Howard Rheingold asks about “Tools for thinking about knowledge?”, and this is a great prompt to clarify my own imagination.
I responded on Mastodon: I can best visualize thinking/ ToolsForThought as a large table while knowledge/ PKM is a big filing cabinet. Put snippets from the drawers on the table and rearrange them.
And therefore, musing about thinking can be facilitated by a modern mapping application. When I played with a puzzle like the famous planarity.net I could wonderfully philosophize about how a dauntingly complex network of associations could eventually be disentangled, and I continued with my own puzzle.
Such a map depicts what is IMHO the most important ingredient of thinking, associations. And it provides a palpable experience (think Murphy Paul) of the distance of the associations. Distant associations are the core of innovative thinking, and the gradual untangling of a complex map involves just the reducing of the very distances of related things, to see new connections.
(A simple map is, of course, not such a lucrative product to sell as an all-in-one TfT app, and my tool is not for sale. It doesn’t even require any installation or registration; it can be launched just from the Downloads folder. Then find the relaxing puzzle under Advanced > Miscellaneous.)
Maybe you also see another feature of a finished map such as my ‘after’ version above. There are parts that are merely hierarchical and do not add to the complexity and overlap problems. They are just ‘complicated’ (from Latin complicare “to fold together”), not ‘complex’ (from Latin plectere “weave, braid, twine”). As you rearrange the map, these parts gradually take their shape and gestalt by separating and isolating items and structures. (Which reminds us that the brain is a distinction engine, and one part of it is particularly good at isolating and focussing on the narrow contexts of deep knowledge about a frame of topics.)
The rest of the map cannot be reduced to such trees, but consists of associations connecting multiple topical areas. (This reminds us of metaphors which were key to language development, and which are the strength of the opposite part of brain operation.) These true network structures cannot be reduced to trees and sometimes they cannot even get rid of their overlaps. Because complexity cannot be simplified without adulteration, it can only be made clearer by rearranging its map.
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