I had an idea earlier today. I thought to myself: having compared the mind to a kind of singularity from whence ideas come I really should try to explain myself a little further. I said in a podcast titled “Epiphenomena” where I considered the nature of consciousness and its possible relationship to explanatory creativity (found below, by the way)
that:
“What I am saying is: we people are the equivalent of a kind of singularity. From one singularity came all of existence. But from others come ideas…From the singularity that existed at the moment of the big bang came everything. What if the analogue of a singularity exists in the mind of a person and this initiates ideas?…If a black hole were a naked singularity perhaps tv sets could come out of them - so it has been said. And the reason? Because the regular laws of physics as we understand them break down inside singularities. Our understanding of causation fails. TV sets may as well come out of such things therefore because regular laws of physics do not seem to apply. Very well.
So what if people are the only real naked singularities? What if tv sets can come out of people? After all, in truth, they did. TV sets came from the imaginations of people.
It’s either that, which at least explains something, or television sets came from the first singularity - that which inflated and expanded at the moment of creation. From that big bang event came hydrogen, stars, galaxies, planets and eventually people and television sets.
So, television sets come from singularities. Whether that’s the big bang or something in the mind of a person, make your choice. But one of those is merely predictive. The other: explanatory.”
Since then multiple viewers and listeners have taken my remarks not as the analogies or metaphors I thought I was expressing but as literal explanations. They are not. I rarely provide “good explanations” of consciousness, creativity, free will or anything of that sort because I do not think we have good explanations of any of those things yet. I have some hazy conjectures at best. That - the idea that ideas come from something like a singularity was one. A “naked singularity” if it exists in physics is a place where the laws of physics themselves “break down” so it is said. Or rather our knowledge of the laws of physics (theories including general relativity and quantum theory) breaks down and hence we cannot give a good account in physical terms of things like what causes what or what is expected to happen next. In other words: we are unable to make predictions as our dynamical laws, as we understand them, fail us in such a place - a naked singularity. The universe itself - all of physical reality - may have come from a naked singularity of this kind. Namely: a state of physical reality that lies beyond general relativity and quantum theory to account for. And hence the best we can say in terms of those theories is “we do not know what caused the universe. Our laws of physics as we currently understand them cannot predict the universe coming into being”. A naked singularity therefore could give rise to the whole universe. Everything. As David Deutsch writes in “The Beginning of Infinity” (page 175) “As Hawking once put it, ‘Television sets could come out [of a naked singularity].’” He, Deutsch, then goes on to say, in essence, that there is no reason to think the Big Bang was a singularity of that sort but rather something more benign. In any case, singularities - naked or otherwise - are bizarre phenomena.
If it’s true that the universe itself came from a singularity and if Hawking is correct that from a naked singularity we may as well expect anything to come (television sets or whatnot) then if we look at a place where television sets really do come (the imagination of people) I was speculating that perhaps the mind contains within it something analogous to a naked singularity. Or perhaps a singularity of some kind. Perhaps. Maybe. Again: of some kind. But I don’t know. This is all rather wild speculation. So perhaps I should be a little more precise then and cease speaking in riddles and analogies? In any case I had the idea I should explain all this a little more. Where did that idea come from? And where are these ideas I am typing out now coming from? My mind, obviously. Me, in other words. But where in me and how? In other words, in the most general case:
Where do ideas come from? If not literal singularities in the mind, then where?
Let us first take a step back and ask what we are even talking about. What is an idea? An idea is a conjecture: a guess. It may be an attempt to say something that might be true (or false, or deceptive i.e: a lie) or useful or beautiful (or useless, mean, insulting or cruel) and so on. This is to say: it may be explicit in part (expressible in language) or it may be largely inexplicit (not properly expressible in language - yet- because we do not know how, like for example the idea of how it feels to be weightless or falling for a moment (a sensation many can recall at will - yet not easily describable) or just what green looks like (if you are trying to describe this, say, to a blind person).
Ideas can come to us for many reasons and often unbidden - but not always. One can sit and reflect upon a problem and…ideas sometimes pleasant or useful can more readily come when we are not distracted or concerned or fearful. Some ideas, for some of us, come best when walking. Or in silence. Especially those kind of ideas we find most important to us: solutions. What to do next? How to get past this problem?
