Where Do Ideas Come From

Maybe certain ideas are archtypes that resonate within the collective conscious of Humanity. Some people tap into this realm by meditation or entheogenic substances. Maybe symbolism brings some of it out.

originally posted by: Peeple
a reply to: mysterioustranger

So you're basically saying the inspiration comes from the metaphysical universe? Or akashic records?
Because the time is ripe for certain inventions?

What is...was...and will be again. Over and over.

It's the age old "Chicken or egg 1st" question.

The chicken clucking in front of you is alive and well.

But the simple egg next to it...may or may not BECOME a chicken (as in the egg could get dropped, broken)...all while the live chicken living...clucks away.

Ideas? Exist out there in the ether of dimensions...

originally posted by: Peeple
a reply to: skunkape23

That's a great quote, I never heard that before. But wasn't Pablo into cubism? Someone was the first to start that style without someone to steal from.

Picasso and Braque really kicked off the Cubist movement but Cezannes later works are possibly the earliest inspiration for the style.

a reply to: Peeple

Here is a small small story.
I swim. Alot. For over 25 years now I swim for my daily exercise. An hour a day. Well a number of years ago I was finished with my laps and was just lazing round in the water, floating and summersaulting and things, Mostly just chillin. I was drifting and thought that I would like to put my feet up on the edge of the pool while floating on my stomach. I use a snorkle and nose plug and ear plugs while swimming. At this point I was feeling lazy and was facing away from the wall. Rather than turning around and swimming over to the wall the thought struck me that maybe I could use my legs in a reverse breast stroke fashion to move the few feet to the wall. So I did.

The effort it took to do it was exciting. It called for me to abandon so many years of developed habit and move my legs in a fashion I never had before, nor had I ever seen before.

Over the next couple of weeks I explored this new motion exercise while fighting off the old training from so many years. Gradually I became proficient in swimming backwards. Other people who swim want to know where I learned to do it as a number have tried and give up immediately. So this case is simply invention through inquisitiveness, finding something new that has never been before, at least as I have ever been able to discover.

Another incident of invention occoured 60 years ago while in high school. It was the last day of my third year and I was walking down an empty hall after school when from the other end of the hall came an old friend from Junior High. Though we had been friends then, once in high school he had advanced into the ruling clique of jocks while I remained with the music nerds.

As we approached each other I thought that even though we never acknowledge our old relationship any longer I still might say something to him as we passed. The last day of school and as I do not like to be rude decided to say something like see you next year, a general greeting kind of things.

At that time, ''surfer'' slang was the rage, living close to the ocean in California. So as I was about to give a greeting of ''How's it going'' part of my brain was bubbling up with rather than a greeting, a farewell . So I also tried to say ''hang in there'' which was an offshoot of surfing '' hang ten''. But rather than either coming out of my mouth, what did get said was a combo of both. What came out was '' How's it hanging''.

He now being a stuffy ''in'' guy and me being a ''lower than life'' guy he just grunted. But a few seconds later he stopped, turned around, laughed and said, ''good one'' and walked away chuckling.

The next fall I came back to school to find that over the summer, this guy had hung with his friends in the clique and he has used the ''hows it hanging'' line as a greeting with others and it was now, in the fall the standard greeting among the clique in school. Within weeks it had spread across the town to other schools and soon became a standard teen greeting among jocks and boys in general.

So here is a case of invention through pure accident.

a reply to: Peeple

Just my personal opinion................... Ideas come from the spirit that has taken hold of your body. This spirit (you) may already contain these "Ideas" from previous incarnations and the experience / learning gained during these sometimes dozens of previous lifetimes of possessing a life form to live within can be sometimes tapped into like a great library within.

originally posted by: Sillyolme
a reply to: Peeple

necessity. Its the mother of invention.

