Ideas are Supernatural
Nothing About How Ideas are Formed or Transmitted Makes Much Sense
Imagine for a moment that the United States doesn’t survive the 2024 elections (I know, not hard) and the resultant chaos plunges the entire world back into a new dark ages.
You know, poor people pushing wooden carts around, snooty aristocrats who never bathe and dress like Humperdinck from The Princess Bride.
But also, as civilization collapses, we forget all the cool tech and science we’ve learned in the last two hundred years, and our iPhones get repurposed as coasters.
Then imagine some monk studying by candlelight in a dingy abbey in the year 2984, comes across a book containing Einstein’s theory of special relativity stacked together inside a well-preserved academic library (which is why we still need physical libraries).
Assuming people still speak English, the recipient of this little gem might actually be able to understand what Einstein was describing.
Then, BOOM!
The idea first formulated in 1905 might be transmitted over 1,000 years into the future, sparking the next renaissance. We get back electricity. We get back computers. We get back the internet. We get back TikT….Maybe we decide to leave some things in the past.
This serendipitous find would unleash stupendous modifications to human life and our surrounding environment, but in what way was energy transferred from Einstein to our future monk?
It’s not so clear.
Ideas Don’t Follow Physics
Specifically, It’s not clear how the physical effect catalyzed by this revelation is in any way proportionate to the cause. Words were placed on a page a thousand years ago and those words were picked up and read. If the monk had not understood the words, then nothing would have happened, but if Einstein’s idea had traversed space and time to implant into a new mind, then everything might happen.
Alternately, if the monk had picked up a manual for a vacuum cleaner, it might have contained just as much data as Einstein’s paper and the monk’s synapses might have fired in pretty much the same way as he began to understand how to turn it on, how to replace the bag, what countries it was legal in, and where to store attachments.
In both cases (Einstein’s paper and the vacuum manual), a modicum of energy would be used to encode the ideas and a modicum of energy would be used to decode the ideas, but in the one case, nothing in the future changes and in the other the physical world would be upended - we’d be able to unlock stores of energy, communicate around the world, and send people to other planets.
It doesn’t make much sense. It doesn’t sound very scientific.
Because it doesn’t. Because it’s not.
The very concept of an idea is metaphysical. We can’t explain them using the scientific theories at our disposal, in part because those very scientific theories are themselves ideas. Ideas can rock the physical world, but aren’t clearly part of it except in a very tenuous sense.
You could imagine a tiny chip which encodes 90% of the really meaty human ideas being transported a million years into the future or a billion lightyears across the universe and having a greater impact on its destination than a thermonuclear explosion.
We Know More About the Big Bang Than the Big Idea
And it’s not just the transmission of ideas that’s strange. No one really knows where ideas come from either.
Think of Einstein’s thought experiment about riding alongside a light beam: That little imaginative excursion has had greater implications for 20th-century physics and the progress of modern technology than almost anything else.
But where did it come from? And if you wanted to manufacture the next breakthrough idea for the next iteration in our understanding of the cosmos, how would you do it?
There doesn’t seem to be any formula. Ideas float into our consciousness and float out in all sorts of circumstances for all sorts of reasons.
A methodology for producing ideas would, for instance, need to account for these instances:
The discovery of cosmic background radiation was made while looking for something else and carefully removing bird poop from the antenna.
Penicillin was discovered because a petre dish was left for too long and grew moldy.
The idea for AirBnB came about because Bryan Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn’t pay their rent without renting out air mattresses.
The idea for Facebook emerged from the idea of comparing girls at Harvard (which lots of college guys have thought is a good idea).
It’s not like people (or at least scientists and philosophers) haven’t tried to nail down how to generate good ideas. It’s just that every attempt has failed.
As soon as someone starts to get snooty with a new, strict methodology touted to be the only legitimate way to find the next E=MC2, someone else cites a counter-example involving hallucinogenic drugs, or a romantic fling, or a job reviewing clock patents, or something which by all accounts has nothing to do with the resultant idea and yet played an indisputable if ambiguous role in giving it birth.
Ideas just don’t seem natural. They don’t seem like they are an ordinary part of our world.
This might be why Karl Popper (the mac-daddy of the philosophy of science) says ideas are actually in a separate world that is distinct from the physical world and also distinct from our subjective mental world.
Whoa With the Philosophy! Why Does This Matter?
Well, that escalated quickly!
So now that I’ve gotten myself neck-deep in philosophizing, what can I say that’s actually useful?
Lots. But I’ll restrict myself to just two points:
First, while we all know that good ideas are a dime a dozen if you don’t execute, we should also know by now that execution requires coming up with more good ideas.
As you execute on the uber idea, you’re constantly facing related problems and opportunities. Often, we approach these lesser puzzles with dogged, heads-down analysis, as if we can just cogitate through every obstacle.
But sometimes, we’d be better off ignoring the petre dish for a few hours or a few days, going for a long walk, having a shower, getting a beer with some friends, talking about anything other than work, reading a sci-fi novel, and getting a good night’s sleep.
“Right!” (you might be thinking) “to sharpen the saw, build physical health, restore work-life balance and focus on self-care.”
Yeah, that’s important too, I guess.
But mainly because very often the activities tangential to action (parallel to analysis) are where breakthrough ideas are born - where the magic happens. Plus, when you come back into the lab, you may find something great growing by accident in your petre dish.
(or it could be that if you chain yourself to your desk for a few months, that is what will generate good ideas, but since no one knows for sure, you’re free to try more diverse and pleasant alternatives).
Second, for all you engineering types who just want to build the widget and get annoyed when some product manager or sales guy oversimplifies your creation to fit it into the brochure, remember that the transmission of an idea can have as much or more physical, objective impact on the world as the initial implementation of that idea.
In other words, your single pulsing light can go bleep, bleep, bleep as you code alone or - if the idea of your app can be made simple and sticky - the whole universe can be set aglow. You choose.
Supernatural?
It’s crazy how ideas are formed and it doesn’t make any sense how much matter and energy is moved when someone is moved by an idea. Yet nevertheless, the world of ideas has more tangible impact on the physical world than anything else.
Ideas are clearly super. And I have my doubts as to whether they are natural.