Quote:
Originally Posted by Noclevername
Exactly, and truly new variations of existing thought-- which you seem to dismiss as irrelevant-- can be original even if based on something that has come before. Based on does not necessarily mean unorignal, not if it's a completely unprecedented variation.
(bold mine)
You said, in fact, that you defined creativity as an "idea that formed completely independent of any previous human experience". You set that standard, not me.
|
I don't dismiss new variations as irrelevant, nor, for that matter, did I define creativity in that way. My definition of creativity is the elaboration and recombination of thoughts and ideas in new and unusual ways. The point about an idea completely divorced from any human experience is that is what would be required for creativity to last for eternity. Since our past is finite, and the number of ideas we generate is finite, in order for new ideas to be created we would have to come up with ideas completely divorced from human knowledge or understanding, and I don't see that happening, at least, not, as you said, with our human minds.
Let's take literature as one example. The English language contains about ~600,000 words. The average book contains about 28,000 words. The total number of possible books at that length then, is 600,000 to the power of 28,000. Human beings are not likely to write infinitely long books, so there is also a finite number of possible lengths of books, which would introduce another order of magnitude to the number, but again still finite. The same logic would hold if I opened up the field to every word in every language, alive or dead, including any alien ones we may encounter.
The number of words, which are made from combinations of other words, is also likely to rise exponentially as the millennia go by, adding another couple thousand orders of magnitude to the final number. Eventually though, we will run out of new words, because, once we reach the universe's final state, there will be nothing left to observe, nothing left to explore, nothing left to create, and thus nothing left to name. For all practical purposes, human experience will end. All that will be left is reflection and discussion of the vanished Era of Experience. Our ancient word hoard will keep us going for a while, a very long while even, but we will eventually have spun out every possible implication, every possible shade of meaning, every possible drop of significance from every past experience, for the simple reason that the time during which we had experiences of any sort was finite.