The shape of a thought

A thought, before it is written, is a possibility cloud. It collapses into a specific shape only when you commit it to language.

This is why writing is a tool for thinking, not a transcription of it. The moment of commitment forces the cloud to choose a basin of attraction.

I keep returning to this idea because it explains why I cannot reliably remember what I think before I write it down. There was no "it" to remember — just a region of probability that hadn't yet been sampled.

See also: Latent spaces as maps

Note to self: this might be the same phenomenon as Writing is a search procedure — investigate.