forget & rediscover & recombine old knowledge with new knowledge to synthesize new ideas.

so in other words, not actually forget... a pov with which i agree

I am not sure about the rediscover part or that there's any synergy going on there. For me the value of notes is that they cure my "fear of forgetting". File it away knowing that it will be there if it's necessary. I don't have to spend mental energy and have the nagging feeling of losing something. You can then accumulate new things and do the same thing to them if they are not immediately useful/necessary. This is the gist of what I got from the part of the GTD book I read too. Though everybody is different of course.

That's why we all have massive ZFS pools, right? It's so much easier to "blow away" a workstation and move on to a new one when you know you have the entire disk saved :P

Shoulders of giants.

It was also a running thread in Carl Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden" that a lot of the history of communications tools and writing formats is the ability to externalize memory and what that means for how we think and behave and what brain power that opens up for other things when we can externalize those memories to focus on other tasks.