4. | Question Number Two
Translation from Estonian: Aul Pedajas
In the result-oriented Western society we are used to fight problems and to solve them like Terminator. Our society has developed into a society of the how-question – it seems to us that if we know how to solve a problem, then we are already on the right path. We are living in a so-called “society of solutions”, peculiarity of which is that every solution seems to create at least two new problems that, then again, we will heroically try to solve.
This pattern has become a phenomenon growing as a snowball, which is not possible to get out of with a question “how” without asking a why-question or its variations. When how-questions help us solve problems (and to create new ones) then why-questions can help us get out of this wheel. An opportunity will arise for us either to prevent a problem or to solve it “without solving”.
An essential part of my life has been asking questions – primarily in mind. Why are things the way they are? I have asked why-questions already more than 40 years and during this time a few observations have hatched out. I have noticed that there exists one question that I call “question number one”, which all people could ask themselves from time to time and another question that many people could ask themselves - because asking questions opens us for answers. Many questions do not have a single-valued, universally true answer, but can have many different, individually true answers. Here I would like to focus on “question number two”:
Where Do New Ideas Come From?
In the era of innovations and start-ups it is understandable that it is not possible to succeed without new ideas. By doing a pertinent Internet search we will find an infinite amount of subject developments how to be creative or how to find new ideas. Also, there are answers to the question “Where to find new ideas?”, but when we read on, they also get reduced to how-explanations or describe an environment that supports being creative. Info and discussion about the origin of new ideas are missing on the Internet – they just like simply get formed in someone’s head, which contradicts with our today’s understanding about the law of conservation of energy and growth of entropy. Just like energy cannot get formed by itself, so cannot information (in qualitative sense) get formed by itself. Rephrasing the question would help us closer to understanding:
Are New Ideas Discovered Or Invented?
If new ideas are discovered, then it means they exist somewhere. If we know where, maybe from now on it would be easier to find them. But if new ideas are invented, then arises a question, how gets formed new information which by its nature is an order in a higher form than the one so far. We know that for diminishing chaos or entropy one has to work. Question is who and in what form one has to work, so that a new idea, book or artwork would get formed?
Many big discoveries have come easily. Literary ideas are often in writer’s head in entirety form and the writer just puts words on paper. There is essentially no more work than focusing on info stream and printing. Many sculptors do not do anything else, but remove redundant part of raw material, as the result of which a sculpture that has always been there gets uncovered. Beethoven was deaf when he wrote his last works…
I have a friend who has written and published more than 50 books by himself. Most of them he has read chapter by chapter on a flash drive, then used a software solution that converts speech to text. In his case, the time it takes to write a book is equal to the time it takes to read it out which the time it takes to edit is added to. Many of my thought developments have got inspiration from his books.
It is not realistic that my friend in real time momentarily comes up with hundreds of pages of logical text that is connected as whole. The only reasonable explanation is that he, so to say, downloads the text of a book, which means the book already exists somewhere. It is a similar process to downloading a digital book from the Internet. If we will find the “address” of the book, the onward is already easy.
I have listened to many of the first (made before writing) sound recordings of his books. Sometimes a more than an hour long sound recording is without any stops or bumps and attracts attention. Recorded talk does not need editing. The text created with the help of software needs editing.
As intriguing examples are also many discoveries and inventions that have been made in different places of the world simultaneously. For example, inventing radio. A much more logical hypothesis would be that different people found the same idea from “somewhere” – became a receiver to the idea as a radio receiver to a signal of a radio transmitter.
Also, many philosophers of the world have made reference to this possibility. Plato talked about ideal shapes which can be interpreted this way that ideas can exist independently of us. In our society, scientific materialism (sceptics) that is current as the mainstream truth, of course, laughs at similar statements, but nevertheless, is not able to take the question off agenda.
On practical level, though, we could phrase the question completely differently:
Why is the question “Where do new ideas come from?” not an essential research object for universities and science institutions? Maybe this is one of the reasons why fruitfulness of ideas of science institutions is so modest?
The world is full of controversies for us, but these controversies cannot be real. They can exist only in our imagination as illusions. Not the world is in controversy, but our understanding is insufficient and controversial. For example, we know that expansion of the universe is accelerating, which means that our entire understanding of the structure and beginning of the universe is insufficient, to say the least. Additional energy has to come from somewhere.
Same thing is with the universe of ideas – if we compare today’s world and the world, for example, 2000 years ago, then the amount of ideas in the mankind’s disposal has imperceptibly increased. Additional ideas have to come from somewhere.
The question “Where do additional energy and new ideas come from?” is so far not just unanswered, but is also unasked and not researched, because the answer can crush our today’s worldview and sense of self.