In the midst of the crash I got serious about my partitions, and for now I’m working everything off a 12 of 48 GB lovely one, with almost a terabyte of storage locker behind it barely touched–4/835ths, by one measure. An absurdist fraction.

Where does the mind end and
the rest of the world begin?

A frothy fluffy little philosophical question that I think ends up mattering a great deal.

Your brain lives inside your head, and only there. But where, love, is your mind at?

Let’s start with this idea that you can have a second brain, an add-on garage to your first one.

That’s what a cellphone is to the average, and a real computer to the rest. Secondbrainers say: upload and offload all that noisy distracting data to your device, and free up the original brain for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, such as they are in these devolved days.

The concept offers itself as new and revolutionary. But an earlier and better version of second-brainerism has been around for 25 years or so, courtesy of Messrs. Clark and Chalmers …

It’s called the Extended Mind Theory, and it accounts for artificial silicon-based data stores, but also points toward a lot of other things Out In The World as extensions of: the brain, maybe, the mind maybe. Consciousness?

Rupert Sheldrake picks up Chalmers and Clark and runs with them.
Short version
Long version

So do, more recently, the advocates of the Second Brain as a ‘productivity tool‘.

An amazingly high number of these are young, rich, and even doctors or students in medical fields, the example above included*.

Nothing against these folk really, but I was pretty off-put by a lot of this approach, especially when they started talking about how second brains can be put to work as ‘profit funnels’ and other capitalistic shit like that. As always, I’m fine with money and having it. But only to a point.

I still wanted to Build a Second Brain, though, and it was hunting for software to help with that, that led me down this rabbit hole in the first place.

I found something more compelling to me. It’s called Zettlr.

In my NSHO, Zettlr isn’t yet fully realized software. But just as with the AntiX operating system, which appealed to me for reasons related to the fact that the developer calls himself anticapitalista, Zettlr’s developer drew me in with this:

Developing (Free, Libre and) Open Source Software (aka FLOSS) is a Political Act

You bet your ass it is. Even using it with some religious feeling is, too.

Very early days, my Zettlrish second brain looks so:

You can only see the highest level … it’s very incomplete … and I’m not even convinced that this path is right.

But I am on it.

This post will be the first one to go into my shiny new second brain under a new Daily Spill category.

Prayers are welcome for the neurological health of both mindnets here.