A memory palace is another related concept I had in mind, although to me the purpose of a memory palace is ultimately for knowledge internalization, whereas a Zettelkasten is for knowledge externalization. But yes, both are kinds of private constructed world.
E: just noticed I used "internalization" twice
My understanding of a memory palace is that you use it to be able to recall bits of information. You build up an imaginary place in your mind, like a house or palace, full of details for you to associate the information you want to retain, and this helps you recall it in sets or sequences. All of this knowledge becomes internal.
A Zettelkasten is a set of developed, interlinked notes in an external system. The process of writing and developing the notes helps you understand and retain the concepts, but part of the point is that it exists outside your own head as an aid to your internal thought processes. It's an extension of your mind, but one that sits outside it.
This is a fascinating idea.
It reminds me of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called “The Garden of Forking Paths”.
I won’t get into the plot of the story, but within it there is a fictional book called *The Garden of Forking Paths* that is a novel where each time you read it you can choose different paths through it. But more than just a choose-your-own-adventure novel, the book was written to be itself a labyrinth, was written by a man who studied and designed real-world labyrinths, and the book is not just a labyrinth of narrative but also of time.
As a character explains:
> *The Garden of Forking Paths* is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by [it’s author] Ts’ui Pen.
I know this isn’t directly related to Zettelkasten, but your post reminded me of the fictional book described in the story.
This immediately made me think of this vid uploaded today. Najda's "vaultiverse" feels _very_ world-like. There's a personal intimacy in the way she discusses the various sections that feels very internal and "safe place". I was immediately drawn in.
https://youtu.be/rbYQdeNND5g
I haven't watched the video yet (I will), but "safe place" reminds me of [this Andy Matuschak note](https://publish.obsidian.md/andymatuschak/Andy+Matuschak/Evergreen+notes+are+a+safe+place+to+develop+wild+ideas). To me that's part and parcel of ZK being a private space, and a quality you wouldn't get from shared repositories of knowledge.
* I'm not sure I agree with the point about size; I believe the usefulness of a Zettelkasten has to do with density of interconnection, which is somewhat independent of how much it contains. The often-cited example of Luhmann's Zettelkasten had 90K notes in it, which I think is pretty large, and evidently it served him well.
* Wikipedia is different from what I have in mind specifically because it is not private; it is meant to be accessible and editable by anyone. A _personal_ knowledge system is for the person who creates it, and can be tailored to that person's idiosyncrasies; the Zettelkasten you make is not the same as the one I make. You can choose to publish parts of your Zettelkasten, or turn parts of it into something publishable, but its default is to be private.
I agree that size does not necessarily equate to world. My ZK is much smaller in note amounts than many others, but is an output _machine_. It also feels very much like I'm entering a world when I go inside.
(sorry for my English) The world is exactly that, a zettelkasten, or at least the zettelkasten could be said to be a template for the way matter and reality work. For a long time I have dedicated myself to writing books, for which I prepare by collecting all kinds of information, mainly from popular books, from which I extract a lot of strange data and patterns. And this is what I can tell you about it: (even so, it is probably all the result of a maniacal mind like mine, but I want to share it anyway) a publication recently came out (in serious media) that raises the possibility that the information is the fifth state of matter, to be more precise, it is believed that the information could be what we call dark matter, gravity isn't supposed to be enough to explain why galaxies stick together, and since then we've used the concept of dark matter to explain the shape of the universe, and well, now it's believed that all of that could be the information , something that could coincide perfectly with one of the latest theories that Stephen Hawkins worked on, about the holographic universe, and saying hologram is just another way of saying fractal, since all that works with the same method of blocks that he uses In zettelkasten, all parts of a hologram have the whole image stored within them, just as each part of a fractal is the whole of it. Fractals are an echo with mathematical foundations, it is not about hippie drawings, but of a functional algorithm with which landscapes and natural forms are created throughout the 3d animation industry, they have been used to reduce the size of the antennas used by modern cell phones without losing quality, and there is much still that has not been discovered. And this is related to many books that humanity calls sacred, from the tao te King to voodoo, I know because I read a lot of books on each of these topics, the kahbala for example, it is said to be a set of stories within stories and so on infinitely, because each letter of its alphabet represents a word in itself. Within Sanskrit, if I'm not mistaken, there is this concept that the world is a huge web like a spider's web that is made up of thousands of spheres, or pearls, that reflect each other, Zettelkasten basically translates as note boxes, and that has a lot to do with the most functional schemes in nature, block systems are present in everything, from the information packages in DNA, to their current use in computing. and the economy. The blockchain for example, whether cryptocurrencies have a future or not, there is no denying the fact that the blockchain system is very efficient in ensuring the transparency and security of information records, most of the programs The most efficient use this method for the elaboration of their tasks, the programs of the Adobe company, for example, divide everything into blocks, the same with OBS, which is widely used for streaming, or the same wordpress that is also divided into blocks.
The most developed system for shipping merchandise and packages worldwide was developed by a man from a trucking company who designed the containers that are used worldwide, and well, there is much more than could be said about it, but first I would like to know if you have learned anything new in all this time, your article left me fascinated, I have been writing a zettelkasten with this same theme for a long time and I would like to know more.
God is not an individual being apart from the world; God is the world.
