You Heard It Here First

Once upon a time, there was a tool called a hand axe. For over a million years, this was the killer app for human beings. It was the thing we used to make other things.

Hand axes were amazing! They could cut stuff and break things apart and be used to make other things out of wood, and even out of other rocks sometimes.

Small stones were used by our ancestors to chip away at those bigger stones, until they were left with something symmetrical that fit in the palm of the hand.

Over the million+ years of tool use, the hand axe did evolve considerably over that time, but the concept was the same: a bifacial stone, sharpened to a point at the tip, that could be used to cut, dig, smash… you name it. Most of all, it could be used to make other tools.

Hand axes gave birth to lots of subsequent technologies and tools, many of which then gave birth to lots of subsequent technologies and tools, and so on. It might be fair to say that the hand axe led to smartphones and self-driving cars.

Think about how simple the idea of the hand axe was, and how it was the dominant human tool for more than a million years. Now think about the profound impact that one idea had on the world, the idea of using a tool to create other tools.

These are the questions I want to ask today: are there any truly new ideas out there? Are we just standing on the shoulders of giants, as Newton suggested? If there are new ideas, where do they come from?

Philosophy and science each offer different ways to answer this question.

Ancient Greek philosophers grappled with the nature of ideas and their origins. Plato’s Theory of Forms suggested that the material world was just a shadow of a higher, unchanging reality, sort of a distant precursor to the simulation hypothesis. What we perceive as new ideas are merely reflections of eternal, perfect forms. Aristotle, on the other hand, emphasized empirical observation and believed in the potential for genuine novelty in human thought, albeit within the confines of existing knowledge.

The debate continues into the modern era, where postmodern thinkers often challenge the notion of originality. They argue that in the contemporary saturated environment of cultural symbols and shared knowledge, true originality is either impossible or irrelevant. Everything is a simulation or a copy of a copy, with no real original.

The movie and TV landscape of the 2020s certainly supports this concept. Remakes are nearly as common as original shows, and… well, how original are the newly conceived shows? Let me know what you think. And, if you know some specifics about modern philosophers and original thought, let me know in the comments!

What about science? While philosophy offers abstract and often theoretical perspectives on originality, science approaches the concept through empirical evidence and observation.

Neuroscience reveals that what we perceive as “new” ideas often arise from novel combinations of existing neural pathways. Brain imaging studies show that creative thinking activates a network of diverse brain areas, suggesting that original thought is a complex interplay of cognition, memory, and emotion.

This meshes well with my own anecdotal experience with ideas. I believe we have circles of competence, and we can gradually help these circles grow by learning and experiencing things within that field of study. Eventually, one of these circles intersects with another circle of competence, and suddenly you know a lot about the intersection of ideas.

This is the nucleus of polymathic thinking, something

Michael Woudenberg

and I wrote about here. Do check out Michael’s Substack,

Polymathic Being

, when you have a chance. He is passionate about the intersection of knowledge from disparate fields.

Right now, a lot of folks are asking if machines can have original thoughts. Back in July,

Alejandro Piad Morffis

asked whether machines can think, and I encourage you to read that when you have time.

These are important questions, well worth asking, but the questions we have to answer first are what we actually mean by an original idea, and whether humans can even have original ideas in the first place. This is very much a matter of definition, and without a clear definition, we’re going to talk in circles.

I like the “expanding circles of competence” idea: where two circles intersect, you have a much better chance of being the first person to consider a new problem. I certainly don’t know more than all jiu jitsu practitioners, and while I believe I’m pretty good at running a small business, there are loads of far more knowledgeable business owners out there. Yet, there are very few people who know as much about the art of jiu jitsu and running a business.

In grappling, my most innovative ideas tend to come from the intersection of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and judo. There are plenty of folks out there with more experience in either art than me, but few who have more collective experience in both.

Innovation is not about creating something out of nothing, but instead about weaving together two circles of competence that can give you something novel. The true measure of innovation lies in our ability to weave together past insights and present experiences, crafting a future rich with evolved possibilities.

What’s a place in your own life where two circles of competence start to intersect?