Oddbean

If there's no such thing as a new idea where did the first idea come from? Turtles all the way down Mr. Twain is it!? Haha what a retard. You could apply the same argument to biological evolution, each new species is just a remix of the old. Yet somehow they magically improve and most stuff alive today does not look like an amoeba. All original information, whether it's genes or memes, comes from the quantum field of the universe. Seth Lloyd explains it very nicely in his book "Programming the Universe". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Universe