July on Warpcast

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Writing as a civilizational tool continues to amaze me. The tool externalizes ideas and thoughts, human consciousness as a snapshot in time. Sometimes I read books, though not in their original language, still hold a certain level of information that some person somewhere actually thought, and came up with, and wrote it down. Not only that but then that idea not only survived the noise and entropy of time (think library of Alexandria burning down, or cultural revolutions like post Renaissance Savonarola burning books) and they are still here today. Reading Cicero for example exemplifies this feeling that what we write - may matter millennia from now. And yes, if you asked Cicero or his contemporaries - would they think their writing would survive? The world that they know it, will it still exist in 2000 years time? I don’t think they would have been able to imagine, yet here all of it is. Their ideas preserved over time, fossilized in one format for another as long as humanity exists Amazing

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July pfp

What makes writing special is our ability exactly to externalize this idea - in a place outside of time. That’s why what resonates still stays the same because even if ultimately the times change, the technology changes, messiahs are promised and salvation is reckoned with, the time (at least as we know it) continues to move forward, and what remains are these thoughts that those that came before us had. The ability to hold all these ideas outside of time means - writing essentially in a way makes our snapshots of consciousness, our thoughts that were once internal to be not only external but potentially eternal. That is honestly a crazy concept, and isn’t something that happened naturally but a tool that we developed over time.

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Maurice pfp

July, do you read the original or the revised version of historic texts. I find it sometimes easier to read a more modern version. I did that with the Odyssey for example.

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eternal memory hole summer

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Sid pfp

If a tree fell in the forest and it wasn't written about, did it really fall.. (In the eyes of an llm)

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Writing is a tool for consciousnesses to communicate with each other asynchronously across space time

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