The magic of generating new ideas(newyorker.com) |
The magic of generating new ideas(newyorker.com) |
"However independent of each other [philosophers] might feel themselves to be, with their critical or systematic wills, something inside of them drives them on, something leads them into a particular order, one after the other, and this something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship of concepts. In fact, their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew: – to this extent, philosophizing is a type of atavism of the highest order."
..."Where there are linguistic affinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar (I mean: due to the unconscious domination and direction through similar grammatical functions), it is obvious that everything lies ready from the very start for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems..."
My very Christian mother once asked me to help her come up with a slogan for the church. I know her pastor well, and know him to be an avid student of history and the literature.
After much thought, I told them this, with the warning that if they used it they’d better be willing to face the consequences of what it means: “The purpose of the church is to remind people who they are. As children, they know. Over time, the world makes them forget.”
In my estimation, Jesus’ goal, and the Church’s job should be guiding people back to what they once knew. Unbridled love and trust in others. Non-judgement. Absolute acceptance, before we learn there’s such thing as a stranger.
Thank you for sharing this passage.
“Their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew”
Later, my Mom sent me the link to the sermon where the pastor quoted my statement and my warning, and followed it with, “My friend might be onto something, because in thinking on the text with his proposal in mind, I recalled one of Jesus’ declarations, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’”
I absolutely agree. Actually, I think that truly original thought is something that the majority of the population never experiences in their lifetime. Most thoughts that seem original are just recombinations or reinterpretations of existing ideas.
Want to test just how hard original thought is? Try to visualize exactly what it would be like to be a 4-dimensional being. Or how about a 2-dimensional being. You might be able to form an abstract idea based on examples (like the “flat lander” concept), but you will find it pretty much impossible to hold in your mind a visualization of what it would really be like. Why? Because due to the physical laws that govern our universe, it is impossible for you to have ever experienced this or anything even close to it. Therefore, it is left purely to your mind to create the visualization from nothing. This is like a neural net that has been trained with little or no data. There’s just nothing to go on, so extrapolations cannot be made.
Now visualize an elephant standing on a chair on top of the Empire State Building. Easy, right? But surely you’ve never seen that with your own eyes. Why can you imagine it so easily? Because you’ve seen enough parts of the visualization that you can recombine them in your mind to create whatever reality you wish.
Whether we’re artists or engineers, we’re all just thieves in the end. Most of us, that is. The few who are truly original create the fuel that pushes our civilization forward.
The idea of a 4d space grew out of STEM through transforming symbols. Taking the leap of faith from one action to the next until you have something transformed or created is original and valuable.
It seems new ideas truly are difficult to inject..
As far as I know, that was only an accepted point of view for a few hundred years.
100% agree, and yet harder still is to keep working on something truly new, trying to drive it forwards, when at best nobody cares and at worst people actively resist the implicit challenge to the status quo. Even, perhaps especially, smart and conscientious people who are already authorities in the field.
I think when people think about innovation being hard, there is a lot of focus on creating good new ideas. They're right, that's really hard, but innovation is about much more than that - it's really about sticking with the good new idea for a long period of time when there are no obvious (to most people) incentives to do so, economic or otherwise.
I have to disagree. The ancient Greeks played with idea of the Sun being the center of the solar system, along with inventing gear systems, and programmable mechanical robots (sometimes using wound thread). Ideas similar to natural selection preceded Darwin, but in some cases apparently kept quiet or wrapped in metaphor out of fear of religious backlash.
There is almost no invention that didn't have similar or simultaneous invention counterparts. It seems when the surrounding technology or precursors are in place, people put 2 + 2 together relatively quickly.
The only "one big leap" I can name right now is the piano. It did borrow from the harpsichord, but appears to be a single-minded attempt to make the volume of a note controllable, like a clavichord, but loud enough for performances. One needed a lot more parts than a harpsichord or clavichord had to do this well. Basically a wealthy person of royalty gave the inventor lots of time and resources to tinker.
Even if it's just the need to make a living, or a desire to see something that you think would be cool but doesn't exist.
As for coming up with "something truly new", sometimes it's just about re-arranging what already exists into a never-before tried configuration.
e.g. Some people would say the iPhone was nothing new, how it borrowed/stole something from everyone going back to the first caveman etc., while others remember how different the industry (I daresay, world even) was before and after it.
It would be nice if there was a public git repository of random ideas for everyone to add to and build upon. A crowdsourced brainstorming session over time.
