2 June, 2025
PDT — 12:13 p.m.
121 Days since 1 Feb 2025
23699 Days old
= 13 x 1823
I’m at my campsite in Northern California, under Mount Shasta which looms above me, only somewhat behind some tall pines. Hilary is sleeping, napping in Ravy, the RAV4 that got us here — some 2900+ miles since leaving our Hudson Valley home just six days ago on this cross-country vacation. It was only yesterday we decided to enter California on US-395, traveling from just outside Salt Lake City through Utah and Nevada on Interstate-80, then turning north from Reno and made it up to the town (city?) of Mount Shasta by 9:00. Tomorrow our first campsite reservation starts and we’ll be camping amongst the redwoods, on the “Avenue of Giants.”
It’s been a while since I took out a notebook and just wrote. I’ve been having conversations with Large Language Models and even more lately doing coding — “vibe” coding with them — to have software that can take my earlier conversations and… well, process them, help me search through them, summarize them — somehow take those conversations, along with my notebooks, old papers, old notes of all sorts — and ultimately find me the “best parts,” yeah, I think that’s what I think I’m doing. Hmm…
It’s a puzzle I’m working out. That’s what my notebooks have always been. A puzzle I’m trying to put together. I have ideas about things that seem important, so I start writing words. They give me sentences that remind me of those thoughts — and I like to think the words are so clear that anyone who understands my language will equally be able to at least understand the sentence and so know that thought. With a few sentences in a row, a paragraph builds a series of thoughts into meaningful structure. With a few paragraphs, an insight into some subject has been indelibly preserved. With most theories of language, this preservation of an insight on any subject, given the preservation of the text, perhaps suitably translated from language to language, is eternal. An insight thus becomes timeless and preserved forever in its existence.
But of course I know the more clearly I state it, and the more clearly I state anything, that this cannot be ultimately true. This truth, like any insight into anything capable of being contemplated, requires assumptions. It requires conditions. It requires context, expression and a circumstance — a moment of discourse.
I’ve learned a lot from talking to AI, but the most important things — the timeless, precious, priceless thoughts — are within me. It’s the stepping back, reading back the responses that I get after asking the chatbot to organize what I’ve said, to summarize, to clean up and restate what I was feeling inadequate at describing, unable to clearly explain to myself for years… that I understand — not that the language model knows something that I don’t — but that what I knew all along can be expressed in words that I already knew — but that I hadn’t the skill — or perhaps patience — to organize so clearly, or completely.
So what I’m learning that is so important is that I did know these things all along, but I didn’t have the clarity to fall back on, or the experience to have confidence in the feeling that I did get it… whatever it is… or was…
I want to believe in wisdom that I have never been able to state. But now, with these statements which resonate with my inner wisdom… have I gathered some wisdom? Or have I lost the seed of maintaining the wonder of ineffability?