That's what I was gonna say!

a reply to: Peeple

In general though, I am of a mind with several others here. A Platonic interpretation is that of forms. A chair is a chair because in the fullest sense of being, there is a CHAIR, a CHAIR which is exemplified by a singular chair. And to boot, all possible chairs exist in potentiality of which any number of human concoctions can bring into physical reality, or into this physical world be they physical objects or conceptual ideas. All exist and are focused into our plane of being here on earth though the medium of human development.

So I can guess that my unique swimming stroke is a reflection of all possible swimming strokes of which I, through shear will and desire to investagate has brought into physical being. So in this case, I was not the inventor, but rather the catalyst making the potential physical.

originally posted by: ufoorbhunter
a reply to: Peeple

Just my personal opinion................... Ideas come from the spirit that has taken hold of your body. This spirit (you) may already contain these "Ideas" from previous incarnations and the experience / learning gained during these sometimes dozens of previous lifetimes of possessing a life form to live within can be sometimes tapped into like a great library within.

Close to my personal beliefs.

I believe in what we call the Tapestry. We are all interconnected, our energies intermingled with all other energies.

All living things are intertwined with each other, creating a tapestry of energy. The Tapestry is above the concept of time.

Some have described it as a superconsciousness that our subconscious minds can sometimes interact with.

It is a thing that is greater than the sum of its parts.

There are beings that are not a part of it, above and below the Tapestry. Things that feed off the energy but are not a part of it.

What some would term angels and demons.

To me that also explains most modern religions. It is an example of the parable of the blind men and the elephants.

In a distant village, a long time ago, there lived six blind men. One day the villagers announced, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”

They had never seen or felt an elephant before and so decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” And thus they went down to the village to touch and feel the elephant to learn what animal this was and they described it as follows:

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” argued the second after touching the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” the third man spouted after touching the trunk.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man feeling the ear.

“It is like a huge wall,” sounded the fifth man who groped the belly .

“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man with the tuskin his hand.

They all fell into heated argument as to who was right in describing the big beast, all sticking to their own perception. A wise sage happened to hear the argument, stopped and asked them “What is the matter?” They said, “We cannot agree to what the elephant is like.”

The wise man then calmly said, “Each one of you is correct; and each one of you is wrong. Because each one of you had only touched a part of the elephant’s body. Thus you only have a partial view of the animal. If you put your partial views together, you will get an idea of what an elephant looks like.”

This is a topic that would take a book to flesh out properly and I don't have the skills to describe it well.

But to me, ideas come from something that is greater than ourselves but yet a part of all of us.

There are different ways of solving problems. One is to a logical representation of that problem then use path-finding to find possible solutions. Then you try out different things at random. Those paths that put you in a bad state get abandoned early on. Those that make it through further on, you explore deeper. This works for board games like Chess, Go and Checkers, Tic-Tac-Toe, solving timetable plans and games like "missionaries and cannibals".

In some cases, there are so many choices, that it's not possible to evaluate them all, but need some kind of intelligent function to make the best choices - the heuristic function. Latest technologies are to use machine learning and deep neural networks.

Other ways are pattern matching - used to solve physical problems that require the use of tools. Some animals like crows and ravens are smart enough to know that dropping stones in a small container of water is enough to raise the water level. Squirrels can be made to run through obstacle courses in order to get food.

Objects have attributes related to volume, whether they float or sink, whether they absorb water or can contain water or can hook other objects, whether they can be pulled or pushed. Then these get matched to the different parts of the problem in turn. A piece of rope can be pulled. A hook can catch onto something. A magnet will attach to metal objects. Combine these together and you can go magnet fishing or use a grappling hook.

originally posted by: Peeple


That's a great quote, I never heard that before. But wasn't Pablo into cubism? Someone was the first to start that style without someone to steal from.

Picasso got "inspired" to produce this painting after a visit to an exhibition of African art, he was quite open about stealing the imagery of the masks he saw, not for their style so much as for the meaning that it added to the prostitutes he was portraying.



