My problem with writing has never been composition. It’s organization, logical progression of thoughts within a structure that makes sense to your average reader. My brain might be incredibly logical functionally but that’s not what often gets related in my writing. Sometimes the flow is near perfect, but rarely. And when I funnel too much, I hold back or get misaligned in my intentions. Where chat was frustrating me was that it was simply mirroring my rambles in its own way. Yes it would have interesting “insights” but I don’t need a chat. I need a structured brief around my ideas, which often get obscured in my long winded exposition… I just need a sort of template, a gameplan that doesn’t go off the rails. I need a lens, not a word salad maker (like ChatGPT, for example).

I suck at mind mapping (one of the trendier tools that people pay for these days) because I think too four dimensionally to be able to flatten it into two dimensions. To think my 4D thought process was the issue all along. I don’t think on a grid or even spherically. I consider ideas not just in 3D space, but also those points along a fourth axis of time, space, and context. No wonder language falls short so often! Has that been my problem all along?

But if my 4D thinking has been my issue all along, then it’s also the solution. I just need to find a way to triangulate reference points more effectively, not have a program that’s designed to just agree with me (i.e. a popular LLM) and keep me in a feedback loop.

Let me try to explain what I mean by four dimensional thinking. Generally, most people think in sort of a grid pattern, plotting points and making flow charts. I find these frustratingly limiting, even if sometimes useful in presenting certain aspects of a complex nature. The third dimension is seeking depth and context, where even mind maps get a bit too muddled to be useful. For a long time this is how I thought I was thinking… that I have a more “sphere of influence” type of thought. This is considered “genius” level intellectualizing. It’s like creating a stellar neighborhood of an idea and those relating to it. It’s neat, but then my mind brings gravity into it… exploring how these stellar neighborhoods fit into the galaxy of my learnings and observations and projections. 

This is where the fourth dimension of thought comes in and most people lose me. It’s the territory of the Einsteins. It’s thought experimentation that breaks down reality far beyond the surface and even inner spheres of concepts and grinds them down into a powder of first principles and constituent elements. I then need to concoct a recipe to turn all this back into something that resembles a superior version of my previous understanding of universal truth. That is, even the most seemingly trivial concept can shift the entire paradigm of one’s thinking. This happens to me more than I like to admit. 

So, this 4D thinking is something I must explore further. I apparently don’t even know my own mind. And the words are going to be insufficient in some of these explorations but I will do my best. 

Yesterday I was stumbling over my words like a mad woman. But I was circling some big ideas that require charting out. I failed to understand the gravity of these seemingly unrelated spheres of thought interacting with one another. I’ve thought a lot recently about how every thing, every object, has its own gravity. I think about how we and everything else around us are made up of complex electrical fields. Nothing, per se, is “solid” as it appears. We romanticize our sensual observations. Everything is atomic. Subatomic really. 

The latter Foundation novels (books four and five) from Isaac Asimov introduce the concept of Gaia and Galaxia, that everything can share a consciousness, even the wall. Even our wastes… yeah, that’s brought up a couple times. But we do have relations with all the inanimate things around us. The animated ones even more so. When we eat, we take that plant and animal matter and raise its level of consciousness, according to this idea. Yet I think we already live in Gaia, but we’re so dimly aware of it. We are all interconnected whether we believe it or not, and these interconnections are fracturing at an unprecedented rate. That’s why the world feels broken. It is, in fact, breaking down from abuse and neglect. And there are many physical causes, yes, but it’s all unnecessary. 

I say often we have the tech to feed, clothe, and house everyone alive today and to allow for a significantly greater number, too. It is the distribution of resources and a severe neglect for the general welfare that’s the problem. It’s not even so much “capitalism” but the extremity of its applications. We should be living in a positive-sum world, not a zero-sum one. During the space race, human tech evolved dramatically. Had it continued, we’d be decades ahead of where we are now. We would be a lot more cooperative and suffering would be considerably less, for tech isn’t just gadgets and conveniences, but how we operate it and relate with it. 

If AI can and should automate redundant and mundane tasks, humans then should be put to work making sure everyone has what they need… (And I’ll add, be encouraged and incentivized to build skillsets that allow us to do meaningful human-centric work.) It only means sacrificing some excess and prioritizing stability and quality over planned obsolescence and quantity. Even human beings ourselves are targeted for planned obsolescence at this point. People speak of population control when the real issue is that we must give said population the tools to succeed. Which we are not… 

I believe that the fourth dimensional thinking I was talking about before is something that many autistic people have, or perhaps all, and this extra dimension can make “regular” human contact unbearable, as it long has been for me. My brain picks up on subtleties that I don’t know how to process. It’s taken me until now to understand how to make sense of a lot of it, and none of it is in the favor of non autistic individuals. This is how Emily and I can get along so well; while we have very different perspectives and life experiences, we are able to connect on some fourth dimensional wavelength. Let’s call it a 4D inflection point. And this is enough. But I think all humans, the vast majority I would say, are capable but unwilling or unknowing how to connect with each other properly.