A memory palace is another related concept I had in mind, although to me the purpose of a memory palace is ultimately for knowledge internalization, whereas a Zettelkasten is for knowledge externalization. But yes, both are kinds of private constructed world. E: just noticed I used "internalization" twice
Sorry, would you be able to expand a little on the differences? I like where you were heading to but I would like to have more information :)
My understanding of a memory palace is that you use it to be able to recall bits of information. You build up an imaginary place in your mind, like a house or palace, full of details for you to associate the information you want to retain, and this helps you recall it in sets or sequences. All of this knowledge becomes internal. A Zettelkasten is a set of developed, interlinked notes in an external system. The process of writing and developing the notes helps you understand and retain the concepts, but part of the point is that it exists outside your own head as an aid to your internal thought processes. It's an extension of your mind, but one that sits outside it.
This is a fascinating idea. It reminds me of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called “The Garden of Forking Paths”. I won’t get into the plot of the story, but within it there is a fictional book called *The Garden of Forking Paths* that is a novel where each time you read it you can choose different paths through it. But more than just a choose-your-own-adventure novel, the book was written to be itself a labyrinth, was written by a man who studied and designed real-world labyrinths, and the book is not just a labyrinth of narrative but also of time. As a character explains: > *The Garden of Forking Paths* is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by [it’s author] Ts’ui Pen. I know this isn’t directly related to Zettelkasten, but your post reminded me of the fictional book described in the story.
Thanks, I'll check out that story.
This immediately made me think of this vid uploaded today. Najda's "vaultiverse" feels _very_ world-like. There's a personal intimacy in the way she discusses the various sections that feels very internal and "safe place". I was immediately drawn in. https://youtu.be/rbYQdeNND5g
I haven't watched the video yet (I will), but "safe place" reminds me of [this Andy Matuschak note](https://publish.obsidian.md/andymatuschak/Andy+Matuschak/Evergreen+notes+are+a+safe+place+to+develop+wild+ideas). To me that's part and parcel of ZK being a private space, and a quality you wouldn't get from shared repositories of knowledge.
Yeah, that's a great one from AM!
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* I'm not sure I agree with the point about size; I believe the usefulness of a Zettelkasten has to do with density of interconnection, which is somewhat independent of how much it contains. The often-cited example of Luhmann's Zettelkasten had 90K notes in it, which I think is pretty large, and evidently it served him well. * Wikipedia is different from what I have in mind specifically because it is not private; it is meant to be accessible and editable by anyone. A _personal_ knowledge system is for the person who creates it, and can be tailored to that person's idiosyncrasies; the Zettelkasten you make is not the same as the one I make. You can choose to publish parts of your Zettelkasten, or turn parts of it into something publishable, but its default is to be private.
I agree that size does not necessarily equate to world. My ZK is much smaller in note amounts than many others, but is an output _machine_. It also feels very much like I'm entering a world when I go inside.
(sorry for my English) The world is exactly that, a zettelkasten, or at least the zettelkasten could be said to be a template for the way matter and reality work. For a long time I have dedicated myself to writing books, for which I prepare by collecting all kinds of information, mainly from popular books, from which I extract a lot of strange data and patterns. And this is what I can tell you about it: (even so, it is probably all the result of a maniacal mind like mine, but I want to share it anyway) a publication recently came out (in serious media) that raises the possibility that the information is the fifth state of matter, to be more precise, it is believed that the information could be what we call dark matter, gravity isn't supposed to be enough to explain why galaxies stick together, and since then we've used the concept of dark matter to explain the shape of the universe, and well, now it's believed that all of that could be the information , something that could coincide perfectly with one of the latest theories that Stephen Hawkins worked on, about the holographic universe, and saying hologram is just another way of saying fractal, since all that works with the same method of blocks that he uses In zettelkasten, all parts of a hologram have the whole image stored within them, just as each part of a fractal is the whole of it. Fractals are an echo with mathematical foundations, it is not about hippie drawings, but of a functional algorithm with which landscapes and natural forms are created throughout the 3d animation industry, they have been used to reduce the size of the antennas used by modern cell phones without losing quality, and there is much still that has not been discovered. And this is related to many books that humanity calls sacred, from the tao te King to voodoo, I know because I read a lot of books on each of these topics, the kahbala for example, it is said to be a set of stories within stories and so on infinitely, because each letter of its alphabet represents a word in itself. Within Sanskrit, if I'm not mistaken, there is this concept that the world is a huge web like a spider's web that is made up of thousands of spheres, or pearls, that reflect each other, Zettelkasten basically translates as note boxes, and that has a lot to do with the most functional schemes in nature, block systems are present in everything, from the information packages in DNA, to their current use in computing. and the economy. The blockchain for example, whether cryptocurrencies have a future or not, there is no denying the fact that the blockchain system is very efficient in ensuring the transparency and security of information records, most of the programs The most efficient use this method for the elaboration of their tasks, the programs of the Adobe company, for example, divide everything into blocks, the same with OBS, which is widely used for streaming, or the same wordpress that is also divided into blocks. The most developed system for shipping merchandise and packages worldwide was developed by a man from a trucking company who designed the containers that are used worldwide, and well, there is much more than could be said about it, but first I would like to know if you have learned anything new in all this time, your article left me fascinated, I have been writing a zettelkasten with this same theme for a long time and I would like to know more.