[HN Gopher] How Typing Transformed Nietzsche's Consciousness
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How Typing Transformed Nietzsche's Consciousness
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 24 points
Date : 2024-12-04 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| exprofmaddy wrote:
| This story is also told in Nicholas Carr's bestseller 'The
| Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains'
| https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16
| namaria wrote:
| Small nitpick
|
| > It took hold of human consciousness 3,000 years ago and changed
| it, with the written word representing thought itself.
|
| Writing is at least about 5500 years old.
| setopt wrote:
| Sounds like they count from approximately the origin of the
| first "alphabet" (including vowels), while writing itself is
| much much older.
|
| Btw, I recommend anyone who hasn't looked at it before to read
| up a bit on the history of writing. It shocked me a bit that
| writing has only been _independently_ invented 4 times in known
| human history (Egypt, Middle East, China, Mesoamerica), with
| all other writing systems being either inspired or derived from
| nearby systems.
|
| The English/Latin alphabet, for example, is a distant
| descendant of the Phoenician abjad, which itself was ultimately
| derived from Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Some traces are left today,
| like the letter "A" looking a bit like an up-side down bulls
| head with horns... because it actually descends from the
| hieroglyph for bull.
|
| Interestingly, Arab, Hebrew, and Indic scripts are all derived
| from the same Phoenician ancestor, despite how different they
| all look today...
| codpiece wrote:
| Thank you, this is fascinating! Do you have any recommended
| reading?
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > Interestingly, Arab, Hebrew, and Indic scripts are all
| derived from the same Phoenician ancestor, despite how
| different they all look today...
|
| Same with Thai or... Mongolian - a not so distant cousin of
| Aramaic!
|
| The fun thing about Mongolian is that to notice its
| similarity to Aramaic, you'll need to tilt your head by 90
| degrees.
|
| Compare this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#
| /media/File:M...
|
| With this: https://www.avesta.org/fonts/index.html
|
| Now look at the first picture again and tilt your head.
|
| I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that, although I studied
| Middle Persian and Avestan (both of which rely on a variant
| of Aramaic), it took me almost 15 years to notice that. Now,
| it's impossible to unsee.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| > _To be precise, he purchased a top-of-the-line portable
| Malling-Hansen writing ball, which was sent specially to him from
| its inventor in Copenhagen._
|
| Wikiepdia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansen_Writing_Ball
| etyp wrote:
| Nietzsche is a very interesting example since there is a very
| obvious shift in his philosophy from The Birth of Tragedy to,
| say, The Gay Science. I understand the argument that the style of
| writing noticeably changes, and I'd be okay attributing that to
| "automated writing," but a lot of the shift in Nietzsche's work
| feels like a pretty drastic shift in ideology. I'm not convinced
| that shift entirely, or even largely, comes from the shift in
| medium.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Typing has a certain reward function to it: that snap-snap-snap
| is satisfying. I wonder if he just got addicted to it?
| quantadev wrote:
| For someone who writes all day every day, their ability to
| explore ideas is somewhat limited by the speed of their writing
| mechanism (hand v.s. machine), because they're not really "just
| sitting and thinking" most of the time but trying to "capture
| each thought" before moving to the next idea, which is laborious
| and slow.
|
| So simply by being able to move faster along the process means
| you can fit more ideas into your short term memory, because
| you're traversing thru the ideas at a faster rate. Once you can
| fit more ideas in, then each idea can have room to become more
| complex. I think that's the "mechanism" (pun intended) by which
| your consciousness/intelligence improves simply by being able to
| write faster.
|
| It's probably partially also why stimulant drugs can make people
| appear more intelligent. The faster you move thru ideas, the more
| information you can fit into working/reasoning memory. It's the
| same thing as lengthening the "context window" in an LLM btw.
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