What if some way to measure how much novelty is possible, using e.g. language as proxy (as medium for thought representation)? Obviously visual and auditory stuff (crudely, art and music) also represent realms of novelty generation, but language could be considered most ubiquitous, used by most minds, to represent more thought, with perhaps more granularity (or at least, more precision). So consider only language.
Then, of all the words / phrases in language, which could be reasonably strung together? These can form pools of possible lingual couplings/families. Then, permute these with each other, to enumerate ? over all possible combinations of words from the families of words that could reasonably appear together. Doing this is possibly impossible; closest we’ve got is something like LLM.
But, instead of actually, practically trying to implement this “idea” if it can be called that (TM considers too nebulous, unspecific, impractical), can just basically, “very heuristically” guesstimate that whatever this number is (representing reasonable permutations of words), it’s huge, possibly orders of magnitude above the number of atoms in the universe? Especially when considering that different lengths of strings of words (sentences, paragraphs) can hold contexts that imbue new meaning to even a singular word.
This expansionary nature of language, TM thinks, is indicative of the (maybe countably) infinite possibilities of creation: new concepts, ideas, stories, descriptions, comparisons, analogies, whatever - and interpretations of all these. Limitless. Boundless. Beautiful. TM is in awe of this property, that could be thought to characterise our existence - this property of the possibility of endless creation. The fact that we could never exhaust the possibilities in this world, especially within our diddy lifetimes. It’s humbling. It sparks an urgency. TM terrified of wasting the potential to materialise its small subset of the possible creations, allotted in this lifetime. Terrified of wasted potentiality.
Created: 2026-07-20 17:52