This fish and I had a stare down, he won
I'm grappling with the origin of thought so please pardon any circular reasoning but don't hesitate to point out flawed logic, or assumptions in the comments
My first instinct this morning was to write about the birth of ideas, and how we develop and communicate them thousands of miles around the world nearly effortlessly. The idea was triggered by a friendly comment from Vijaya Sagarv as well as a series of exchanges with my friend Eli. But I wasn't sure where to begin.
What is the origin of an idea?
What defines an idea's surface or boundaries?
Idea Refinement
The majority of my thinking is spent pattern matching, molding concepts, perspective tuning, and refining the methods I use to do so. The tools I leverage are primarily conversations with friends, this blog & comments, other blogs & comments, and shared source code. All of which are read/write social collaboration. In addition I receive a healthy dose of processed information from "read only media": web sites, ebooks/books, electronic documents, music and videos. All of the above aren't the direct source of new ideas, but inspiration or fuel for ideas and concept refinement.
Juxtaposition, Buddhist like Awareness
Before I began writing a contradiction or interrupting idea arose. First the topic of identifying the source of ideas is far more than I can analyze in a single post, let alone the wonderful communication networks which connect us all together. An adjacent topic bubbled up to my conscious awareness. The idea blossomed out of focusing on the source of raw concepts. My mind is continually performing a multitude of pattern matching problems, comparing various concepts and seeking connectivity and personal relevance. For the most part I ignore these background processes and focus on a particular task at hand, or simply let my attention drift over the ocean* of my minds ideas. Although the diversity of ideas suggests a level of randomness, their may be statistical distributions which describe the neural waves our nervous systems continually exhibit. The source of our dreams could very likely be the source of our conscious ideas, but while conscious additional filtering takes place to seek relevance. We focus the lens of our attention while awake, and let it drift while dreaming.
Why the title Harmonic Contradiction?
Despite an unrelenting storm of ideas we find the ability to function at very high levels and achieve flow states between thought and action. We are engines of creativity.
*Heads up there's a problem with Disqus locking out comments, I sent a message to them*