You are more than welcome to comment below. We’d both love to hear your insights.

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 intuit. It’s a little bit like matter. The amount of mass in a human body compared to the amount of space is surprisingly small. Our molecules are connected by intermolecular bonds and have space between them. Those molecules are made of atoms that have an incredible amount of space between their nuclei and electrons. The subatomic particles inside of those aren’t exactly touching, either, by our common understanding of the term. And just as our physical world is mostly space, our ontographs are mostly made up of the tiny fraction of what we’re able to sense and pay attention to at the moment.

Some people are more intuitive and probably grasp the situation they’re in pretty effectively. Some people are more focused and tend to miss things outside their field of attention. And of course we all have moments in which we’re more focused or more generally aware. But whichever kind of moment you’re inhabiting, you’re not doing both at the same time, certainly not to the degree that you’re keenly aware of everything going on around you. Human experience catches critical curds of substance, like a cheesecloth. And that’s probably best, since we don’t have unlimited attentive energy or sensitivity, which sounds overwhelming anyway.

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 and your clothes announce to me your cultural heraldry. This expands my knowledge, and actionable knowledge expands my personal agency.

Next, you tell me about a book you just read, transmitting information from the author’s ontograph, through yours (with any alterations you include) to mine. I receive what you say through my clouded lens of imperfect perception, but perhaps I have new ideas that allow me to understand the world around me better. This increases my options for interpreting the phenomena I encounter in life.

We network our ontographs together this way–memetically. And communicating ideas that increase our adaptiveness boosts the combined agency of the human network. So far we’ve made it into space, and hopefully we’ll eventually be invulnerable to the expansion of the sun. Then the sky will no longer be the limit.

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. I wanted to use the term Ontos because it encompasses a person’s entire existence. It also has a history in philosophy such as ontology, which is closely related to the project of exploring the ontograph.

Graph is Greek for recording: “to write.”

A record of geography is called a map or cartograph. As one makes decisions about what to do in pursuit of goals, one navigates a landscape much larger than geography–it is geography multiplied by dimensions of feelings, thoughts, intentions, and more. But our behavior still feels like moving on a map to some degree, so I chose that etymology.

I considered “ontogram” but there is already an object called an ontogram. I see it also referred to as an ontograph. I feel like it’s taking up one too many go-karts on this philosophical joyride, so let us grab the “-graph” term for this project because the ontograph behaves more like a cartograph, and the ontogram behaves more like a diagram. Those two familiar terms have enough established nuance in English that I’m happy to let them sit. I hope that’s agreeable to the esteemed developers of the ontogram.

I would be fascinated to hear any thoughts about this word choice. There may be an even better term approachable by Latin, German, or other means. Please let me know.

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.)