Book and Journal of Mattanaw

# Novelties on Novelties

Question: “Are there any ideas that are truly new? Or are all new ideas based on previous ideas that were blended together?”

There is only increasingly complex synthesis. Complex synthesis can result in Gestalt forms, but these are traceable to neural synthesis. Bio-reductionism is inescapable. Because you can lesion it away. Paragraph originally posted on Facebook. Accessible in the HighIQWorld group HighIQUnleashed here..

Complete novelty is on the tower of novelties atop novelties. Otherwise they are based on new combinations of already existing things that were not formerly combined.

When something really new appears, it is because whoever created it had intermediate creations that were also unknown to others. Newton, Einstein, Archimedes and others are towering figures, not because of single ideas they generated, but the thousands and perhaps millions of novelties they came up with to pave the way to the greater synthetic forms they also created. What is sad, is that necessarily die in unknowability. There is no recording all of the insights. Only some.

If this were not the truth, then one would expect others to immediately grasp the idas created by these figures. Because one would have to assume, that once the shared knowledge has been acquired, anyone would quickly realize what is pointed out to them, for it would be merely a new combination of ideas they already had. But as a matter of fact, that is not how it works. Unique thinkers have to prepare their audience to receive their ideas, because they are built from ideas that other would not have had. Thus the greatest thinkers of all time are teachers, and they are very often teachers of subjects and topics people had not considered before. Sometimes, they invent whole new fields and develop them to significant help, all without any assistance, and without much influence.

This being true, there is no escape from the fact that the ideas that they have are not possible without the cultural preparation that was done for them. This is easy enough to explain, because we can realize that ideas that are new today were not possible in earlier ages or times. We see that many ideas are well ahead of their times, but every idea ever recorded has depended at least upon the lexicon in which it was communicated. Very smart people may coin words and unique usages, but noone ever invents there entire vocabulary from scratch. We know that most ideas are incomplete or suffer some defects, and that also is due to the culture from which it was generated. This is also explained by the well known Whorfian hypothesis which explains that perspectives are dependent on the language and culture of origin. Thus someone from another culture may find defects or make improvements upon a theory that someone produced in another language, simply because the thinking that generated the ideas were founded on commitments of earlier thinkers, and yet earlier thinkers, back to the origins of the lanugae itself. This is not to touch on the topic of neuroscience.

Mattanaw I., formerly "Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh"

I am a retired executive, software architect, and consultant, with professional/academic experience in the fields of Moral Philosophy and Ethics, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and more recently, Economics. I am a Pandisciplinarian, and Lifetime Member of the High Intelligence Community.

Articles on this site are eclectic, and draw from content prepared between 1980 and 2024. Topics touch on all of life's categories, and blend them with logical rationality and my own particular system of ethics. The common theme connecting all articles is moral philosophy, even if that is not immediately apparent. Any of my articles that touch on "the good and virtuous life" will be published here. These articles interrelate with my incipient theory of ethics, two decades in preparation. This Book and Journal is the gradual unfolding of that ethic, and my living autobiography, in a collection of individual books that fit into groups of book collections.

This Book and Journal is already one of the largest private websites and writings ever prepared, at nearly 1 million words, greater than 50,000 images and videos, and nearly one terabyte of space utilized. The entire software architecture is of my creation. Issues of the book for sale can be found under featured. These texts are handmade by myself, and are of excellent quality, and constitute the normal issues of my journal that can also be subscribed to. The entire work is a transparent work in progress. Not all is complete, and it will remain in an incomplete state until death.

I welcome and appreciate constructive feedback and conversation with readers. You can reach me at mattanaw@mattanaw.com (site related), cmcavanaugh@g.harvard.edu (academic related), or christopher.matthew.cavanaugh@member.mensa.org (intelligence related), or via the other social media channels listed at the bottom of the site.

Close