Let's imagine that God's Book contains not only proofs but also the other good Ideas of the Universe (QED, Enlightenment, Mozart's Requiem, etc..) For one of t

Let's imagine that God's Book contains not only proofs but also the other good Ideas of the Universe (QED, Enlightenment, Mozart's Requiem, etc..) For one of these Ideas to become known to us, a human's brain must at some point "think" it - by entering some physical/biological state (firing pattern?) which encodes that idea. Then the human search for these Ideas is really a search over an enormous state space of all possible brain states. Some factors that can affect one's odds of being first to exhibit an Idea: - Wiring: some brains are born prone to Idea states. Through plasticity, brains can increase their propensity to represent Idea states. Also, some brains are wired to acquire new states and evaluate them more quickly. - Hard work: entering & evaluating more states than other people, usually in a small area, through disciplined investigation. - Inputs: the right knowledge at the right moment (Ideas are similar to each other - cf. beauty as a correctness heuristic) - Blind luck Some apparent characteristics of Idea states: - It is hard work to represent an Idea state (presumably, the easy ones are those we are born to, and appear trivial to us) - Idea states appear to occur in clusters (cf. beauty as a truth heuristic in physical theories) - It is difficult to define a distance metric between Idea states - Corollary: it is difficult to tell how far away any given state is from the nearest Idea state As far as I can tell, the author of this article is arguing that it is unreasonable to stop searching simply because one's brain is not as Idea-compatible as F-E-H's appear to be. This seems to be sensible advice - but one must appreciate that it does diminish the odds.