👋 Hello and Welcome!
Since November 2021, I’ve been using an Antinet Zettelkasten to keep track of my thoughts (and generate insights). If you don’t know what an Antinet is, I recommend these 3 sources to dig deeper:
I recently finished reading Antinet Zettelkasten - A Knowledge System That Will Turn Into a Profilic Reader, Researcher and Writer by Scott Scheper, and it is making me question my basic assumptions about consciousness.
🗃 The Antinet
Antinet is a term coined by Scott, the more well known term is the Zettelkasten (which is German for notebox). The creator (Niklas Luhmann) used a specific type of notebox, one which followed 4 principles.
Because these principles were not well known, the term Zettelkasten started to get used for systems which were not at all like Luhmann’s. Zettelkasten just means notebox, so technically any box that contains notes could be called a Zettelkasten. Scott thought it would be useful to have a term specifically for the type of notebox Luhmann used and coined a new term: the Antinet.
The ANTI in Antinet is an acronym for the 4 major principles of the notebox method. The 4 principles are: Analog, Numeric-alpha, Tree, Index, followed by network.
📰 Analog
The system must be a physical thing, with physical paper and physical handwriting. There are a lot of tactile feelings that come from having physical objects. There’s also a lot of spatial memory. When you write a digital file, you just remember it’s somewhere in the folder. In real life, you can remember the exact location of a notecard base on spatial memory.
🔢 Numeric-Alpha
Every single card has a specific numeric-alpha address which acts as a coordinate. So for example, I have a card about the idea that humans use past experiences related to the general size of an object to speed up our depth perception processes. Perhaps we could replicate such a system in neural networks? (though it would be very tough to do so) The coordinates of this card are: 5303.0b
The addresses / coordinates allow me to insert any card I want anywhere in the system, but once it’s there, it will stay there. What this allows me to do is to always place a card closest to the idea which is most similar on another card.
🌳 Tree
The Antinet follows a tree structure in the sense that the adresses on the cards branch from each other. For example, I have this card about evolving inputs and outputs
In the notecards linked above, the addresses are as follow:
- 3251.4 - 3251.4.0 - 3251.4.0.1 - 3251.4a
As you can see, .4 has multiple branches (.4.0 and .4a), and there are more in my Antinet which I didn’t take out for this example. This branching capacity allows me to build from past thoughts, improve, or correct them. In fact, I don’t believe in the ideas of 2 out of the 4 notecards I’ve shown you. My opinions have changed since I’ve written them, but I keep them to have a paper trail of how my thoughts evolve over time.
📜 Index
The final part of the Antinet is the index. The index acts as a map which links human readable titles and keywords to the addresses on the cards. The first card I showed you (about depth perception) is keyworded as “pulling from past experiences“.
The reason for using a broad keyterm is that when I come across more ideas that pull from past experiences, when I navigate over to this area to file them, it will give me the chance to possibly link the 2 ideas together instead of keeping them in separate silos.
Here is an example index card:
👻 Ghost In The Box
These 4 principles combined give rise to what Luhmann called the ghost in the box. Once you reach a critical mass of notes, it feels as though there is another consciousness which emerges from it. It practically becomes another person which you are communicating with. Specifically it is your past self. I’ve been using my Antinet for a little over a year, and recently made an estimate that I have ~1200 cards in there. The feeling emerged last month.
There seems to be a critical mass at which you start to find more and more unplanned connections. There is some kind of tipping point where suddenly it starts bringing up random cards which are somehow related exactly to what you’re doing, but in a very different way.
The feeling is very hard to explain, but it’s there. It makes me question, whether consciousness requires life, or if it can somehow emerge from static objects.
Truly fascinating for me but for what may seem totally different but completely analogous reasons.
It is the eternal return of the return. Inadvertently you have confirmed ideals of McLuhan and rediscovered even restructuring through a phenomenological personal experience the work and philosophy of John Dewey
Mcluhan stated that the medium is the message, in this the information gathered in the cards becomes attached to the medium of the card. It is inherently different from identical information stored digitally. You access it differently, experience it differently and this its latent meaning and thus your understanding and all subsequent, shall we say experience of such is different, this includes the development of the neuro pathways needed to access it.
Indeed the medium is the message here.
In this medium your organizational structure and alpha numeric organization is remarkably analogous to the structure created by John Dewey. He even described in a way , the concious you describe.
Now as a dweller of the 900's myself (see Dewey's system) i love this return to the return, historic empathy at its finest.
Oddly I have oft thought of the the exact nature of the change in epistemological conscious since the advent of digitized personal memory.
This reverse engineering of that previous state of conscious comming from one on the other side going back and the subsequent observations have been extremely interesting and useful to understanding the historic paradigm shift in conscious we are currently experience.
love your description of "ghost in the box" and your first-hand experience of it!