An idea, therefore, is a kind of guess and it may be a kind of knowledge. But not all knowledge counts as an idea, nor vice versa. How are “guesses” and “knowledge” and “ideas” and similar concepts related? I do not think this field is a precision science or philosophy. But the following diagram may help to some degree in at least summarising a part of epistemology as I understand it and best explained by David Deutsch following on from work initiated both by Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins (among others).
I wish to emphasise that this “diagram” is not supposed to be either definitive or exhaustive - merely informative to some extent - a hint as to how some of these epistemological notions are distinct yet related. For one thing there are many more categories we could apply: the explicit (and implicit) vs inexplicit distinctions in knowledge. Also worthy of note: I am simply taking so-called “Popperian” epistemology to be epistemology (the study of the creation and growth of knowledge) in much the same way a physicist just takes quantum physics to be physics (the study of energy, matter and so on). This is not to say that in either case all has been explained or there are not deep mysteries left to unravel. But it is to say that, we’ve moved beyond certain ideas (induction, justified true belief, “confidence” and subjective feelings and so on in epistemology in much the same way we have moved beyond Newtonian classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics as being a literal explanation of how motion, gravity and energy works. Or indeed how neo-Darwinism has replaced creationism (which may be a better analogy - more than an analogy indeed - still). It is for this reason I have deliberately avoided categories like “belief” or “justified truth” or “probable assertion” and so on - I think those, and related or synonymous concepts are all entirely misconceived.
Returning to my diagram and considering the various intersections (and complements) of “knowledge” with “ideas”, what is common to all instances of ideas is that they are abstractions, which is to say they could, in principle, be communicated and represented in various physical forms. Or to be a little more precise, an idea, like knowledge, can be said to be independent of its physical substrate. We humans have ideas and they are in our minds represented as patterns of neuronal firings. We don’t have any good explanation as to precisely how. We can write down our ideas - as ink on paper. Or speak them - vibrations we call sound in the air. Pixels on a screen - patterns of light and dark. But the idea is not identical to the ink on paper or the neuronal firings and so on. These are just ways of representing those ideas. For my purposes I shall say an idea is an abstraction that attempts to capture or represent possibility.
Let me explain parts of this diagram and let me start, as I admonish anyone interested in epistemology to do, with science. It is no accident I put science (and related intellectual pursuits) at the heart of my diagram here inside the green circle. We must start here as those interested in epistemology for if epistemology is to serve us any purpose at all it is to serve the purpose of solving problems in the real world and the real world is the business of science (as well as mathematics, morality, economics, philosophy and so on. Namely - other subjects.) Epistemology is not to be done in the abstract or by considering trope examples of whether tables exist or was the nature of perceptions are. It is to consider how knowledge is created and to understand that we should look to science. Let us not merely imagine what goes on in the abstract - let us use the tools of science and reason upon science itself: explain what it is that we observe to be going on. We have a problem: how did we devise theories of the atom or of gravity or of the diversity of species and how did we move from plumb pudding atomic models to the modern quantum idea of the atom or from Newtonian force of gravity to Einstein’s curved space time or from Biblical style creationism to evolution by natural selection. Those are real problems of how we move from explanation to better explanation by correcting errors. That is the centre of the bullseye.
Ideas that are good explanations all count as knowledge if they are explanations of reality. These are also memes as they go on to get replicated.Not all scientific knowledge counts as a “good explanation” in light of being refuted (for example). So Newtonian Gravity counts as explanatory, it’s knowledge and it’s a meme (it gets replicated) but it’s not a good explanation of gravity given what we know about general relativity and observations like gravitational waves and Eddington’s experiment, etc.
Here let us consider the region bounded by the red circle but is outside the Green. Good explanations are not only of the scientific, moral and philosophical kind. They can be just good explanations of who one’s family members are or how a certain dance is best performed. Some good explanations (where you left your keys) won’t count as memes, though they are knowledge.
The intersection of knowledge and ideas are memes or another way of saying that is that memes are ideas that go on to get replicated. Many memes are not “good explanations” - they could just be cultural behaviours for example: ideas and knowledge, yes - but not explanatory in any sense even if there are explanations for those things. Jokes might fit in this category, as will songs, works of fiction, art of the kind that becomes popular to some extent and so on. Some memes are rational (they propagate by making use of the critical faculties of their holders) and some are anti-rational (they propagate by disabling the critical faculties of their holders) but that distinction does not feature in this crude representation of these categories. In any case anti-rational memes may often be a form of inexplicit knowledge: the holder just won’t know they even hold them. The fear of criticising some idea might run very deep, well below conscious awareness.
