Writing as a p-zombie

(Warning: This writing is for its own sake. There is no other point)

If all the entries in this ongoing writing experiment be this shallow, then I don’t think I need the whole half-an-hour, because half of that would suffice. So now I have a choice. Do I try to keep writing to fill in the remainder of the allotted time, or do I just admit that I have nothing else to say and stop when I feel like I should stop?

I guess the most reasonable thing to do is the latter, so I would try not stopping this time to prove the point. Let’s see.

What’s really making the writing process long is the urge to edit while writing. It’s like you don’t want to commit to the first words that come to mind. In fact, let’s clarify that by writing we’re not actually writing, we’re typing. I guess the difference is that editing while attempting to write is very easy with modern text editors, as opposed to the old-school way of actually holding a pen and writing on paper. Editing there is messy because one always still sees the failed attempts at encapsulating thought, while on text editors, it’s as if no run-on sentence has ever happened, not that I don’t leave them be anyway.

But editing while writing is bad, because it disrupts the flow of thought, thoughts so flimsy that a little distraction will cut the thread from the spool of randomness from which all thoughts come from. I am imagining a sewing machine just now. Going along with prompts is weird.

Just about now I’m doing a read over on everything I have written so far. That’s how shallow my short-term memory must be. Where was I? Wait.

Alright, done re-reading. I have used ten minutes. I have twenty minutes to go. Is it really that bad? Wow if I actually went along with what I said at the beginning I would end up writing quite a lot of gibberish. Let’s do so anyway.

How about taking a stab at some of the supposedly deep thoughts from the previous entries that started all these. I mean, admittedly, the prompts that caused all those are the podcasts by academics employed in Philosophy departments peddling books.

A snag just now, there was a paragraph before this using the pronoun I a little too many times for my taste so that has to go. Maybe that’s the reason why writing is so hard. One can only do so much to avoid the first and second person. Writing as if one does not exist is impossible, but if we don’t know any better that seems like what we’re trying to do. Anything that scratches anything more than the surface is forbidden, and that’s what makes this writing exercise a bore.

I am again thinking about machine-learning generated texts. Those texts are like this. Just words that follow grammatical rules, I mean in so far as I can follow them, the machines probably are able to follow the rules more rigidly than I ever could, I used to use the Hemingway editor app just for that, now I don’t bother anymore, but then, also, one has to be forgiven when not using one’s own language, both figuratively literally and literally literally. Heresy, I know. That has to account for something too, right?

Alright twelve minutes to go. The easiness of this is so hard. Just come up with words that don’t mean anything. I can’t do it.

I’m going to transfer this to the CMS now. Hopefully tomorrow the entry would be more meaningful. Eight minutes left. This time, let’s say there has been an attempt, a proof writing this way is not the way to go.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/15/2020:
  1. I like Dr. Sara Walker‘s take on what information is. Think of “math as a kind of information, one that evolved out of biology…the kind of information most copyable between different physical systems… abstraction our minds evolved really good at being represented in different media.
  2. Crash Into Me
  3. There’s always somewhere anything that’s something accumulate.
  4. So, apparently there’s now a live action of Extra Credits History. Cool.
  5. This was playing at the start of me writing this entry. This was playing just now.