Should You Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think?

Should You Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think?

No, that would be really boring.

One of my most anticipated and longest-held wishes about future technology is the ability to automatically capture my stream of consciousness as text, mostly for recall but also for the possibility of organizing my thoughts' interrelations, reducing compartmentalization and Taking Ideas Seriously. Of course trash-sorting/maintenance algorithms to increase signal to noise ratio might be necessary, but at the least it would be a searchable history.

I understand why this post may be downvoted (perhaps the title as a specific call to action), but I really wonder at why it isn't given at least some discussion about these possibilities.

It's better to do something LESS INSANE. It's also SAD that the post is not downvoted into OBLIVION.

If you'd literally recorded every thought in you conscious mind, you'd quickly hit some infinite regress... stack overflow.

I take lots of notes of my thoughts, though I suspect it is mostly due to my obsessive nature and fear that I could forget an important thought.

The thing is, when will I take the time to go through the thoughts? I have a text file with over 10k lines of notes. It's a question of opportunity cost, I could wade through my old notes or do something else.

Heh, I actually mapped my thoughts following Lion Kimbro's method, six or seven years ago; I still have the notebooks on my shelf. From what he later said, he doesn't really recommend it, it bogs one down.

I still think it was an interesting experiment, though I'd put it more in the category of creativity helper / mind map; it's also interesting to have a snapshot of the kind of stuff I thought about a lot at the time, with quite a bit of detail.

This probably has some useful stuff in it, but...IMMOBILIZED? Seriously? What I can see just reading the quote is setting off my mental alarm for "you had a good idea, but you tried to apply it to an extant for in an arena in which you're hitting really bad diminishing returns, so stop it right now, determine how far you can take it without it making you expend an inefficient amount of effort, and go from there."

Why do I have a mental alarm for this kind of thing? Because I do it all the time.

I will list all the problems I have with adopting such a system in the hope that others may have some of the same problems and can also benefit from proposed solutions. I realize that many of these problems do not conflict with more limited forms of note-taking and would suggest that others remind themselves not to use problems such as these as an excuse to avoid those limited forms.

I have a strong inhibition against articulating truly personal thoughts in any way. I would have to be certain that nobody could gain access to my repository and even then would have to spend some time deconditioning myself.

A non-electronic medium would be too insecure, virtually impossible to back up, and impossible to automatically algorithmically analyze.

Data entry for an electronic medium would be a problem. I can't easily alternate between common activities and typing on my laptop. Typing with thumb keyboards is too slow to be practical.

I am afraid writing my thoughts and reading them will cause them to lose their affective components. This fear may or may not be irrational: I have no idea.

Ideas:

• I could use a notepad to jot down thoughts when I am out and later copy them to my computer and shred the notes.
• I could encrypt the data on my laptop (not an effective measure against anyone actively trying to access the data)

All suggestions welcome. : )

Arguably you wouldn't have to map every thought to see a benefit. A minor variation could easily apply to the mapping of cached selves.

Does anyone else worry that anyone who had access to a transcription of your thoughts would think you were too easily emotionally effected and thus "shallow" or childish? I know that I am strongly emotionally effected by many things I believe most people would think are too simple to be emotionally engaging.