Knowledge that is not a good explanation and is not “memetic”can be things you know that just aren’t so and you may never communicate. For example you may be superstitious and think wearing your “lucky red socks” on the day you plan to propose to your sweetheart really is the reason he or she says yes - or even factors in it. Or that this is the reason you never got covid and so on. You may say you “believe” in the power of your lucky red socks. You know it. Yet it’s false (like Newtonian Gravity) yet unlike Newtonian gravity fails to solve any problem - it also never gets copied and passed on to another mind so does not count as a meme.
Ideas you have that don’t count as knowledge that you never think are true or useful - but are merely guesses that appear in consciousness only to be almost immediately refuted (just for example) or eventually refuted. “I left my keys on the kitchen counter” is an idea that might be immediately refuted by observation they are in fact in your pocket. So that guess (idea) is not knowledge and is not a meme nor a good explanation.
Descartes, Kant and Hume (indeed many of the classic philosophers both British and Continental of the early Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th century) were most concerned about ideas rather than knowledge. My business is usually to write and speak about knowledge which, although related is technically a separate thing as can be seen from my diagram.
Knowledge, on my view, borrowing directly from Chiara Marletto, following in the footsteps of David Deutsch, himself in the lineage of Karl Popper and who likewise followed from Xenophanes of Colophon (570-478 BC) is resilient information.
Resilient captures the quality of getting itself copied through error identification and correction over time and remaining “instantiated in some physical substrate”. This getting itself copied property happens precisely because something (people generally) find that information useful. Hence it counts as knowledge. What makes the information useful? It solves some problem. And so long as that information solves a problem, it will continue to get copied and transmitted whether explicitly or indeed without a knower being present - like for example in a book or more abstractly and implicitly still - in an object. My favourite examples are telescopes which can be reverse engineered by some intelligent creature to reveal the knowledge contained within of how to collect, focus and magnify light coming from object. Or indeed a computer which “instantiates the knowledge” of laws of physics allowing for calculation/computation to occur and whose circuits, transistors and capacitors can have represented in them as (for example) electrical potential energy information in the form of binary digits which, correctly interpreted, can be understood as likewise containing knowledge. In summary:
Knowledge is useful information. It can be called “useful” because it solves some problem. Because it is useful it tends to get itself copied, or in other words once instantiated in a physical substrate tends to cause itself to remain so (or, in other words, it is resilient).
So that’s knowledge. But what about ideas? They cannot be the same as knowledge because not all ideas are useful.
Popper, Deutsch and Marletto all refer to ideas repeatedly in their work but their focus, like mine, is rather more often on knowledge. After all it is those ideas that count as knowledge (in particular explanatory knowledge that “transform the world” (to borrow a part of the subtitle of “The Beginning of Infinity”). But if I wish to attempt an answer to the question “Where do ideas come from?” I had best refine what I mean by “idea” in at least something like the way I just have there with knowledge. But, as I say, Marletto, Deutsch and Popper, do not refine “idea” in the way they do with “knowledge” and for good reason: knowledge is the really important stuff.
But philosophers have, through the ages, focussed on what this word “idea” is all about. Descartes, in his profound work “Meditations on First Philosophy” (1641), following the tradition of which he and his contemporaries were a part, spoke of certain ideas as being “clear and distinct”. Such ideas he thought could not possibly be false. So a “clear and distinct” idea of himself where he writes:
“…because I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think]. And although possibly (or rather certainly, as I shall say in a moment) I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined, yet because, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.”
Which as we can see in the light of modern physics (of computation) and epistemology (of personhood) he’s quite right except for this desire to be certain of it all. And that this certainty is in some way established by the clearness and distinctness of the idea. He desires certainty because his view of knowledge and epistemology is to have a solid foundation on which to build the rest of the totally reliable edifice of knowledge. He is not alone in this tradition even through to today. People want certainly true axioms and certainly true rules of interference allowing them to infer, deduce or conclude certainly true knowledge as consequences logically implied and as certain as those axioms one began with. It’s not about problem solving so much as proving true what one believes or thinks.
