An ontograph is a record of a person’s experience of existence. Like a map, your ontograph details where you have been. Like a biography, it details what you have done. Like a poem, it details how you feel.
Your ontograph contains all your experiences, your feelings about those experiences, and even the parts of those experiences you can’t articulate. This makes a complete ontograph too complex to record, but we share pieces of our ontographs with each other and our future selves all the time.
When we share our experiences and impressions with others, it gives us an opportunity to detect inadequacies in our own ontographs and imagine improvements. If you hear a thought about a song that did not at first impress you, it may allow you to derive more pleasure from the song next time. If you hear about a construction project of which you weren’t aware, it may increase your ability to get to a friend’s house in time for an event. Communication multiplies the options available to an individual.
I am grateful for this opportunity to share with you my experience, to the extent I can articulate it, of pondering this concept. It occurred to me last year while I was considering the definition of wisdom and the patterns intelligent creatures to use navigate the worlds in their heads. I have a few thoughts a day about this right now, and I wanted a place to get them down in black and white. Or black and whatever this background color is called. Perhaps you can tell me the name of this color in your ontograph.
(Here’s a copy of the background color in case I change it later.)
