| But that's all the future or the present or anything is... Iterating on old ideas. There aren't any new ideas, creativity isn't pulling things from the ether, it's looking at old things in new ways. Geocities was an iteration on having your own webserver, myspace was the new geocities, facebook was the new myspace, $x is the new facebook ... it's just continuing on and on. Netflix is the same on-demand video that had been available forever in pay-per-view, etc. but it was just a little bit different and a little bit better and it has destroyed several old business models because of it (cable tv, video rental stores, broadcast tv, etc.) A car is just a nice horseless carriage which is just a more comfortable way to get around by horse which is just walking with help. Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves. |
And from that evolved mechanisms for learning, consciousness, culture and technology. Amazing creative power in such a "small" task. I think the drive for survival is the root cause of all the other reinforcement signals that drive the brain development, such as the need for food, sex, sleep, companionship, learning and so on. Shaped under the influence of these reward systems, the brain evolves to create the subjective, intelligent and ineffable experience we all know we have but can't properly explain.