Surfulater PrevGen on bits, again

Posted by 22111
Nov 21, 2013 at 09:31 PM

I should clarify the advantage, by detailing WHICH order I mean, in practice, and I am speaking from experience, not from starting from some theory. First and of course, there is some “temporal” order, in the way, “which aspect should come first”, but it’s evident also that you cannot preserve such “order” when considering things in sort of a “logical” way. Then, there are “suites” of “aspects”, an most of which do not really have “sub-aspects” but rather “vicinity aspects”, i.e. things belonging together in a (main) way, and of different levels of importance, but not really subordinated to each other.

It goes without saying that whenever there is such subordination, I create a child or a group of children, but you will have understood that I judge the 7/7/7 paradigm (“No list longer than 7 items, and create as many artificial descendence levels as necessary to comply to this stupid rule!”) worthless and even harmful, the irony here being, of course, that this counterproductive rule has been created out of perceiving the same thinking limitations that have been proven for a long time now, this impossibility to have more than just 4 (= for most of us, the 7 number is wishful thinking for most people, and even 5 would be) items within your “head” / “mind”, concurrently.

So I see the problem that by doing sorts of 7/7/7, you deliberately cut off aspects that should be considered simultaneously, and by that I mean at the same time, i.e. within the same fraction of a second.

Now whenever there is a “new” element, there is a “jump” within your list, and many people would then create a new “header” item, by this fractionizing the “list” ad libitum; whilst in fact, most of these “jumps”, in my “lists”, in my thinking, do not even justify a separator line, let alone a new “parent”.

Other jumps do, and so I have 4 levels of jumps (according to the importance of the “distance”): Just a new sibling; a new sibling but bolded, and perhaps some regular further siblings “beneath” it; a new sibling after a separator line; and finally a new “heading”, i.e. a new uncle/aunt (i.e. one level upward); within the siblings, as said, there can be parentage, siblings that contain just 1, or a group, of sub-aspects - whenever I have such a little cluster, but of which the contents should not logically be “nephews” of the other siblings, I usually bold their parent sibling and try to rename the sibling/parent in a way that makes it evident it’s just a container for further siblings, just in order to shorten the list and avoid too much scrolling.

Of course, these jumps are sometimes akward, i.e. the “logical distance” is sometimes rather broad, and that’s another reason why I make rather ample use of separator lines, and of bolding.

But in general, I try to MINIMIZE LOGICAL DISTANCE BETWEEN ITEMS, thus my manual rearranging of items - to a degree at least. You never can do this in any near-perfect way (thus all those jumps), since you have only one dimension, a list, eased a little bit by indentation/levelling, but you don’t even have a real second dimension, let alone three-dimensionality, so it cannot be otherwise: You only can REDUCE jumps, which means, reduce the total, overall length of logical distances, but you cannot avoid them, and as we all know, there have been many tries, in the academic world, to devise 3-dimensional, i.e. spatial, representations of knowledge/thinking, and proper “handling sw” for this, and as we also know, this sw does not seem to help us here: on the contrary, it distorts our vision, probably because our mind tries to “get” more than just 4 elements out of such visuals because they seem to “offer” those elements (even with TheBrain, without the third dimension but with a fully-represented second one, this can be clearly felt).

So we know that outlining is a lamentable compression, into just “broad 1 dimension”, of what “comes” from 3 dimensions, and of course, this totally deconstructs “what is originally there”, into something very different, and it’s blatantly incredible so few people wordwide ever bothered to put some thought to this “new product”, and to an optimization of this new graphical representation… which inevitably creates some very new - and very restricted - thinking processes instead of the “ideal” ones, i.e. those we would have, had our mind been able to properly process 3-dimensional graphic representations.

Now my concept, and which is so easy to obtain in outliners, but almost impossible to recreate with tagging, is SLIDING (in French: glissement), which means, yes, your outline necessarily cuts off other aspects, but at least for most “intimately related”, “near neighboring” aspects, you can do a slide (and then, there’s always CLONING, even WITHIN CLOSE VICINITY! (It’s rare that people think of this possibility to also use clones.)).

