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… Continue reading What is an ontograph?
The Ontograph: Your personal Bluth chicken dance.
About once a week, I think of a new analogy or explanation of the ontograph. In a Facebook conversation today, I came up with this one: We live in the objective world, but experience occurs in our minds, in a sort of virtual reality version of the objective world constructed of knowledge and misconceptions we’ve… Continue reading The Ontograph: Your personal Bluth chicken dance.
Chat with Pace
Pace Ellsworth and BJ Hamaker talk about the ontograph. Pace relates it to linguistics, shared experience across species, Platonic ideals, and brings the term “ontotype” to the conversation.
Chat with Danny
Danny and BJ talk about the Ontograph. Danny relates it to scarcity mindset, philosophy classes in university, focus, savants, Christ’s perfect perception, mental fixations, relationship advice, and motivation toward productivity.
Chat with Dan Pratt
Dan Pratt and BJ Hamaker talk about the ontograph. Dan relates it to Jung and archetypes, maps, scientism, models of reality, and the placebo effect.
Chat with Ben Muhlestein
I had the pleasure of talking to my new friend Ben Muhlestein about the ontograph for the first time while we shepherded the young men at summer camp this year. The conversation is recorded for your edification, if you can excuse the vacation audio quality. You are more than welcome to comment below. We’d both… Continue reading Chat with Ben Muhlestein
Ontographs are tiny.
It’s funny to think that your mental map of the entire universe could be tiny, but compared to the actual universe, it is. If you were able to look back at all the things going on around you at any moment, you’d see unlimited events occurring that you didn’t have time to experience, consider, or… Continue reading Ontographs are tiny.
Sharing Ontographs
I’m sharing my ontograph with you right now. Ideas we communicate are little pieces of one ontograph that a person passes to another, expanding the recipient’s ontograph. That means our ontographs are interpermeable and overlapping. You could think of a Venn diagram where circle A is your ontograph and circle B is mine. We meet… Continue reading Sharing Ontographs
Why name it “ontograph”?
Ontos is Greek for existence: “to be.” I didn’t want to limit the ontograph to perception, because an ontograph includes things that may not be perceived or understood in the moment. I didn’t want to confuse it with a biography, because a biography typically includes only those events and experiences that are relatable to others.… Continue reading Why name it “ontograph”?