And not all thinking is writing is a clear truism, there’s no point to even stating that.
Writing helps us think about the world, it’s a pivotal intellectual technology.
Much like money decoupled selling and buying to move away from bartering, writing decoupled saying and hearing so they didn't have to happen at the same time. The incredible step that happened was not that people had to think a whole lot, it was that thinking that was already happening had to happen once.
> All writing is thinking when done by a human, you’re literally distilling your thoughts into words. You can’t write without thought.
Of course you can. You can write down exactly what you hear, for dictation.
You can write down a stream of consciousness and put barely any thought into it at all.
I can't help but feel most here are massively over estimating human writing. Human writing is, almost universally, terrible. We have entire jobs that are hard to fill just to make things sort of ok. Good writing is a small subset of human output.
Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is different from thinking logically about a concept and writing it down which I think is where you are getting at.
The definition of writing and thinking is too broad in that sentence even though it does apply in several obvious cateogires within that at different levels.
And also "writing helps us think about the world" is too broad again. Why? Why does me writing "apt apt apt apt apt apt apt" help me think about the world? I just wrote it because i felt like writing it. Why wouldn't you consider that writing?
Have you never asked a decent model to explain something to you? You should try it.
Poor example. You wrote it to make a point, after all.
Do you have any non-contrived example of writing that was done with zero thought?
Of course you cannot do anything without like basic thought otherwise you will not be able to do anything.
So I am not sure what you mean by non-contrived? It has to be contrived because we are talking specifics like I said.
If thinking = consiousness then yes you cannot write without being consious. But if thinking = having complex logical thoughts and writing about them then I would say yes it is possible to write without that.
My only claim is that just because you are writing something doesn't automatically mean you are having complex thoughts about what you are writing. So writing = thinking doesn't sit right. I can tell you i often just mindlessly write words on my journal sometimes but that is also a contrived example. Yet the existence of the example is the point. You cannot categorically claim something if exceptions (no matter how contrived) can be raised.