# New ideas need to come out of a single mind At the end of the day *there can’t exist an idea that nobody has thought of.* When multiple people seem to come up with an idea together the process looks like passing a bundle of nodes back and forth and adding incremental pieces. But the fundamental action of addition or subtraction happens in one person’s mind. [[Connections create new knowledge]]. A heuretic isn’t ‘viable’ until it can exist separate from the mind it came from. [[Brains are wombs for heuretics]]. The fact that new combinations need to come out of a single brain at the end of the day is why [[Naming things is Powerful]] - names allow you to hold more things in your brain at once. ### Computers do count as minds Does it count as an idea that nobody has thought of if a computer helped? At the end of the day the assertion of the idea needs to come from the computer or the person. So in this case a combination of [[Using computers to simulate possible experiment targets is still primitive]] and [[Using robotics to carry out automated experiments]] does not challenge this assertion. It’s just the computer acting more and more like another mind. Computers can act as minds without ‘general AI.’ I have a hunch that there is a set of parameters that solves the problem. I do an optimization problem and the computer finds the parameters. I could have asked a person who knew how to find those parameters to do the same thing. In this case, did the idea come from both of us? I don’t think so. The final idea came from the person who did the calculation. The idea of the idea came from me. Another example is that [[Algorithmic knowledge generation]] has already found new drug targets from an existing database. *This note was originally titled ‘New ideas need to come out of a single brain’ but there is no reason why a new idea couldn’t come out of a computer. ### Related * [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]] * [[There are many pieces of equipment or tacit knowledge that only exist in one or two places in the world]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/New+ideas+need+to+come+out+of+a+single+mind) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/New+ideas+need+to+come+out+of+a+single+mind)