> We take the sun being the center of the universe
You mean solar system.
Like your example, leaps in math may be easy to see in retrospect but were hard to come by without anticipating a world that supports their existence: The concept of zero. The concept of limits. The concept of imaginary numbers. None of these are hard concepts, but on face value they seem arbitrary and "not entirely real". It is only deeply through exploring their implications that they have value. This is difficult not only because there are so many possible random ideas that lead to nowhere but also because fruitful ones seem like they must have been considered already.
How many people thought that "zero" might be a useful abstraction but didn't go further because it seemed like it must already have been considered? If you want to have a new idea, take a germ of a simple idea and follow it curiously without self-doubt. Think of the famous story of how Feynman came up with quantum electrodynamics: trying to understand the physics of a wobbling plate.
Only if you define the universe as the solar system ...
So I guess we (at least I) are rejecting quite a lot of potentially useful ideas?
When did the sun become the center of the universe? I thought it wasn't even near the center of our galaxy, much less the universe, though I seem to recall that expansion makes it look that way because all the other galaxies we can see are moving away from us.
Choosing which ones to act on, and acting on them effectively is what's hard.
Highly recommend the course (or the book form, A Mind for Numbers).
Before I had children, I found the "unconscious processing" part more difficult, because my time was simply _my time_ to do with what I pleased... so I would often try to work harder, leading to less productivity and more spinning in circles.
After having children, my time is obviously more structured and I've found the regimen of childcare to be a wonderful diversion from thinking about systems and complexity.
Taking multiple walks a day also helps immensely. The trick is not trying to think about my work when walking, just absorbing the sounds, sights, and smells of the world around.
Long walks, perhaps?
Ideas are cheap, execution is not.
Here's a free sample tip: Dynamic Relational. It's the new "plastic" (a movie reference). The NoSql movement has shown a market/desire for dynamic databases. But with Dynamic Relational you get dynamism AND sql; you don't have to choose one or the other. And you can set constraints/rules to gradually make it more "static" like traditional RDBMS.
https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becomi...
And it's so satisfying seeing the solution work, especially if you don't know the correctness 100%.
I have no shortage of ideas, most pretty ordinary, some very small number good.
It's a very long journey though from good idea to release of a successful software product. Takes time, money, motivation, technical skill, not making big mistakes and that absolutely required ingredient, luck.
I noticed the same thing about my poker game back when I used to play religiously.
Taking a week or two long break from playing invariably improved my game.
None of my poker buddies understood the phenomena, but every single one of us experienced it.
It's easy to have ideas... validating/building them, that's the hard part
That's quite an optimistic assessment of little children.
I'm not sure if it is. Little children lack preconceived ideas, and, often, inhibition. That combination is a good recipe for accepting the unknown and coming up with new ideas. That is not to say they can't be cruel at times.
Very conveniently it is very easy to make little children believe all that, and now you tell us we should be like them little children too.
We should blindly trust the preacher-man, like little children, that's what he is telling us.
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched my one niece judge her little sister for a behavior that she herself had been admonished for a few minutes before. She just learned that bad girls do that, so now she’s informing her little sister that she’s a bad girl.
i don't know if this is what you meant by "playing well around here", but what you wrote is a sentiment to which many secular humanists would wholeheartedly subscribe.
My counter-intuitive opinion is that children are quite skeptical of religion. They may enjoy the make-believe part of it. Pretending, after all, is child play, but they will never take it for granted just because an adult tells them so. On the contrary, kids will know when something is made up. An adult seriously resorting to magic to answer a child's question will raise doubts. That kid is likely to question authority and religion ever after.
I think if adults SEEM to be believing it then kids will believe it too. Maybe you can say that then is not misleading them since you believe it to be true, but I don't think that proves that kids really have a critical thinking ability. That is why I think they are easily mislead. Of course there is much good to be said about having an "open mind", but having an "open mind" basically means anything can enter it. Kids' brains have their doors wide open. Is that good or bad? I don't think we can say it is just plain good. They need to learn critical thinking, all humans do, that is the skill to acquire.
My point was that the shaping of children by the world to hate, or judge, or otherwise adopt the beliefs of any given adult is exactly what corrupts them from who they truly are.
I’m referring to the goal as their state prior to those corrupting influences.
It's not so good to be open-minded if that is the same thing as readily-corrupted. Or in other words we shouldn't strive to be in a child-like state where we are easily corrupted, easily mislead, because we are so open-minded.