Witness

Witness is meant to be used with the Ontological Type System, a way of keeping notes in which each real thing you care about (a person, a book, a place, an idea) gets a note of its own, sorted by a few basic types.

Most days are ordinary. I kiss my girls goodbye and drive to work, usually with a podcast or an audiobook. At lunch a coworker mentions something I have never heard of. In the evening a brother at church tells me a clever joke. All day I am meeting things.

Some of them I want to attend more mindfully: I want to remember that I met them, and what it was like. So throughout the day I open the daily note in my journal and type a few lines, and when one of those lines names a thing I want to attend to, I link it.

Witness is a way of keeping a journal. Everything I write there is my experience of something: plans, worries, prayers, the shape of the day. Keeping it as witness means writing toward the things themselves, and when a line is about a particular thing, linking it, so the thing’s own note in my type system can find what it was like to meet it. An AI agent can make the practice more potent, but the practice itself is attention.

The Journal and the Thing

Witnessing extends the Ontological Type System I use to organize my notes. In it, the things I meet get notes of their own. The YouTube video might have a note. So too a channel, a book, a person, an idea. Those notes describe the thing as it is, independent of my witness.

Not everything I mention gets a note. Everything could; the type system has room for it. Deciding which ones get a note is a matter of discernment and practical attention. This morning a kitchen clip turned out to have ball bearings in its hinge, an overengineered delight; it got a witness and no note, because I will probably never link it again. Caliban’s War, the audiobook on my commute last month, got a note the first day I mentioned it, and I linked it twice more that week. The test is whether I will link to it again.

The journal is different. It holds my experience of the thing: that I met it, when, and what it did to me. What I learned, what I thought, what it stirred up. The link joins the two. The thing I encounter does not need me. The witness does.

The note holds the thing; the journal holds the thing as I met it. Sometimes a witness is little more than a fact, the thing at the resolution I encountered it, the level of detail I actually took in.

Most of my witnesses are exactly that: a line typed by hand, sometimes with a sentence or two under it. A witness can hold gratitude and frustration in the same entry. It can be untidy, but using an agent makes it much tidier.

With an Agent

Some things deserve more than a line. When something catches me, I hand it to an AI agent that can read and write my notes. I use Obsidian and Claude Code; any notes app with links and backlinks, and any agent that can read and write your files, will do.

Mostly the agent does the clerical work. Obsidian lets a link point at a note that does not exist yet, a feature I use often. In the middle of a conversation, I type the link and put the phone down; later I ask the agent to enrich, to build a note for every link still waiting. When I have a little time, listening to a podcast or a lecture, I do that work up front: I hand it the thing as I meet it, and it builds the note on the spot, filling it with some of the thing’s reality: for a person, a short biography; for an event, what happened and when. The next time I run into it in my notes, I meet it at a resolution I can understand, having been taught for a moment. It also formats the witness itself, the links and the lines under them, which helps most when I am working from my phone.

What I love most is that I can bring only the spark of a thought. Here I had one sentence, a novel reminding me of another, and the agent named the pattern I was pointing at. The witness that lands is my thought, completed. The agent shows me the line before it writes anything, and I keep it, change it, or cut it.

Sometimes it does more. When I am still working out what I think, the agent can ask. A thought I come up with on my own is different from a thought I give in answer to someone else’s question; an outside voice prodding at my experience lets me see it more clearly. It works like friction, a small and productive amount of it. Talking a thing through also takes a little effort, and in my experience the effort is what makes it stick. When it goes that way, what lands in the journal is more than I would have had: the note knows more about the thing than I did, but the larger change is in me. I met it more fully.

Backlinks

Another payoff comes later. I listen to a podcast called Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, and over the months I have witnessed many of its episodes: a “meat shower” in Kentucky, the riverboat call that gave Mark Twain his name, a Bronx drunk who survived antifreeze, a snowbank, and a taxi. Each witness lives in the journal, on the day it happened, and each one links the show. So when I open the note for the show, they are all there, gathered as backlinks, which Obsidian lists at the foot of a note as linked mentions: every time I met it, and what it did to me each time.

The backlinks gather on their own. The note’s own content grows another way: it starts at the resolution I first met the thing, and each time I meet it again, the agent or I add what I learned. My knowledge of the world grows at the rate I pay attention to it.

People work the same way. On a neighbor’s note, the backlinks are various encounters with that person, in the order we had them.

Why Witness

My reason for keeping a journal this way is, for me, theological. I believe the world is, among other things, a gift that we receive by paying attention to it. In Genesis, one of the first tasks given to a man is to look at the animals and name them. Attention is the first act of regard.