The Philosopher's Desk

Okay, figured out the text size issue, hooray. Had some mild trouble with that.

Anyway, I'm sitting here a day after the final touches were made to my newest book I abbreviate to NASH - "This is Not A Self-Help Book". It was a wild ride to make and I figured in the spirit of NASH I'd make the post-creation blog post I make about it here on Dreamwidth in full stream-of-consciousness just like the book itself. Yes, I made an entire 17.8k word book entirely in stream-of-conscious style. It was created for numerous reasons all equally valid - I'll get into that in a sec - but one of them I want to mention up front is that I did in fact want to see how many WPM I could put out in handwritten s.o.c. style.

I do pretty much all of my writing s.o.c. but with edits, and transcription which helps me to catch weird phrasings I end up doing like truncating metaphors or aphorisms, sometimes as you can see about three or four times in NASH, I end up 'gapping' an entire half-sentence. It's a little nutty. I also pretty typically reformat my text a bit to 'professionalize' it so I sound a lot less casual. A lot of "y'know" and stuff like the word "nutty" cut out.

Making this is a decision more about getting a bit of closure I suppose. I don't really feel like, even with how I made the book, that I got all I really wanted to say about the process 'out there' and I'd rather do a 'quick' blog post here in s.o.c. than have it all in the book, both as a means to raise awareness for my book's release such that I can, but also because there's some stuff I'd rather have out there about the creation of the book that's public and readily accessible via my socials.

This'll be a bit meandering, being all s.o.c. and unedited like NASH but, I hope it'll come out pretty okay. The first thing I want to dive into is how the process itself really came around. I had the idea of making a book titled "This is Not A Self-Help Book" that was entirely s.o.c. a few months ago. In particular I wanted to make sure it had no outline, no other forethought other than the title, and was going to act as sort of a generative prompt for my brain if you will. I have a natural habit of sort of doing longform s.o.c. as I said, it's how I do all of my work. While I normally do it at most like, ten pages at a time, I have in fact done at least one forty-page wide-ruled notebook session for TPM albeit that was for a slew of the stuff in the beginning of the definitions section that was rather simple compared to the later stuff. I was also writing a little bit larger than I was for the opening thirty-seven page burst I did for the first of three major sessions for NASH. So, the thing is, with TPM I have an outline, I have structure in terms of what tone and format I'm taking, and I have especially in the definitions section a 'goal' wherein I'm fully aware of when I'm going to 'stop', how far I have to go, and what kind of pace I need to put in for that section of the book to be done. With NASH, if you read it, you can clearly see at the opening ten pages in the introduction some of the unsteady 'wobbling' in the narrative as I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to plant my feet and long before any of the advantages my KS grants me as regards this process.

Which, while my KS and how I relate to my writing with it mid-stream does offer some serious advantages, when just starting out or when I have a hard stop be it a voluntary break or some strange traffic jam of noetic - like right there, I hit 'noetic' and had a hard brake as I was going to say 'flow' but didn't want to, then didn't find a good replacement - current (that worked lol), it can take some effort to get started again, though having a sort of leaning forward mechanism - as I describe in NASH as the 'iteration tunneling' effect - can help to keep me from stalling for very long. The problem is that this has to, like a fat goose trying to take off, get some runway behind it first and get its wings flapping in a manner of speaking for my writing to be reliably steady instead of wobbling via repetition or flat recursion. Meaning that I'll repeat the same stuff or tag back stuff too early with very little added to say.

Now, I'm still trying to do this rather quickly but the thing is, something about typing this stuff rather than writing, not sure what exactly, makes the process much more difficult and clunky. Although I can write pretty quickly, I do wonder if it has to do with how quickly I type, or perhaps has something to do with how the physical sensation of writing with a pen, or even the lack of 'typos' when handwritten, keeps from making me really ever have to backtrack. That kind of stuff, when doing this via keyboard as I am right now might be part of it, but it just feels different. I guess I'll slow down a bit before this entire blogpost turns into me recursively talking about my stream-of-consciousness process of making the blogpost about my stream of consciousness making the book that is purposefully meant to be an artifact of stream of consciousness, lol.