It definately adds another dimension of meaning I think and despite it's borrowings, it is still a unique creation that speaks volumes.

I don't think that that is real stealing though.

a reply to: Peeple

Hiya. Ya, right? I've always seemed decent at taking two or more separate things and making a new synthesis of them... but as far as the true creative , coming up with something truly novel? I've always found that amazing.. .godlike. The new ideas I'm exposed to, as rare as they are, keep me wanting to live.

I'm also not so full of hubris to think really novel ideas come from human brains. There are a few "dreams" I remember where I woke up in awe of the experience, wondering where the ideas and execution came from, as I could barely understand them let alone create them. I know, "Subconscious" ...but what IS that, really???

I'm completely open to an external source for many ideas. Good and bad, actually. Daemons.

A neat exercise is really paying attention to the thoughts that "pop" up in your head, and whether they are beneficial or fearful ... it has made me rethink things, a bit ..as well as wanting to revisit the latest psychological findings, heh.

a reply to: Peeple

Well . . . .

I was once looking into my family's history. There was an old grudge amongst the old folks about one side of the family in Ireland swindling the Australian side out of inheriting a mansion and estate. Communication took months before airplanes started carrying mail so the estate was finalised before anyone in Australia even knew someone had died.

My aunt (an artist) wanted to know what happened and asked me to "look" into it "occultly".

So find the estate on the "inner".

Nice two story place with a huge garden with a lake and stream at the bottom when viewed from the drawing room.

An ancestor "haunted" the drawing room still. In life he traveled on sailing ships as the resident artist to record what they found. In the afterlife he still was an artist. He would paint the landscape of the estate from the drawing room while looking through the picture windows.


I asked him what on earth did afterlife artists do with their finished works? My thinking was he couldn't sell it.

In reply he picked up his latest work and put it on my aunt's easel.

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

The colours are just amazing. I was at a Picasso exhibition 8n Vienna and he truly was a master and original.

The mystery to me remains still where novelty comes from.

artistic ideas are a collaboration that comes after long chats among friends. innovative ideas are meditative that comes after long period of lonliness.

all innovative ideas have artistic results not all artistic ideas have innovative results.

Ideas spawn from the chemical consciousness...

Meta ideas are like this..and sorry are her little feet...

mineral kingdom..means a certain amount of consciousness...the carrier of hidden emotions and

nash equalibirium is about how to star in a shopping mall..or otherwise grocer..

they cant say no to certain things..which means they are creating a social contract as a social mechanis..and social responsibility

Cerftaionly only certain things happen..with latency and lag..and even swell and welding..even with the worst costs on any price...you will see the ffecgts of freewill in the mix..freon to you all..

Freon is like Enron..it will eventually collapse..based on weight and size..of the ratios of time and need...The Daily Bugle so to speak is in the words the way in which we speak..the weather is better than ever..and we have all realized eternity..otherwise your put in hell..waiting for things to happen that you don't like or don't want..

a reply to: Peeple

I am not a fan of Picasso, the guy was an utter nonce and I find that impedes my own appreciation of much of his later works, but Guernica haunts me. When I was at junior school there was a print of it on the upstairs landing, for 3 years I would walk past it at least four times a day, five days a week. It was a strange picture to have in a junior school but then my junior school was kind of strange or perhaps it was just that the '70s were strange. In assemblies we often sang pop songs instead of hymns: Brown girl in the ring; By the rivers of Babylon; When I'm 64, and Last Night I had the Strangest Dream. The last one was my favourite, and even though I didn't know what Guernica was 'about', I always thought of that song and the painting going together, and still I find it impossible to not think about one without the other. When I went to Madrid a couple of years ago, my brother asked me if I had gone to see Guernica. I didn't know what he was talking about, so he showed me. He and I went to the same primary school, walked past the same picture every day, but he doesn't remember it there, didn't even remember when he saw it in all it's glory in Madrid.



The mind is a marvellous and mysterious thing.