second-brain pt 2: ontology

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Science progresses via a collapsing of ontology into the new. A new framework emerges that alters how we define reality (ontology). The old ontology collapses under the weight of what it can no longer explain. The new order of meaning emerges, whereby yesterday’s observations are redeemed from their isolation and reinterpreted as signs of a deeper order. Examples of this include the shift from the geocentric (Earth-centered) to the heliocentric model of the universe. Or the transition from Newtonian mechanics to Einsteinian relativity.

second-brain

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Second brains are have moved from personal archives into agent-readable cognitive infrastructure. The central constraint is dual legibility. The system has to make sense to me, in Obsidian, and it has to make sense to Claude in the repo. Throughout history, scholars, scientists, philosophers, and writers have kept some version of an external thinking system. Commonplace books serve as working scrapbooks to store arguments, fragments, and half-formed ideas, to be returned to later. They were not kept as diaries in the introspective sense. John Locke even wrote A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, offering a system for arranging quotations, ideas, and speeches by subject and category. Cognitive scientist Don Norman, in Things That Make Us Smart, explored how humans become smarter by building external aids that extend memory and reasoning.

Claude-Workflows on Stephanie Rebecca

second-brain pt 2: ontology

second-brain