So, slowing down, and having re-read the part about NASH where I'm diving into this, what I wanted to get at was that if you read it, the wobble sort of clears up right when I first mention awareness. That part of the book has me take what I lampshade as a 'hard hairpin turn' into a topic that sort of sets the hook for the stability of the rest of the book, a first tentpole of sorts in a serious flurry of thought and words attempting to stabilize itself into a coherent narrative. From there, as I wrote the sensation I was having of what words to use next, what tone, the flashes I was getting of what the structure of the book was going to be as I went on, got clearer and clearer. I was hoping it would happen, obviously, as if it didn't I'd be pretty out of luck yeah? I had no reason to expect it would as I haven't done anything like this before, and my very first attempts at stream of consciousness writing with no prompt a few months ago were TERRIBLE. Seriously. It just sort of went on for ten pages and I'm not even going to publish that how bad it is, which I guess the title sort of served as a grounding anchor, a relational object of sorts to compare what I was writing about to and orbit around. But man while I didn't expect the 'orbit' to stabilize it still took a good minute given I was iirc about fifteen pages into the book before that moment where it 'clicked'.

Having done this though, I suspect that if people do s.o.c. as a practice, that it's something one can get better at. I certainly feel after doing NASH that my brain freaking expanded in some vague way I can only sort of shrug and point at for now. But I do feel as if though I'll probably be better at this as a cognitive exercise in the long-form at least if I decide to do another book like NASH in the future. And I hope that perhaps anyone reading this post not only got this far into it, but continues to read because I'm serious when I say I think this something that other people can use as a good exercise for themselves whether you want to get into writing or not.

The next thing I'll get into is a bit of the theory I was working on in NASH. Like, one of the 'simultaneously prime in importance' reasons for even doing something like that. It's not really without a good reason that people who aren't mad push out an entirely s.o.c. book that's 17.8k (the parts that were s.o.c.) words in length. What I was testing, other than again simultaneously important stuff asides, is this concept I had that generative content done in a stream-of-consciousness manner stabilizes if the system generating it (human, whatever, a particularly smart frog?) is stable enough as it's moving through the iterative process of generation. In simple terms I have/had a theory that due to how finite sets work, and how an iterative process works, the more, well, I had to backspace a few times here. This isn't exactly easy to put into simple terms for a guy who has a problem with saying anything in a simple manner due to wanting to say all ten versions of it at once. The concept is that if you're making say a painting with no prior idea of what the painting will be, the more of the painting's canvas you fill in the more you know what the painting MUST be, as there's only so many reasonable, logical configurations of paint colors, shapes, figures whatever, that can fill the rest of the canvas without it looking like garbage. Another way to put it is, if you're using an instrument, there's only so many chords and assemblages of notes that you can use that don't sound like crud, so you eventually end up making a song if you're a competent musician just like the previous example assumes you're a competent artist. So, naturally, if you're competent at narrative generation as concerns a topic be it fiction - I'm not a fiction writer so, yeah, that's out, but there's no reason a talented fiction writer couldn't write their fantasy, sci-fi, whatever, version of NASH - or non-fiction, there's only so many given ways you can construct a book as you're writing it for the ending to make sense.

A good way to visualize this effect is to think of a funnel. The funnel narrows as the number of sensical permutations of words, tone, all the parts of the book, is lowered as road is laid down behind where the author is currently at. That's the concept I call 'iteration tunneling' in its most basic premise, that I was testing with NASH. Now, an aspect of this that I was testing was a related concept that I explore in the end of the book I like to call a 'simultaneity tripwire'. Now this will be a bit of a headache but, try to follow me here. I promise it makes my eyes go crosswise every time I try to explain it too so don't think I'm being condescending, I'm half trying to prepare myself here.

Okay so say that we have x 'thing'. X doesn't occur unless y 'thing' hasn't occurred yet in z context. The thing is, y 'thing' occurs if 'x' has happened. What this means is, that when z context arrives, the condition for x to occur is triggered by y not having yet occurred, and y is triggered simultaneously as its occurrence is bound to x having occurred. Now the problem is, x and y need not necessarily take place in a linear timeframe from the perspective of the observer. Meaning, if x happens, y will always happen and indeed has already happened for all intents and purposes. Trippy right? Well the thing is, with my KS, as I was writing NASH - and as I explain in detail within the end section of that book - I had a sensation of it 'going off' repeatedly with a sensory experience that helped me to structure the book as I wrote it, confirming more or less to me at least, that this is something that is a crucial part of any stable system generating a coherent emergent structure sans work beforehand. Basically, this is something that guarantees, assuming a competent system being the producer of the work/iterative actor, that this effect will be what narrows down the field within the iteration tunnel securing a coherent work by the end of the process. Even if it's wobbly at the start, and perhaps has hiccoughs in its pacing and/or structure, that it will still be coherent enough to at a minimum if the iterative actor is given the capacity, or someone/thing else wants to, the structure will be sound enough to require minimal editing or other efforts to render it a satisfactory product.

