💾 Archived View for breadpunk.club › ~pretzeltruck › log › visual-thought.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Visualizing ideas through space and time

Ideas and knowledge are kinda similar to other life forms, at least in my naive interpretation. They reproduce through conversation, whether direct or through books, gemini pages or other media. They mutate by transmission alone, being told slightly different and understood slightly different. Thereby they may lose something, but also gain something, depending on what other ideas, thoughts and so on are present in those who disseminate and those who intercept and absorb.

For some ideas, we may assume that it's easy to pinpoint them to a certain person or group at a certain time and space. Whether this is accurate, given that we experience and gather information provided by others all day is a different matter. Nevertheless, let's assume that we could actually pinpoint the origin of ideas and isolate them somehow. Imagine a world-map or some other form of visual representation of space and track some idea through time, like an animation.

For example, any famous book. At first the author thought about it, put his mind to the task - there is a single bright spot on the map. As time goes on, spots may light up on the map. Some time later on, the spots may become more numerous and appear further from the origin. When the book is translated into another language, we may see a lot of simultaneously appearing spots in a so far blank region of earth. Some ideas are more widespread, others may flicker here and there, then vanish. Some ideas could even come up multiple times at multiple places and times, without any direct link between them.

I really like the idea of such a tool or just the thought of it, just envision what kind of pattern some idea, book or else may generate.