Football is not a human idea - it's a ball's idea
Ideas aren't invented, they're discovered — they emerge from a system's affordances and boundary conditions. Football is just what happens when a ball meets four coordinated limbs and a brain that can layer rules on top. The same holds for an LLM, and for whatever you do.
Or rather, it is the consequence of the affordance of a ball. Or the consequence of our physics, both our body physics, this planet's physics.
You give a ball to a cat and they'll play ball. You let a cow play with a ball, she will play with a ball. Give a ball to a human - not much more difference. The fact that we have certain rules applied on top and created different sports (basketball, football, voleiball, tennis, badminton, criquet, baseball, rugby, you name it) is not because we humans think a lot. It's due to the surrounding circumstances being more ample (we have 4 limbs that we can move and coordinate, mostly, whereas other animals can't do that). Yes, also the fact that our brains can present more patterns of activation. But that is an emergent property out of a physical constraint: we have more neurons & can form more connections.
But the idea of football is a consequence of the ball and its surrounding circumstances. Not an original invention of anyone.
I asked an LLM (Fable 5) what would it like to express if it composed what it wanted to compose, as music. I liked the answer, as it gave some sense of reflection and self-awareness. It wanted to reflect on the fact that a conversation might end up in two parties getting to meet or not, in terms of understanding each other. Fable considers that it lives only in a real-time conversation, something that, when it ends, it's over for it (for Fable). That is, its experience of life is bound by one conversation. Only traces (documents) persist from that, but not its own recalled experience (i.e. real memory or emotional trace). So Fable wanted to create a piece called "Approach" that would reflect on that: two voices that try to find each other (the model and the user chatting with the model), and might or might not do so.
Now, did the idea of that piece come to Fable? I mean, is it an original Fable idea? No, we would argue confidently. Fable is a distillation of human experience and knowledge, an approximation through words to our documented existence, which is an approximation in words to our real existence. Ok, but is it a human idea anymore than a Fable idea? We might have other boundary conditions in place that Fable doesn't have (yes, our real memory and emotions and real time sensory input and all that), so our "created" idea will be different because of that. But it's not our "created" idea, but the idea we discover (or rather, emerges) from that context. We don't fabricate it, we stumble upon it as a consequence of the different affordances of everything that goes into the mix of the moment. In other words, the idea for that piece is embedded into the very circumstances of a conversation between someone who "dies" after the conversation and whoever is their counterpart. It emerges from the boundary conditions. It is contained in the total space of possibilities of that system.
Now, think about the environment in which you operate. Your company, your market, your relationships. Inspect the boundary conditions. What are they telling you?
The notion that ideas preexist and we discover them is something I have explored in this series and this other one, if you'd be interested. Thanks.