Webbiness

I met with the lovely supervisor Ben. I'd like him to be my nephew or godson.

He said, 'You say that your style of thinking is like a web, everything interconnected, rather than analytical and that's why you find this difficult.'

'Yes!'

'Well, I think analytically so it's hard for someone who finds something easy to explain how to do it to someone who finds it hard. But I've been thinking about this. And I think that my wife thinks more like you than like me, so here are somethings that she finds useful. You may know about them and do them already. They may not be useful. But I thought I'd run through them.'

He suggested mind maps. That's quite useful. I need a big piece of paper. Then he said he just writes - and won't use any of that for the real thing - but he said, 'Writing is a form of thinking.' Yes, that's so... right. It's what I do here, I guess. And, in effect, it's what I've been doing with these essays... what I have been less good at is jettisoning that first draft... I've thought it was a first draft rather than just a 'morning pages'. So that's helpful.

But then we talked about premises and sub premises and having only two or three main points in an essay of this length. And I could see it as a pattern of bricks rather than a web. so that really was helpful.

Right now I am writing AGAINST three things: human as natural, human as not animal and human as not transcendent (by which I am meaning altered states of consciousness). Come to think of it I could channel my old friend JSM... On Nature for the first section and On Liberty (with the experiments for living and value of genius for the other two) and wrap up, as I was planning to, with Mill's beneficence and not causing harm - from On Liberty and Utilitarianism for the end.

Now that is an intriguing idea. Is it a web or a wall?