Now this is important to me as part of logic-mysticism as it's a sort of, well, proofing of how something such as stream-of-consciousness producing a coherent work can be rendered even partially, even hypothetically, as a logical function of informatic principles. That we don't really need to wander around in the dark wondering how something such as s.o.c. output can render a work that's coherent when we just apply our minds a bit and experiment without fear of what the output is going to be. I mean, if NASH turned out to be TRASH (sorry couldn't resist) it still would've been a good thing! I mean, it wouldn't have proved it or disproven it in a conclusory manner for most people, but at least for me it probably would've been enough to at least set the idea aside for a good while and perhaps focus on other informatic principles like the stuff in TPM I'm somewhat procrastinating on getting back to, or it even could've opened up other avenues of thought for me if it had failed. Basically, I went in unafraid of what the outcome would be as I was ready for it to yield some form of benefit in my direction regardless of if it was going to produce something worthy of public publishing or not.

And I must say, I'm very happy about the fact that it not only worked but exceeded my expectations, as a method, as an experiment, and as a work all. What I want to say to anyone who might be a bit nervous about putting themselves out their with their work, is that this was one of the most liberating actions I've taken in my life, as far as being self-conscious about what I produce is concerned, and I really cannot encourage enough that if you're reading this and have ever second-guessed yourself if you should try your hand at writing something, just go for it. Maybe you're even good at recursively iterating a whole book and you just haven't tried it yet? Perhaps you have some kind of writing experiment you can or have thought of and feel too nervous to commit to it? Just go for it! You have no idea what you might find out about yourself in doing it.

To continue though, one other thing I want to mention is that one major component of NASH that came through in the iterative process that I hadn't really considered before is the grave importance of helping people to comprehend simultaneities, both in and outside of my work. It's not just to help understand the stuff I do when people read it and to help bridge the 'language barrier' I have between others and myself, but also just in general as I wrote some of the stuff in NASH it became clear that it can genuinely help people as a cognitive tool to have in their everyday life. Be it overcoming some problem habit or trying to come up with a storyboard for a fictional setting, or trying to consider the flavor profile of a meal and the options one might want to add or subtract from it, or even just what activity to do for the day. Being capable of considering multiple things at the same time is not merely a 'neat trick' but just, well, a swiss-army tool for stuff big and small. From making metacognition of the kind that allows for real agency to making small decisions that involve a lot of different possible options a lot easier, it's a real oversight I've had in my work thus far, trying to work on ways to help people 'get there' in their own cognition.

The best I've got at the moment outside of the stuff in NASH like pointing out how you can hold all sides of a small object at once even if you're not able to see all sides of an object at once, and recommending koans that deal with holding concepts in superposition, is to consider stuff like the 'simultaneity tripwire' I posted above. Like, how two instances can be simulcausal even if they might appear from a linear perspective to be retrocausal, and how this schema can be applied across domains rather than having to do merely with standard cause->effect chains.

The next bit I want to talk about is that the actual process was rather exhilarating but also absolutely exhausting. I'm still reeling a bit and feeling the cognitive effects a full day later from the finishing touches being put on NASH and frankly I'm going to need to take  a few full days just doing 'normal' stuff not having anything to do with L-M for the sake of my poor noggin. It's really, really not easy to do s.o.c. coherent and at-speed for as long as I did, and although I drank about 25-28 500ml bottles of oolong/chamomile/peppermint tea (which I lovingly refer to as 'philosotea') over the 50ish hours and three sessions it took to create, the creation process' toll wasn't really lessened or at least I hope the toll wasn't lessened as I struggle to comprehend how I could've been any more put out by the sheer amount of focus I had such that I slept twelve hours after getting the stuff all handled between KDP and the copyright office. I'm saying all of this to note that, while I absolutely encourage anyone and everyone to try their hand at this, and to try their hand at writing in general, just know that it's not something without effort and you should definitely prepare better than I did both for your manner of entrance into the process of longform s.o.c. and your exit plan. Aftercare, like what kind of stuff you might want to have ready if you're going to undertake it in the same manner I did. Because man I really cannot express enough how exhausting, mentally, it was even if I didn't feel it as much inside the process. 

As far as NASH as a work is concerned, I am convinced I'll make another work like it after I finish TPM, then GR. Before I make Glyphic Competency for sure, as I want to have another sort of 'in-between' book. It just 'feels' right for there to be a bridge in-between The Philosopher's Goggles (the book) and The Philosopher's Map. I didn't really plan on there being a book between the two and I certainly didn't plan for it to be NASH, but it feels somehow correct. Though when I do that book I'm certainly not going to have the same time-constraint mindset. As I said, it's very taxing, enough that I will leave the 50ish 17.8k word NASH as my personal best 'speedrun' time. Title Only Any% I guess, lmao.

