Progress and Invention.

Truly, nothing mankind has achieved in the span they have existed, can be classed as new. Newness, true originality, is impossible to the conscious seeker. It is impossible to create something that bears no relation to anything that has gone before, from material already extant. It is impossible to have an idea that bears no relation to anything already imagined. Originality, in its pure form, cannot exist.

Try it if you don't believe me. Do this simple thing for me: Remember something. Right now.

Did you draw a blank..? I did - without any prompt to spur a particular memory, there are no memories.

Now, try think of something that is truly unrelated to anything you have previously experienced.

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Another blank..?

And yet, look around at all the things we have now, that didn't exist in any concrete shape or form even a hundred years ago. They are perhaps not truly new, but certainly new enough to remark upon. How did that happen if the best an inventor can do is to recombine endlessly previously percieved forms and objects..? Mash together ideas already thought of..?

Aha. Whilst previously unpercieved forms do not exist, the emergent properties invoked by their close assembly, do. And here lies originality. Not entirely random, not entirely unknown in nature, but not entirely not so. Who would have guessed that saltpetter from a midden, and the burnt blackness of wood, would explode into the world and cause death by the millions..? The Egyptians had batteries of a sort, in jars. Who would have guessed that the force in those jars combined with filaments of metal almost too fine for the eye to see, would provide so much light..?

Newness of a sort.

But - we have not changed, have not gotten any smarter, since the days when fire was a new invention and chipped flint was all the rage. Why then, do we have so many new and complex toys..? Surely mankind has progressed..?

Of course not. Same stupid monkeys we ever were. The only thing that differs between then and now is that there are more of us. And this, believe it or not, is enough.

Here, take four dice. I want you to roll them so their fallen faces show six sixes.

Impossible. Of course. Not enough dice. Here, take six dice - roll away. (Took you ages didn't it, astronomic odds).

Here - take five billion dice. Now the chances of six of them showing a six are not just a near certainty, but the odds against there not being six sixes among them are unimaginably high.

Technology progresses, discoveries are made, building from a multitude of previous discoveries, not because humanity has gotten smarter along the way, but because they have grown so numerous that the odds against a particular discovery being made, however strange and tortuous the route toward it may be, are shortened to the point of near certainty.

Einstein was the right guy, in the right place, at the right time to draw the right connections between conceptual objects already extant. Not only that but he also had the right kind of brain, the right kind of education, the right kind of life experiences, all at the right times to shape him into the right kind of awareness to make them. But then again, sooner or later, someone was bound to.

And it is the same with any discovery.

Linear rational progress is a mirage. Scientific or conceptual discovery is a simple function of probability, not intelligence. And as the population grows, we load the odds in our favour. The smartest man in the room truly is everybody. We individuals are the merest cogs in the collective mind.

Sentient awareness acts as a catalyst, increasing the probability of complex events and objects coming into being. Without human awareness, even something so simple as tea in a china cup, would be so unlikely as to never occur by unguided chance. Technology, for some obscure reason is classed as 'unnatural', whereas things like horns and teeth are 'natural' - what is a horn save organic technology..?

'Natural' and 'unnatural' are really simple expressions of probability.

...Continued...