Okay, fuck it. Let’s start weird. My first actual “let’s write every day and blog a lot of thoughts that are half-baked as a learning in public experiment” post of 2023 absolutely cannot be another “Hey there! I’m starting a blog! I hope to post again soon!” thing.

So I love note-taking and productivity apps. All the things that fall under the rubric of Personal Knowledge Management, or #hashtag #pkm. My relationship with #pkm is long-standing. When you were in college spending your student loan money on clothes or beer or whatever, I was subscribing to Remember the Milk and Evernote. In 2002, I spent hundred of dollars on a hand-held pen scanner so I could laboriously drag it over individual lines of text and then get them as a plain text file. I have no memory of how I used this information.

Why? Because it was cool. I still think it’s cool. In the years since that pen I have changed products dozens of times. And something that has often struck me, as I once again try to (re)organize my #pkm tool of the moment, is that I’m spending a lot more time and energy on these tools than I’m getting out of them. My use of these tools is not really rational or healthy. And when I spend time in #pkm forms I’m struck by how… deeply weird many of our relationships with these tools are? Just how much time and energy people put into building these complex bespoke task managers and note-taking systems. Yes, a lot of the big standard tools suck, but do they suck this much? Or are we doing something else?

Anyway, I stumbled upon my notes from Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel the other day, and found this quote about the phenomenal self-model (PSM) which he defines as “the conscious model of the organism”:

Whatever is part of your PSM, whatever is part of your conscious Ego, is endowed with a feeling of “mineness,” a conscious sense of ownership. It is experienced as your limb, your tactile sensation, your feeling, your body, or your thought.

Thomas Metzinger

What I wonder, and this is pure conjecture, is if part of what makes my use of #pkm and the #pkm discourse so weird maybe that what a lot of us are trying to do is externalize our self-model? We are trying to take our daily notes and weekly reviews and book annotations and habit journals and turn that into part of our model of ourselves. Later, he says:

Whenever our brains successfully pursue the ingenious strategy of creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious. First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our body and our psychological states but also our relationship to the past and the future, as well as to other conscious beings. The internal image of the person-as-a-whole is the phenomenal Ego, the “I” or “self ” as it appears in conscious experience; therefore, I use the terms “phenomenal Ego” and “phenomenal self ” interchangeably. The phenomenal Ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image—namely, the conscious self-model, or PSM. By placing the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center is what we experience as ourselves, the Ego. It is the origin of what philosophers often call the first-person perspective. We are not in direct contact with outside reality or with ourselves, but we do have an inner perspective. We can use the word “I.” We live our conscious lives in the Ego Tunnel.

THomas Metzinger

If I am right, we’re not really taking notes. We’re trying to create an embedded external model/image/representation of our ego — our psychological states, relationships, past and future selves — in the form of markdown, outliners, tag and folder structures.

Will we ever be able to look into the void of our own ego tunnel, infinitely reflected back at us like a house of mirrors, in the form of tables and tabs and unchecked todo items?