Yet Descartes is correct that what he, as a person is, is a thinking thing and that he could indeed exist “distinct” from his body and could exist without it. This is just a consequence of substrate independence of the mind. He got there by reasoning this through from rather dubious premisses - we can get there now as a matter of good explanation. Namely: we as people are thinking things and what it means to think is that we have a mind that runs on the brain but is not identical to the brain. The former is a special kind of software running on the hardware that is the brain. But all of that is by-the-by for what animates this present discussion. What is an idea? Descartes offers little by way of explanation here but perhaps he touches upon our question as to where ideas come from when later in his Meditations he writes (in the rather obscure style to which philosophers of his era were fond)
“There is certainly further in me a certain passive faculty of perception, that is, of receiving and recognising the ideas of sensible things, but this would be useless to me [and I could in no way avail myself of it], if there were not either in me or in some other thing another active faculty capable of forming and producing these ideas. But this active faculty cannot exist in me [inasmuch as I am a thing that thinks] seeing that it does not presuppose thought, and also that those ideas are often produced in me without my contributing in any way to the same, and often even against my will; it is thus necessarily the case that the faculty resides in some substance different from me in which all the reality which is objectively in the ideas that are produced by this faculty is formally or eminently contained, as I remarked before.”
So there he admits there is something in him - an “active faculty capable of forming and producing these ideas” which come from “a certain passive faculty of perception”. So here Descartes thinks perception is passive - in other words no interpretation is needed. You just “perceive” in a rather unproblematic way. But this is a problem for anyone who wants to account for things like optical illusions or indeed just hallucination. What we think we perceive just might not be so - never mind what idea we then go on to have about that first “sense impression”. What we are, are minds. Those minds are connected to senses via nerves and who knows what neurones might fire or nerves might go haywire to deliver to us a perception of something that just is not there. We cannot ever rule this possibility out entirely, and thus we should remain fallibilists who understand that we are guessing at the world and always interpreting the apparent contents of our minds. We may guess reliably well and come to solve our problems some of the time but none of that ever confers certainty - which is Descartes’ mistake: the error of mistaking some good (though possible false) explanations for certain truth. He just could not imagine how he could possibly be wrong about some things (like his own existence) and on that basis - his lack of imagination - he thought he proved himself infallible at times, on some topics at least. Whatever the case, Descartes reached the unsurprising conclusion that ideas originate within him, and sometimes against his will. Very well, there is little to quibble with there.
Immanuel Kant in his celebrated “Critique of Pure Reason” (a book Karl Popper himself praised as being a great advance in epistemology for its almost (but not quite) outline of his own “critical rationalist” philosophy. Kant likewise cannot tell us where ideas come from but in the second part of his vast tome titled “Division two: Transcendental dialectic” he does write “On the ideas in general” before he gets to specifics on his more major topic “transcendental ideas”. He writes,
“In the great wealth of our languages, the thinking mind nevertheless often finds itself at a loss for an expression that exactly suits its concept, and lacking this it is able to make itself rightly intelligible neither to others nor even to itself. Coining new words is a presumption to legislate in language that rarely succeeds, and before we have recourse to this dubious means it is advisable to look around in a dead and learned language to see if an expression occurs in it that is suitable to this concept; and even if the ancient use of this expression has become somewhat unsteady owing to the inattentiveness of its authors, it is better to fix on the meaning that is proper to it (even if it is doubtful whether it always had exactly this sense) than to ruin our enterprise by making ourselves unintelligible.”
Which is good advice to modern thinkers today: avoid coining new words. There is rarely a good reason to come up with neologism unless, at the last, you are utterly exhausted of all other options. For one: it confuses your interlocutor who has never heard your new word before and on the other you can mistake inventing a word with discovering something real - or possibly be inclined perhaps to deceive your reader that you have discovered something new when in fact you’ve done little more than J R R Tolkien did when coining the term “Hobbit”. He at least totally understood he was writing pure fiction and was not intent on deceiving anyone (much less himself). We cannot be quite so generous with certain other modern thinkers who proffer all kinds of new vocabulary and acronyms in order to conjure the pretence of deep investigation.
