Maggie Appleton, digital anthropologist, did a lightning talk called “How to Become a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg” to discuss the question, “What does it mean to build a “second brain,” and why do we think that’s a Good and Valuable thing to do?”. 

She had completed the Building A Second Brain course and answered the question posed in her talk with, “Yes, if we rephrase building a second brain as ‘Build a Partial Cybernetic Extension of Your Empirical Collection & Reflection System to Help the Small Conscious Part of Your Brain Do A Limited Number of Writing-based Tasks’”.

I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to find ways to organise ideas in ways that helps me to connect them, either linearly because one led to another, or in an expansive divergent way. At the same time, I try to keep myself in check by reminding myself that the map is not the territory, the model is not the reality.

So, does Maggie’s definition help me be clearer about what I’m trying to do with organising ideas? A random stream of consciousness about the topic…

I tend towards the abstraction of ideas, Maggie favours the embodiment of ideas.

Are we talking about different ways to do the same thing, or are we talking about different things?

Embodiment is about reasoning, abstraction is the mental constructs. 

Data (raw, uncontextualised) can be interpreted, creating information (contextualised, formalised, organised), which can be transferred knowledge (only held within the person), which can be partially codified as information in order to be transferred.

Does there need to be a distinction between a mechanised process of a computer interpreting data to present information and the human perceptual system of the senses collecting unconsciously data about the world around us and transforming it into conscious knowledge?

A distinct piece of codified knowledge is what I would call an idea. It’s a useful building block. It is abstracted from its original context, purified almost to its simplest clearest expression. 

Where Maggie talks about second brain as practice, a process of reasoning that relies on embodiment not abstraction. 

I guess I don’t disagree with the Embodied Cognition premise, that cognition is shaped by the body which is cognising, but is it something to reduced or removed, or am I falling into a cartesian trap of thinking that an idea is purer if it just of mind?

The idea, as a piece of codified knowledge, could contain metadata about its origins (even just conceptually), almost the genetic code that controls how the idea behaves and will result from interaction with another idea.

Definitions

Abstraction – the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events.

Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process where general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal (“real” or “concrete”) signifiers, first principles, or other methods.

“An abstraction” is the outcome of this process—a concept that acts as a common noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category.[1]

Conceptual abstractions may be formed by filtering the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, selecting only the aspects which are relevant for a particular subjectively valued purpose.

Embodiment – a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling.

Theories

Embodied cognition 

Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism.

Biases

My biases:

• Rationality is not neutral.