SO WHAT IS A SLIDE? You have aspects/elements a, b, c, d, e, listed below another. Then, there is element f, g, h, and a separator line above elements i, j…, i being a parent to some other, no problem. Now if you splice up your elements in indented lists “heading for a, b, c”, “d”, “heading for e, f, g, h”, “heading for sub-items of i”, “heading for j, k…”, your “thinking”, i.e. your ability to concurrently process items, will be more or less confined to these FORCED CLUSTERS, to those some siblings beneath some parent.

In theory, you could “process” “c” (from expanded heading a-c), “d”, and “f” (ditto within the e-h nephews), but in practice, you will be unable to do it, your thinking about c, d, and f, in this example, will NOT be concurrent, but in succession.

So what is “thinking”, what is this “processing of 3, 4, 5… elements, concurrently”? Well, I cannot speak for you, but for me it’s BLENDING: The mental vision gets blurred, the aspects mix up together, without “you” “doing” anything here, and if you’re lucky, it will breed an “idea”, i.e. some further aspect which is possible a “solution” to something, and in reality, there are myriads of such often very tiny, but sometimes satisfyingly “intermediate”, “new” elements, and real “solutions” will perhaps come after dozens of such consecutive “minimal” thinking processes, be they in the time range of 10 min., or of several weeks.

Now if you hold your lists flat, AND if you really try to put them into a “logical” order, you are able to consider c, d and f, as intended by your brain, in order for it to be able to (hopefully) deliver (some intermediate) results: concurrently, not consecutively: There is NO BARRIER between them that blocks the input.

There’s a myth which is called “associative thinking”. There’s a myth that goes that geniuses (and ordinary people if they buy some books and fervently try) get totally unconnected things together, and heureka, they the light! That might be so; my personal experience is quite different: When I minimize the “logical distance” between several aspects, I (logically) muse about very similar aspects, and here, some very minor changes, replacing some very similar aspect with another very similar aspect in my “range-of-three” (four? I doubt it, but then, afterwards, you never know for sure, right? it’s been all too well melted together if it was real thinking), such a setting often gives me (intermediate, valid) results - whenever I try “creative thinking”, putting together things that have nothing in common: well, not so much (I understand that “looking out for things that could be transposed” (for products, for literary creation, and so on) is a senseful creativity technique, but that is quite different from the core of the “associative” thinking process I’m trying to describe here).

Also, my “order”, as said, is an iterative process that goes together with my thinking about the elements in that (sub-) tree: I try to find even lesser distances, but which at the same time do not (too much) expand other distances then, or just for things / distances that possible “could be sacrified”, which means there’s always a judgement about possible “core elements” of which the overall clustering / suite (in fact) should be optimized, and lesser, “just supporting” elements, of which spatial optimization doesn’t seem as important as for the former; it goes without saying that such judgements are error-prone, and also that, depending on the “task at hand”, important elements here will become relatively insignificant element then, and vice versa, hence an ever-going of re-arranging those elements at the core of your business or your life.

So your eye falls on abc, then on cdef, then on bcf (you will have put f before d and e in the meanwhile), and so on, and you get results, also from “putting meat” to your a, b, c, etc., from furnishing them with sub-elements: You SLIDE in both directions, your thinking including this sub-range, then another one, then again rearranging items so that a third, new range will be ready for thinking about. Now compare with what you get from today’s tagging systems.

A last word: Have a look into music, especially into non-core-EU music. Look into some jazz, look into some “avantgarde music” of the Sixties and Seventies, and especially, look into traditional music from Azerbeijan, over Asia to Africa: In all these musical genres, there is to be found this VERY SLOW, MINUTELY GRADUALLY PROGRESSION AND DEVELOPMENT for which the French again do have the perfect term: “envoûtant” (a not-that-close translation would perhaps be “bewitching”).

From what I see, the act of thinking runs in quite an analogous way, very similar elements combined having quite a spectacular different effect. Elder readers will remember a 1974 film by Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Glissements progressifs du plaisir”, and the idea of this “glissement progressif” seems to me the perfect description of the act of thinking, and of optimized thinking, provided you’ll get the right vicinity elements, CONCURRENTLY, into your brain, for every such single step of the thinking process. And it’s undeniable that good outlining can be of big help here, whilst traditional tagging tends to mix up things in their immediate vicinity - the one that should deliver optimized input. And a last word, don’t say, I just need it for reference: As there is no non-communication, there is no non-thinking when you look at your material: There’s just bad, or perhaps better, more relevant thinking, and we all strive for the latter variety, right?