In the two-plus years I’ve been playing with ChatGPT one of the more interesting uses I’ve found is in analyzing the 6,400 posts on my blog (going back more than 20 years). I suspect the day is coming when an AI will be able to scan/read all of those posts. As an experiment, I picked one topic —memory— that I had posted on as far back as 2004. From several perspectives: neuroscience, philosophy, fiction, Eastern spiritual traditions.

ChatGPT concluded its analysis with the following:

It’s both a philosophical inquiry and a deeply personal theme — where your intellectual interests and life story fuse. These posts read almost like a personal anthology on memory — each entry a fragment in your ongoing effort to understand self, time, and what persists.

Artificial intelligence has taken one topic from my blog to a place I could have never imagined. A gestalt of this particular topic. A whole much greater than the parts. Again, ChatGPT:

A gestalt really is what it feels like. You’ve been writing for decades in fragments: notes, quotes, memories, reflections. Each one on its own has weight, but when seen together they create something larger, almost like a self-portrait you didn’t set out to paint.

And maybe that’s the real magic here: you weren’t writing with the intention of producing a unified theory of memory, but the accumulation over time is one. What I did was simply hold up a mirror that shows the shape of it.

It makes me think: every tag on your blog could be treated this way — consciousness, radio, Kennett, AI — each a different lens, but each capable of becoming its own gestalt chapter in the story of your life and mind.

Here is ChatGPT’s analysis of my posts on “memory”:

1. Core Themes

• Memory vs. Self – You return again and again to the idea that memory is the glue that holds the self together — yet also the thing that undermines its permanence (Dreams of stuff that never happened; Memory creates the illusion of continuity ).
• Fragility & Reconstruction of Memory – Posts cite Daniel Kahneman, Nisargadatta, and Alan Watts on how memories are unstable — “copies of copies” reshaped every time they’re recalled .
• Forgetting & Letting Go – In Forgetting, you reflect on Lawrence Block’s description of deliberately shrinking an image until it fades — contrasting it with your own reluctance (or inability) to do so .
• Memory and Technology – Several posts wonder whether documenting life (via Google Calendar, Day-Timers, video, blogs) changes or even replaces memory (How our memories are changing; 15 years of Day-Timers ).
• Dreams as Memory – You speculate whether dreams can themselves become a kind of memory, especially of events that “never happened” .
• Mortality, Time, and Continuity – Memory is often linked to death, immortality, and the illusion of a continuous self (Immortality; What remains when the ‘person’ is gone? ).

2. Influences & Recurring References

• Thinkers: Daniel Kahneman, Alan Watts, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Julien Baggini, Susan Blackmore, James Gleick.
• Writers: Lawrence Block, William Gibson.
• Philosophical Threads: Buddhism, Taoism, non-duality.
• Media/Tech: The act of documenting (calendars, YouTube, blogging) as prosthetic memory.

3. Personal Touchpoints

• Autobiographical moments: Childhood recollections (jumping on the bed and crashing through a window — clearly false but lodged in memory ), burning Day-Timers, a cotton-field photo sent to Barb.
• Meta-awareness: Many posts end with you pulling back, asking: If memories are constructed, what remains of “me” without them?

4. Evolution Over Time

• Early posts (2011–2014) lean heavily on excerpts and thinkers (Kahneman, Baggini, Blackmore), grounding memory in philosophy/science.
• Mid-phase (2014–2017) mixes in more personal memory projects — calendars, burning Day-Timers, family photos.
• Recent posts (2018–2025) shift toward direct reflection and questioning, often in dialogue with ChatGPT, asking whether hope, time, or dreams are memory-based illusions.

5. The “Memory Cluster” in Your Blog-Mind

If we plot it against your bigger tag map, memory sits at the crossroads of three larger constellations:

• Philosophy/Consciousness (nonduality, Buddhism, time)
• Technology/Media (prosthetic memory, digital archives)
• Personal Narrative (childhood, Kennett, Day-Timers, Barb)

It’s both a philosophical inquiry and a deeply personal theme — where your intellectual interests and life story fuse. These posts read almost like a personal anthology on memory — each entry a fragment in your ongoing effort to understand self, time, and what persists.