Do software-generated "connections" really generate inspiration?

Posted by Manfred
Oct 27, 2007 at 12:41 PM

I don’t want to “whip a dead horse,” so this is my last post on this.
First, it was probably a bad idea to post last night after a full day’s of work. There are some more typos in my message. The most important one in this sentence: “But from the fact that making connections does not HAVE TO feel like thinking it does not follow that it is false to say that it CAN and often DOES go hand in hand with a conscious effort that characterizes thinking. And that’s all I wanted to say.” The first “thinking” should be “linking.”

Secondly, with regard to to some of the last comments. If you want a full account of “linking” or “thinking” you need to make a lot of distinctions, of course. But my aim was not to offer a full theory of linking or thinking. I made what I took (and take) to be an uncontroversial claim:

(i) conscious thinking is characterized (at least in part) by efforts to make connections between different bits of informations, ideas, or thoughts.

I concluded from this:

(ii) Therefore, consciously making wiki or hyperlinks between different topics or documents represents a form of thinking (and one that I find useful as one of the first steps in dealing with any kind of subject).

I neither claimed that it was the only kind of thinking nor that it represents a priviliged form of thinking.

That’s all, folks ...

Oh ... E. M. Forster comes to mind as an afterthought: ““Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” But that is an entirely different matter!