My philosophy came up in an online discussion today. I decided to copy the explanation I gave:
Question:
Post #18
1 reply
“So basically, you believe there are ideas out there, and it’s just a matter of time before we discover them…
And so they are not original ideas, or ideas that we “create,” but instead truths that already exist that we simply discover and recombine according to our own principles.
So creativity, then, is making connections.
I wonder if an original idea could ever be “wrong”
Response:
Post #19
Essentially. It’s sort of like Platonic idealism, in that the things in the real world are simply combinations of some set of absolute concepts, such as “has branches”, “is green”, etc. Theoretically, if we had an infinite amount of time to do so, we could describe the entire universe in terms of how these ideas come together. (We don’t have an infinite amount of time, so what we get is “knowledge”: an approximation to the truth that becomes more and more accurate with time. Not just science, either; we’re also part of the universe, so the humanities and arts are just as valid. If you’re familiar with calculus, think integral vs. sum. They’re equivalent in the limit).
However, because we exist within the material world, the ideas also have a subjective component. Even though we can perceive the same ideas differently, our perceptions are still both true; it’s not as if we are seeing different “shadows on the cave wall”.
The example I like to use is a photo of a tree. Say we take two photographs of the same tree with different exposures. They’re going to appear differently, but that does not change the fact that they *are* (in an absolute sense) photos of the same tree. A person may or may not *identify* them as the same tree, however; this is where the subjectivity comes in. However, because the subjective component of an idea is not inferior to the absolute one, whether the response is “this is the same tree” or “this is not the same tree” is irrelevant; they’re both correct.
That’s actually the logical conclusion of this whole philosophy – there’s no such thing as an idea that’s truly wrong. Of course, how useful it is is still up for debate (though most people tend to be very bad at judging how useful an idea is; in general, people tend to underestimate). Even blatantly contradictory ideas such as “the sky is green” are useful because they allow us to refine our approximation of the truth by discarding inconsistencies.