[millstone]

I think we stagnate because we accumulate experience. As we grow old, we gain wisdom, but our wisdom is centralized in the past. We can't shed our experiences without forgetting ourselves.

Steve Jobs also talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." But I can't be a beginner again and again and again: some day my biases/old-dreams and stale-ideas/past-successes will dominate. Nobody has an endless capacity for creating the new.

[lachlan-sneff]

Perhaps stagnation is due to experience, perhaps it's due to accumulated, age-related brain damage. I doubt we'll know until people do live hundreds or thousands of years.

Surely you can be a beginner again. Pick something you've never done before, and do that. As fledgling as humanity is, humans already have millions of different traditions and areas of study. Just pick one (or many).

[pessimizer]

> Pick something you've never done before, and do that.

You run out of those things shortly after birth. The vast majority of the aspects of everything that you attempt are familiar, and you have already developed habitual approaches to them. Having "never done something before" is shorthand for some experience having some aspect that you have never experienced before, not complete novelty. I'm going to build the strategies of flying a spaceship on the strategies I built learning to drive a car, which were built on the strategies I built learning to walk, which were built on the strategies I built learning to crawl, to manipulate my parents by crying, to identify distinct objects using my eyes, etc...

Eventually, the actually novel part of any new experience becomes vanishingly small. If anything, the ability to enjoy novelty, or to even see things as novel, is increased with our ability to forget. Maybe for a society, the ability to innovate relies on the ability to leave behind a bunch of brains whose plasticity has long been lost due to a lack of mental exercise.

[nynx]

Get some help man

[bpizzi]

Those beliefs you spell are quite absolutes to me. Humanity is not made after a single mind model. What you take for granted (« nobody has endless capacity for creating the new ») might very well be an utterly false premise.