2026.07.28
According to the TimeToy webapp I made, I was 9556 days old when I started the diary, and am 19112 days old today. So I have half of the days of my life loosely documented, and half not.
I think I started making a diary because even at 26 I was aware at how much I'd already forgotten, that there were entire seasons or years when I didn't have a good summary of what I had been up to.
(Just today I unconsciously coined a new word, while bouncing some of these ideas off of ChatGPT: "forgettal". If a memory is the unit of something we recall, a "forgettal" is the unit of something we've forgotten.)
I use ChatGPT as a discussion partner; sure it lacks much of a true human dialog, but also it doesn't have the agenda a human has (well, arguably it might be imbued a different agenda) It can be a powerful, proactice mirror, and it will tolerate my meandering and repetition at lengths I can't expect my human buddies to match. (In a way it's kind of like... "what if my blog could talk back?")
I was talking about my frustration with finding the most useful metaphor for consciousness and subconscious parts; Freudian Id/Ego/Superego, Internal Family Systems, inner children (or soemtimes even inner dog), McGilchristian hemispheres, multitasking computer systems, etc. ChatGPT came up with this: (in that LLM telltale "short sentence" style)
Here's a metaphor I've never quite heard anyone use.That's really good! And based on a little googling, pretty original.
Imagine a modern nation.
There are millions of citizens (the low-level processes).
There are institutions (habit systems, emotional systems, perception).
Then there's the press.
The press isn't the government.
It isn't the citizens.
But it absolutely shapes what everyone thinks is happening.
It decides what is news.
It constructs narratives.
It remembers history selectively.
It has incentives.
It develops biases.
Sometimes it uncovers genuine truth.
Sometimes it spins.
Sometimes it believes its own headlines.
Your inner narrator might be something like that.
It's an emergent institution.
Not reducible to one neuron.
Not the whole country either.
And because it's built on language, once it exists it develops its own dynamics.
(It does bring to mind if that metaphorical nation's government has a king, a president or what - I think I see it as a fairly direct democracy with a lot of ballot measures. Also a bureaucracy with a lot of systems that keeps things moving.)
It brings to mind another thing ChatGPT agreed with, like a new metaphor. People who say LLMs are "just a glorified autocomplete" undersell what they can do but are kind of right about the mechanism. The fact that "what word sounds likely next" is SO powerful really says something about the power of words. Like "In the beginning was the Word" level stuff.
I did more rambling of the above won a "pondering the nature of being" tip ("what is self", "what is consciousness?" etc) - usually ending up with the Buddhist truth (and Descartes concern) that on some level all we really have is this moment.
That all makes me think of this quote from Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" (SPOILERS AHEAD) - the story is a world where continuous video lifelogging is common, and the main character confronts footage of an event he misremembers:
And while I wasn't that man anymore, I couldn't deny that I was continuous with him.Love that idea. You can't step in the same river twice... but... it's still that river.
(some of that came from thinking about that Star Trek TNG episode where an old "clone" of Riker - caught as a teleporter pattern, shows up. I need to rewatch (or mayne just watch?) that episode, but the idea that that clone would wake up and is just as much the Real Riker as the one the audience knows... it's intriguing.)