h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So you're saying that Douglas Adams didn't originate the babelfish? Heresy!

How rude!

A bit more formally, you seem to be saying that even if I think of/write/make something, someone else thought/wrote it before I did. But the last person to think/write must also fall under your rule. Some other person must have thought/wrote it before them ......... So we get into an infinite regress where nothing can ever have been original however far back we trace it - even unto the first thinking creature! Nare. Don't work do it

No! What I am saying is those things were first thoughts.
The conjunction of babel and fish is unique but babel and fish are not.

Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

So when someone discovered how to make gunpowder and called it whatever, are you going to say that it wasn't original because charcoal, saltpeter and sulphur already existed?

It still leads to either an infinite regress, or a person who had all the first ideas....which Aquinas called God [not that he thought of it first of course: God did ]

It sure does, but I just love disproof by counterexample. I thought of invoking God to put a stop to the regress. Logically, there seems to be no alternative, but 'having already been thought of by God' doesn't seem to be much of a criticism of any idea does it?

Right then, tell me what you know that was not the thought of someone else.

Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

The reason why analogy is such a powerful ideas generator is that it allows us to assimilate new EXPERIENCE. Everything else is "just" restructuring.

Noggin

What I decided to have for lunch. What I said to the girl I met on my walk to the town. My hypothesis about the role of representation in deductive reasoning. Sure, the words I use in describing them were thought of by someone else. I could make up my own, but that wouldn't help to communicate with you would it?

OK. I've done it. Now tell me how you deal with the 'infinite regress' argument?

Now I have to put on my cognitive psychology hat for a moment. Sometimes we assimilate new experience, and sometimes we accommodate. The latter means that we change our way of thinking in order to make room for the new experience. Pure Piaget, I'm afraid. He calls the balance between these two modes 'equilibration'. Wordy stuff, but I like it

'Just' restructuring eh! So a human is just a restructured bacterium?

No. A human is "just" a restructured bacterium. The quotation marks are important here.

Actually, all eukaryotic cells are several restructured bacteria, and all multicelled lifeforms are agglomerations of eukaryotic cells.

You're actually right of course. Alterations brought about by interacting with the environment are also incorporated. So it takes both forms of "learning."

Noggin

That stuff about the quotes is too obscure. Are they scare quotes, ironic quotes or what? Please spell it out for the non-telepaths among us.

Nog. You're such a bright guy, I know I only have to mention 'emergent properties' and you will know where my next argument is coming from. They do emerge and they're new. Do you really dispute that?

Yes we do.

[to explain it to me ]

Plus I have something new: I created my own theodicy last year

Just Google 'emergent properties' but to be brief, a single cell can't think. Build a brain out of them, and it can. The thinking is an emergent property of an aggregation of individually unthinking cells.

Thank ye

Emergent properties, eh? This is a tricky one. Is a house an emergent property or just a restructuring of a pile of bricks? Is a housing estate an emergent property or just an agglomeration of houses?
A computer is a syntax in relation to its programs, but a semantics in relation to the laws of nature. Structural organisation is heirarchical, but the original elements still make up the bottom level. So are the upper levels new or just restructured?
Personally I think I'd agree with you. A higher level "emergent" structure is new in an important sense. But a lot of new structures are still just restructuring.

Noggin