Promises Made, Promises Broken

This post is from a period before SPLectrum. I wrote a small number of posts, but wasn’t exactly a productive writer. It was not until the arrival of AI that productivity in writing was unlocked for me. I had an idea of the style I wanted, I had topics in mind, but putting it all together was were it failed - each time. It makes me smile when I read this back, I really couldn’t get it fired up …

I started this blog nearly three years ago. I laid out the course of learning I was embarking on, with a blog to accompany it. Some posts were created. More were promised but never materialised.

Oddly enough, it isn’t because I drifted off the subject. On the contrary — I am more focused and dedicated than I was three years ago. It’s the writing part that let me down. Thinking piled up faster than the words could carry it, and for a long stretch I chose the thinking over the writing. Not regretted, but it left a gap on the public side.

So what have I been up to? Getting a better grounding in the history of philosophy, the history of civilisations, and digging further into evolution and the origin of life than I had managed before. Long reading sessions, plenty of false starts, occasional moments where something clicked. I wouldn’t claim I have it sorted — the more you read in any of these areas the less sorted anything feels — but I am a lot more comfortable with what I know and with what I don’t, and I am beginning to see where the questions connect.

The biggest shift is that the material wants a structure I didn’t have before. In the early days I wrote whatever was on my mind, which is fine for beginning but not enough for building. I have decided to split the subject matter into three areas:

Philosophy and the brain
Evolution and the brain
The big picture of evolution

The brain sits at the intersection of the first two — it is where thinking meets biology. The third is where biology meets everything else: chemistry, time, the slow unfolding of what there is.

The next posts will fill in each area. New promise made — let’s see what happens.

It took me another two years to figure out that it was language that I was after. And it was a software project and AI that pointed it out to me.

This post is from an earlier moment in the walk(24/11/2024). This post is part of the preamble, about happening before SPLectrum saw the light of day.

Photo: Jaleel Akbash / Unsplash