The Need to Read

Ok, I’m confused. Do you take notes in Obsidian or in Zettelkasten? Or both?

Oh, definitely. In fact, Qur'an shares the same root as recite/read and one translation for it is The Recitation (also connoting a lecture). But it is addressing a plurality of audiences.

For the messenger recipient of this message, recite is more sensible, since the knowledge that he lacks is imparted directly by an angel, so he doesn't need to lex and parse, and can just relay and recite. Possibly, though this is certainly not the case with him, the messenger doesn't even need to get semantic with a message - just go and deliver it. Like IP. (Though ours likely has various ears doing deep readings..;)

For us, we have to lex and parse (read & eval), and then we can recite (print). Just like a REPL.

So what's interesting here with these opening verses of the Sura Clot of Blood is that in my 'reading' of this book it is an invitation and instruction on how to read this book.

We are urged to read/recite ['the Book'], in/with the name of our Lord. We have a 'Lord', named 'Ar-Rahman, the Infinitely Good, sometimes rendered Most Gracious*. IT's accomplishments we are told include Creating and Teaching. Creating human. How? From a clot of blood. Then teaches it. How? With a Pen.

And after this, this creature called Man has new knowledge, new information, that it didn't have before (or possibly could never hope to independently obtain).

So, continuing my 'reading', I decided to treat this book as a Hypertext. Without nasty markup, however. So the avenue left is that semantics are links, stuff like that. So here, a reasonable place to start doing full text search to look for clusters with 'Ar-Rahman' and 'Teaching'. Because remember, we're supposed to read in/with our Lord's name.

Sure enough, there is a whole Sura called 'Ar-Rahman'. And right off the bat, looks like we took the correct semantic link:

   In the name of Allah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

   ar-Rahman

      Taught/teaches the Qur'an       
      Created Man   

      Taught him eloquence/expression [for reciting]

      The movement of the Sun & the Moon 
          is *Computed*.              [new information - it's a simulation]

      And the Stars and the Trees     [cosmic & life form scale] 
          prostrate themselves        [no freewill for them/deterministic]

      And the Heaven IT raised        [spatial or mind/conscious expansion]
      and *imposed* 'the Balance'     [? tbd]

      That you not transgress         [it regulates]
      within the Balance              [it's all around us..]

      -- how to eval -- 

      And establish weight in justice [evaluate (REPL) with careful weighting (decision trees)]
      and do not make deficient/discount 
      the Balance.                    [which is the TAO]

      -- continue REPL to load full 'read-with' library --

After which you can read the rest with 'the understanding' that you got from 'Ar-Rahman', per instructions of reading in/with this name.

The rest of the Sura is oddly Buddhist in flavor. A list of reminders of various favors of God, punctuated by a repeated chorus pointedly asking, almost in an accusative 'i-told-you-so' voice 'Which of the favors of your lord, you twain deny?' Now keep in mind some of these favors are in Paradise (good stuff) and the others are in Hell (very nasty stuff). But apparently, they are all 'favors'! And a 'twain' is involved. That would be the sentient 'mind' that needs 'duals' to 'read' reality. +/-. top/down. left/right. good/bad. etc.

So. We are in a simulation. It is governed by TAO. Not everything enjoys choice. We do. Duality makes us see a unity as good and bad, while in actuality it is all good. Optimistic readings, only please. Happy readings.

* God (in general in quite a few religions) has nice names and scary names, corresponding to Grace and Majesty. This is a very nice name. Good and Generous, unlike any.

Thank you.

Did you use any particular book or blog post when mapping the method to the app? I've found one book, but not sure if good https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Obsidian-ebook/d...

There's a gem in the notes at the end of this essay which resonates strongly with me:

By "good at reading" I don't mean good at the mechanics of reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the page so much as extracting meaning from the words.

The first lesson is that reading is not simply parsing glyhphs and assembling words. It's contextualising that information, assimilating it, analysing and synthesizing it. Strong shades of Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book.

It also brings to mind a recent Ezra Klein podcast episode with Maryanne Wolf, on the neurophysiology of reading:

If you think about language, that is a natural process. There’s a genetic program in which it unfolds. There’s nothing like that for reading. We were never meant to read. But what is amazing is that the brain does have this almost semi-miraculous capacity to make new circuits within itself using the processes that are genetically there but in new ways. So what the brain has is the capacity to make novel circuits. And the invention, the human invention of reading, required a new circuit. So the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols 6,000 years ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...>

Transcript: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-k...>

TL;DR: we've only been reading for 6,000 years, far too short for dedicated neurological hardware to evolve --- our brains are doing this in software as a learned behaviour.

Language: you're born with the innate capacity to do this, with dedicated neurological regions, speech hardware (the larynx, tongue, and other physiology), and possibly some hearing adaptations.

Reading? You've got to teach children how to do that, starting with alphabets, phonetics, meaning, and all the stuff we layer over atomic symbols: simile and metaphor, idioms, cultural touchstones, and all that jazz. And we do really well at that, at least at basic levels. Though if you look more deeply into actual skills, it turns out that literacy levels vary tremendously across the population, in ways which are not nearly as evident in, say, spoken language. See: "Adult Literacy in the United States" https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp> (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146>)

> In my experience the deeper insights came on the second page about 30 minutes in, after depleting my brain of its ruminations and searching for more thoughts to fill up the page.

She also mentions that this happens 1 1/2 pages in on average which I would agree with. I write using Notability on an iPad and my handwriting is fairly small.

I just looked through a few. I write about 8 words per row and there's 36 rows. Around 300 words on each page, so ~900 words for morning writing.

I do feel you on the burning out part. I almost always get at least 2 pages in a day. Sometimes more than 3, but I timebox it and move on without feeling bad if I don't always get 3.