Anyway, Kant goes on later in this same passage to write,
“Plato made use of the expression idea in such a way that we can readily see that he understood by it something that not only could never be borrowed from the senses, but that even goes far beyond the concepts of the understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), since nothing encountered in experience could ever be congruent to it. Ideas for him are archetypes of things themselves, and not, like the categories, merely the key to possible experiences. In his opinion they flowed from the highest reason, through which human reason partakes in them; our reason, however, now no longer finds itself in its original state, but must call back with toil the old, now very obscure ideas through a recollection (which is called philosophy). I do not wish to go into any literary investigation here, in order to make out the sense which the sublime philosopher combined with his word. I note only that when we compare the thoughts that an author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech as well as in writings, it is not at all unusual to find that we understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept sufficiently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention.”
And so he goes on in similar vein. Now it may well be that we understand some writer better than he understands himself or we may both misunderstand the thing being written about to some extent at least. Kant here seems to be suggesting that Plato understood by the term “idea” something closer to what I call “knowledge” after all here the word is being used as referring to “things themselves” - but then, not all ideas refer to real things. Some can rightly be said to not refer to anything let alone the thing itself. An idea of a fairy is not referring to anything real so what “fairies themselves” can mean, I do not know. An idea is a guess - an attempt at representing something real or not. In any case, Kant is not particularly helpful. He is deeply focused on categorising ideas but he never grapples precisely with what they are nor where they come from.
So lastly for now let me consider the work of David Hume on all this for Hume authored a book called “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” and chapter 2 of that book is titled “Of the origin of ideas”. So that would seem to be the jackpot when it comes to my searching for an answer to my original question “Where do ideas come from?” Unfortunately we must prepare for disappointment for although Hume is my nomination for the greatest philosopher of the 17th and 18th centuries (a notable achievement among luminaries including the aforementioned Descartes and Kant but also Locke, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Voltaire, Burke, Godwin and Rousseau) but then I have always been fascinated by the question of personhood which I think Hume made far more sense on than any of those other heretofore mentioned. So with that preamble let me read sections from “Of the origin of ideas” and distil out what there may be there.
(It is perhaps worth noting John Stuart Mill was of the 19th century).
He begins with “Every one will readily allow, that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and when he afterwards recalls to his memory this sensation, or anticipates it by his imagination.” Which is a terrible appeal to the masses. No, not everyone. Indeed Descartes had already explained why this could not be “readily” allowed. Yes, ok - we can say there is a difference in general between perceiving a hot thing and remembering that hot thing - but we can never be sure we are not hallucinating, dreaming or just making an error in our recollection.
Yet he goes on “These faculties may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses; but they never can entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment. The utmost we say of them, even when they operate with greatest vigour, is, that they represent their object in so lively a manner, that we could almost say we feel or see it: But, except the mind be disordered by disease or madness, they never can arrive at such a pitch of vivacity, as to render these perceptions altogether undistinguishable.” Which is an admission that the mind can indeed be disordered. But it need not be by disease or madness. Simple errors can make recalling and experiencing sometimes confusing. But none of this is actually relevant to the origin of ideas beyond the fact he is trying to say: some perception from outside causes a sensation inside the mind. Very well.
He also makes a distinction later between a man who is angry and a man who recalls what it is like to be angry. Again, all very well - but none of this explains exactly where ideas come from only that they arise in the mind and themselves can be explained (the idea of being angry can be explained by the events causing the upset and the idea of remembering anger can be explained by recalling to mind the sensation of what it’s like to be angry). In any case Hume does want to divide all the contents of the mind into two kinds: impressions (which are perceptions like the scalding heat of tea that is too hot or the anger one feels when having been robbed or assaulted, let’s say) and ideas which include remembering those events. Hume writes on all this,
“Here therefore we may divide all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species, which are distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible and lively are commonly denominated Thoughts or Ideas. The other species want a name in our language, and in most others; I suppose, because it was not requisite for any, but philosophical purposes, to rank them under a general term or appellation. Let us, therefore, use a little freedom, and call them Impressions; employing that word in a sense somewhat different from the usual. By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And impressions are distinguished from ideas, which are the less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflect on any of those sensations or movements above mentioned.”
