To innovate or not
That indeed is the perennial question. From the basic stone tipped axe to the steam engine, innovation has really been all about the box and the thought that breaks it open. It's always one single point of departure, one chink in the Mould, one little dent on the wall of reason that leads to innovation. And it always is a choice.
Unbeknownst to us lies a secret capability inside our minds. An innate ability to stretch itself, negate itself and find footing where none exists. A proverbial prospector, protected by a protracted promise of preservation prior to premediated, pedantic performances of the primal proprioception. Verbal jugglery apart, what sticks out is this strange sense of an extra-sensory perception of the self. That we indeed, are more than what we appear.
Consider the pen.
The initial instance of an inscription was indeed inherently an immaculate indenture on an invisible stream of information (See what I did there?). We used a rudimentary stick to make a mark on the ground. The softness of the soil led to bolder decisions, and we decided to mark the stone walls of our dimly lit caves. The significance of the petroglyph as the first act of rebellion against the suppression of our innate expression is not lost on anybody. Indeed, this was the first pen; the first iteration of an innovation that quite literally wrote our destiny.
But wasn't this a choice in the first place? Wasn't the conscious act of deciding to leave a mark on a physical object an act of breaking the box? After all, the most tell-tale sign of intelligence is the emergence of language. As Douglas Hofstadter describes it in so many words and allegories, language is the emergence of meaning from chaos. And to decide to be an agent of emergence, and make it better, is innovation.
But this is never a linear process. Innovation requires enormous patience, persistence and raw dogged spirit to sit with the problem and leave every other thought alone. Our brains aren't very efficient at multitasking, and this chain-of-thought reasoning is inherent to the way we think, iterate and innovate. In the language of computation, for important problems that require non-trivial thought, we need to build a world model first. This model then acts as a sandbox, where we iterate, fail, iterate again and keep the combinatorial game going until we hit upon the "aha!" moment. The naked scientist leaps out of the bathtub, and innovation is born.
In my last note on culture and growth, I mentioned how culture has second-order effects and leads to non-trivial growth. A key component of effective culture is innovation. If we consider a matrix of components for any system that define its behavior, a row reduction or Gauss-Jordan decomposition yields a leaner matrix with fewer redundancies. This is where our core choices lie. This is the box where innovation lies caged, waiting to break out.
So, we make a choice. A choice to change our perspective. To look at the system from different angle. To reduce a component or introduce a new one. We make a choice to break out of the box. And that is when innovation happens. In that thin line between madness and reason, and that is where magic happens.