Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?
In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence?
If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all.
But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.
In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence?
If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all.
But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.