Which is all very imprecise: we are just distinguishing between the so-called force upon the mind of these things. Actually experiencing burning your mouth (an impression) and remembering the burning sensation (an idea). But now remember a funny joke and the first time you heard it. I have the experience in many cases here of the so-called impression being identical to the so-called idea. Both can elicit in me the same kind of silly joy over and again with a very long half-life at times. But perhaps that is just me. And once I forget the joke or the stand up routine for a while I can then later recall it with full force and laugh again as much as I did the first time. The same is true of the experience of music. The recollection and the first experience can sometimes have the same kind of profound experience. But never mind that: just consider dreams. Are they ideas or impressions? They cannot be impressions on Hume’s view because they come wholly from within. And yet the profound fear, joy or whatever emotion and sensation they elicit is indistinguishable for the time of dreaming from reality because we only experience reality in our minds. We have to interpret it. If we interpret some mental content as going on now, then it feels more forceful in general but if we interpret it as having passed we will not experience it as being so present and forceful. I can recommend what Hume writes on this further (for a total of around 10 dense paragraphs) to get the gist of what the great man said on all this - but, as I say, prepare for disappointment when it comes to actually grappling with “the origin of ideas” or where ideas come from.
That ideas can be explained by recourse to stuff happening out in reality (impressions) or being recalled by memory (ideas) does not actually explain how they both arise in the mind - but only that they do. I want more and I especially want to know, when trying to create something new - where those ideas come from. Where does innovation come from and our new creations? Where did Hume get the idea for his work “An enquiry into Human Understanding”? It cannot have come from outside, could it? And nor could it be recalled. He seems to have missed the most important kind of idea that is not mere “perception” (or impression) or recollection (his “idea”) but rather a new creative thought. A solution to a problem, a composition, a new theory or explanation and so on. He does try to say, admittedly, that (for example) the idea of a “golden mountain” is about recalling what “golden” and “mountain” is. So in this sense creativity is just the combination of pre-existing ideas. But this would be a form of pure deduction and Hume was of course trapped into thinking that ideas and knowledge could only come either from deduction (the logical combination of ideas like this) or induction (the logical derivation of ideas from the senses). This leaves no room for genuine imagination and creativity and guesswork. It is an attempt to create a logic of creativity by denying actual creativity!
So let us move on from the great (though terribly misconceived) philosophers of the classic era.
Let us consider instead what is it to have an idea as a matter of subjectivity. We will ignore reductionist physicalist answers: namely that ideas just are nothing but neural firings or some such. As we have already said, this rather misses the point. If I have an idea that begins in that form i.e in the form of neural firings) I can write it down onto paper and it remains an idea for it can be passed on to anyone who then reads the paper and has some version of it kindled in their own mind as they try to guess the meaning of the scribbles on the paper.
But do all ideas count as knowledge? A we have already seen no, they do not. Let us recall from earlier and take things a little further by saying: all ideas will count as a kind of information. But not all ideas are useful - so they do not count as knowledge. Knowledge solves a problem and hence is useful. But not all useful information goes on to get replicated and so because not all knowledge goes on to get replicated - which is to say not all knowledge counts as a meme or as memetic. For example I may have the idea one day of adding a teaspoon of “golden syrup” to black coffee and calling it “golden coffee” to myself. To me this idea becomes knowledge but if no one else ever learns I do this it never becomes a meme. It’s just some private knowledge. Useful to me perhaps, but it never goes any further than that. Or to belabour my trope example from earlier: the knowledge of where I left my keys (on the kitchen counter and not in the lounge room) - may be useful information to me that solves a problem but will likewise never get replicated - much less ever communicated to anyone else the instant after I pick up my keys and then go on the rest of my life forgetting I ever had that problem that moment of where my keys were.
In any case all ideas - all knowledge - counts as conjectural. It is guessed and so we should not be surprised that the overwhelming majority of it is false. Indeed we can argue that all of it, in the final analysis, must turn out to be false as even if we think we have hit the proverbial nail on the head in describing or explaining reality we will find eventually some misconception we have or some failing in our claim about the world. “Electrons orbit the nucleus” turns out to not be quite right. The word “orbit” does not capture the motion of an electron around the nucleus. And as for orbiting the nucleus is that perfectly correct? Or is the motion of the nucleus and the electrons about some common centre of a combination of mass and centre of charge? In mathematics - that through two points a single straight line can be drawn. An axiom of Euclid turns out to not be universally correct once one understands there exist geometries beyond that described by a flat two dimensional space.
But the ultimate fallaciousness of all ideas still fails to allow us to make any progress on that question which animates us here: where do ideas come from? From minds, very well. But how? We just do not know. Are all ideas variations on ideas we already had? That seems to lead to some kind of infinite regress stretching back in time to our moment of the conception of our personal consciousness. That is no answer.