As I've done this all s.o.c. like NASH though with much less of a sense of urgency, although I'm not really sure if I covered all that I might've wanted to, I'm glad that I did decide to go ahead and try my hand at a little more s.o.c. output outside of it to sort of demonstrate what I'm talking about. I'm now wracking my brain a bit... I guess there's a few more topics to discuss.

The handwriting aspect, boy. My hand was literally popping loudly at the joints and felt like I imagine having an attack of rheumatism at a hundred or so years of age might feel. It seriously wasn't great, and as you might imagine there was an icepack or two involved. I'd chalk that up as one of the considerations, if you're reading this and it sounds interesting as an exercise, to have ahead of time. That if you're doing it handwritten that you will absolutely have hand cramps and joint problems if you're doing it at-speed. I'd also say that while there's no shame, at all, in not being able to write in a manner that meets your thought flow while doing s.o.c. - practice makes perfect, and I believe nothing I do is beyond anyone else - it's probably a sign you're not really ready yet for doing this 'challenge'. I got stuck a lot when I tried for the first time months ago. I'm pretty sure just doing the amount of writing it took for TPG and the amount I've been doing for TPM is what sort of solidified my capacity for this in the interim to the extent that I was capable of keeping up. Not because my capacity to do s.o.c. was necessarily limited by, well, let's say that my KS and how it works as you can read about in NASH gives me a massive natural advantage in doing it, but because I had this almost neurotic perfectionism and inability to be satisfied with what I would write that I'd stop nearly every sentence because of my doubt about whether or not it 'looked good enough'. Which is one of the reasons, and I apologize if it's ever annoying, I am so repetitive and insistent with the message that you shouldn't doubt yourself if you want to write. Just write. Just do it and hold it up to a reasonable standard, because if you're anything like me as a person you might really be the only thing standing between yourself and actually putting your ideas out there.

So I guess that's a thing to get into, that if you're having trouble doing s.o.c. at speed and it's because of that kind of doubt, definitely get rid of it. But if it's a mechanical problem like you have some kind of physical disadvantage, I'm sure you can do it if you practice, or better yet just don't worry about the time constraint. Just do it, if you feel you can. Seriously I know I've said it enough times but I'm a massive advocate for other people to put themselves and their ideas out there if they've ever doubted themselves. It's a very liberating thing to do. So really don't feel pressured to have some kind of time constraint. You can just do it to practice, maybe try to feel out if it could help you with some other aspect of your writing like not being able to get past some hurdle in fleshing out a character or world aspect of a fictional work, perhaps some kind of writer's block for how to phrase a section of a biography, whatever. Try doing it just as a means of having a 'battering ram' for that stupid wall everyone comes against time to time known as 'writer's block'. Even I get it and I've got the writer's block equivalent of a neutron bomb! I mean, for me it's usually procrastination rearing its ugly head but still. I know what it's like and I can tell you that I'm very glad that it's not really difficult for me to overcome as a result of this skill, given that it's a problem with getting the output 'put out' rather than the usual equivalent I have of procrastination due to the project having multiple parts.

I guess I'll finish by mentioning that it is indeed the problem I'm having right now in TPM that led to me making NASH on a sort of whim/gut feeling. Upon realizing that I have some seriously strict limits in Microsoft Word on the size of the graphs I can use I'm now having to re-tool or remake a lot of the graphs I made for/about Conceptual Geometry and it's a big pain. Not only that but I'm having to mull about wondering how to go about making some kind of Internet resource for anyone who wants to access the original or full-size versions of the images to look more closely at them and I'm sort of considering if it's worth it or not to make something like an imgur gallery or whatever. So I'm kind of stuck at that, and while I know I'll get over that hump pretty soon after I fully recover from the process of creating NASH it's still hanging over my head like a particularly dull sword of Damocles. So if there's a good while between now and the next blog post or TPM's release that's a big part of why. I'm sort of stuck figuring out the more technical aspect of TPM, as pretty much all of the other 'stuff' is done except for the actual, y'know, typing.

So, with that, this long and meandering product was just something I wanted to put out there in the ether somewhere, particularly here. A sort of long-ish s.o.c. 'debrief' if you will from the incredible time-warp that was the creation of NASH, and a signal flare for anyone who might be interested in a book that is explicitly not a self-help book, to go check it out for only $2.99 USD on Amazon KDP - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FD6ZWQBD - and see what a book entirely authored without any plan other than the title looks like.

Cya in the next blog post, possibly outlined ahead of time but almost certainly written first as usual.