why is there such a vast difference between understanding and creating? why is it so much easier to understand ideas than to come up with new ones? it might be a stupid question but this really perplexes me. i'm able to read fairly difficult philosophical works, and i can understand them, intuit them, interpret the ideas through my own framework, play around with them, etc. but i know i would never have been able to come up with those works on my own. neither the ideas or the language used to convey them.
i suppose a deeper question i'm having is where do ideas live. if a philosopher describes an idea he's having, and i read it and fully understand it, we both have the idea. then why would it have been nigh impossible for me to have described the idea before encountering it? is the idea in his head or in mine? are ideas in everybody's head, but just in different ways?
are ideas discovered? unearthed? delineated? extrapolated? how would you describe the act of adding an idea to your head? the act of "finding out" about an idea?
any books on this topic are appreciated
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yeah this is why civilizations worship books. it's actually a miracle.
philosophers are divine conduits of sophia
sophia is a divine conduit of my semen
shes too good for your small penor
I'm scared of running out of things to think about. The scarcity of thought that exists, in the material or spiritual, or like forms the way Plato described it genuinely scares me.
Frick, I accidentally added a full stop at the end of the sentence without noticing. I'm cooked
i've had similar scares, especially when i view the world through a spiritual framework: "time doesn't exist, everything is in flux, we will all die" yadda yadda thats it, everythings predictable... but then i actually think about all the fields i haven't delved into at all and the complexity and depth of those fields and i think i haven't even scratched the surface. along with the fact that thought is always evolving in new interesting ways i don't think it's possible to reach the end of "thinking". this whole fear is extinguished easily when i think about math, or biology... it's all so intricate
I skimmed through a bunch of russian and existential literature a few years ago because it seemed cool and now I get to think of interesting ways I am going to kill myself tomorrow and that's what keeps me going
You'll never run out of things to think about unless you're some total bugman... You should be more afraid of dying before you've thought about everything you want to.
To answer one of your questions. Read Kierkegaard. To get answers we make leaps of faith. From my observations these aren’t purely out of nothing but based on the sum total
of your experiences this far, your actions and your choices. These “truths” and ideas people land on are usually only half truths; they contain some truth and some lies. The reason why they are so convinced the lies are true is because they symbolise something that they themselves lack and satisfies emotional need. I can partly attribute that insight to Nietzsche. People build whole systems through deduction based on these half truths. Science included.
My advice to you is if you want to come up with new and fresh ideas go out there and live life. Go do brave and courageous things. Go do something loving. Watch, observe and act powerfully. Really test yourself and you’ll be surprised what you come up with.
Most ideas are just developments of other ideas. The great philosophers are great philosophers because they had read everythign that came before them and then they developed on it. If you do not have PhD level knowledge you'r enot going to be able to come up with ideas. Even if you did, they would never go anywhere because they have to be written about academically, which is not something you would be able to do.
Usually it's because they're not bound to a frame of reference/thought/paradigm and have an intense need to make some sense of life. That's how you create original ideas
You are fundamentally wrong that ideas are easier to understand than create. To create something understandable is difficult however but to create is not.
Direction of creation pertains to intelligence; command of creation pertains to willpower; between both, there is inclination of spirit: into what the heart is poured is with what the head (re)stores the hearth.
are ideas inherent to the universe? when marx delineated "capital" and communism, those ideas were surely in the substrate of society at that time. did marx single handedly create new ideas or did he merely "unearth" them, "excavate" them from the structure of life around him?
what verb would you guys personally use to describe a philosopher coming upon an idea? finding? learning? delineating? plato "invented" the theory of forms? kant "developed" the idea of the categorical imperative? deleuze "extrapolated" the body without organs?
i can't square away the fact that ideas are so easy to understand, yet so difficult to create. millions of people now know about the idea of "accelerationism" but it took Land pretty much his whole life to properly delineate this idea. reading fanged noumena it's clear the thread of accelerationism and machine growth is woven throughout all of Land's writings. this guy spent his whole life examining deleuze-guattari, kant, bataille, nietzsche etc.. finely working around Kant's epistemology, examining Trakl's poetry, gathering data points from so many sources to combine them... but then a reader can just spend maybe a week reading the core texts and pretty much end up on the same page as Land, following along and understanding the idea just as well as he. what the frick gives?
there's a clear difference there in effort and complexity between the creator and reader of the work, between the sender and receiver. it seems like an obvious fact, not worth thinking about, but this really really perplexes me. the orders of magnitude of difference between "unearthing" an idea and "understanding" an idea when the end product of the idea is the same. it really boggles my mind, i've been thinking about it on and off, and it also gives rise to other questions in me about the nature of "ideas". which realm do unexplored ideas inhabit? where are the unfound ideas?
I think the question you have is more about psychology. Freud thought that philosophical endeavors are world-building efforts by psychotics that need them to stabilize and give meaning to their experience. If you adopt the frame of reference given to you by others, you don't have that kind of urgency to explain. You just are.
Of course, a philosopher's past and subconscious will influence their system. They don't work in a total vacuum.
thank you. i think my question has more to do with this unknowable "aether" which you talk about. i think i'm gaining a better understanding of how to "traverse" this aether and i wanted to get some insight and conversation going in this thread about how people on IQfy might go about this.
this process of placing oneself in the torrential wash of undiscovered ideas to hopefully emerge with new, previously-undelineated, fresh ideas.
what i'm talking about is akin to David Lynch talking about "fishing" for ideas, and this "aether" you talk about is like Lynch's sea, and the juicy fishes are what i'm after. it's just a question of where do these fish live, and how do you get to them. how do you best acclimate yourself to the realm of tasty, undiscovered fishes?
ultimately psychology is the domain of the solipsist and any traversing of the aether is subsequently totally subjective, and any diving apparatus needed will have to be tailor made for me, totally subjective, any acclimation must be done on the diver's part. you are right in that regard, thank you again
Maybe you don't understand them as well as you think if it's so hard to come up with your own. Or maybe you haven't gone through enough adversity to force you to abandon what you think is appropriate and start thinking for yourself.
it's easier to assent to a mathematical theorem when it's presented and explained to you, than to come up with the theorem yourself. Same principle in literature.
Because analysis is easier than synthesis.
It’s because both are fundamentally mysterious but articulating some apprehension is not. So there’s layers upon layers of mystery in the act of creation. It is one thing to pluck a thing out of the aether as a thought or impulse or impression and articulate that with words, but another thing entirely to pluck a thing out of the aether as a thought or impulse or impression and and articulate it as it is rather than how it can be understood, or to contribute your own to the aether. The artist speaks to something not necessarily rational or articulable into words. Creating is intuitive and inspired to a degree that mere articulation is not. But each has its place.