And so I claim this very question: “Where do ideas come from?” itself contains a misconception. It cries out for an answer to do with the source of our knowledge. In other words it is the wrong question. And there can be wrong questions! (Consider: what being designed the shape of Australia? The real question is: what processes lead to the shape that Australia now has?)
In similar fashion asking about where ideas come from is misleading - it points the way down a path that is an epistemological cul de sac. We know we have ideas: minds have them. We do not know how (until we know how minds work in fine detail).
For now, and instead a more profitable avenue to begin down is to ask: What sorts of things allow creativity to flourish? Equivalently: under what conditions will better ideas arise given we know they arise in minds?
So let us replace the question of “Where do ideas come from?” with “How can creativity be helped to flourish?”.
This, the astute reader will notice, is but this author’s pale imitation of, or riffing upon, just one movement in the great symphony of Karl Popper’s epistemology where that original composer wrote in his 1960 essay “Knowledge without authority” wherein he offered to the world a way forward with:
“I wish to replace...the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: How can we come to detect and eliminate error?” And thus in exactly the same vein I wish to replace the question of where ideas come from by the entirely different question: how can we come to maximise creativity? Maximising creativity, or perhaps the somewhat more modest question of better allowing creativity to flourish simply is about most effectively detecting and correcting (or eliminating) errors.
It is in the opinion of this author that maximising creativity happens best when the creative entity (a mind, a person) is free: liberated from coercion and nurtured with good health and reasonable wealth to be able to explore a space of ideas. This takes time and freedom. Those are the ingredients. We cannot say where the ideas will come from, but that they might better flourish in a garden of freedom given the passage of time and the watering of good health and the sunlight of reasonable wealth is all we can say. Time to explore, energy to reflect and no shadow of coercion upon the process might best allow the person to maximise their creativity. This does not mean solutions will come but rather that the opportunity that they present themselves is greater than when time is restricted unnecessarily, or a person is coerced into thinking about things they would prefer not to (such as poor health or an inability to pay their bills or know where their next meal is coming from, let’s say).
It is well known for example that Issac Newton, sequestered away during a pandemic, authored his Principia Mathematica. Albert Einstein did much of his best work well outside of mainstream academia while gainfully employed but with (seemingly) quite an amount of freedom day to day to explore ideas.
On the other hand we must also admit that at times a sense of urgency may help. A goal in place to manufacture a vaccine, or get to the moon or first construct the fission or fusion bomb. So perhaps only sometimes for some people does splendid isolation work so well. Other times the buzz of a motivated team is the fertile ground that allows ideas to germinate, sprout then become a veritable forest of flourishing originality.
People are different and so the best prescription is simply to ask them what works best if you want something out of them or just wish to help them be their best so you can be your best. Contemplatives, meditators and those practised in careful introspection and exploration of their own minds have long known that ideas seem to simply “arise” in consciousness. This is quite consistent with the Popperian view that everything in our mind is an interpretation. We are minds: the things that have ideas. The ideas are interpretations. We are what have them, create them and criticise so as to refine and improve them. We find solutions that way. But no solution or idea is identical to us. The mind - the creative conjecturing, guessing thing we are is itself unchanging but provides new content all the time. The empty stage is itself unchanged even though cast, crew and set pieces come and go. The mind and its contents are different things.
Ideas as I have said are abstractions that capture possibility. They arise only for most of them to pass away, criticised and lost to the vacuum of unconsciousness again. If I am right that ideas come from the equivalent of something like a “mind singularity” then all this is saying is that what we know so far of epistemology fails to account for their creation and thus the question of “where do ideas come from?” when given the answer “a singularity in the mind” is just another way of saying “our best explanation right now is silent on that matter”.
But what it is not silent on is how best to allow more and better ideas to arise. In general that is a state completely divorced from coercion and liberal with time devoted to thinking. For then conjectures can arise and conjectures criticising those conjectures can arise and the whole wheel of progress turns and improvement comes on not inevitably, but nonetheless relentlessly. For now I have an idea: I should turn this article into a podcast.
Go enjoy creating, criticising or considering some new ideas. That’s what you are and what you do.
Credit: to David Deutsch, Chiara Marletto, Karl Popper (for much of my content about how to define the problem) and Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch for much of my framing of the solution.
Where do ideas come from?