a test of my belief in the power of external symbolic representations to reflect, extend and expand thought. Here goes.