Plato and the ancients

I always find the old intelligent people of old such an interesting thing. For some reason I get this feeling that if you study their thinking patterns enough you'll be able to get a snapshot of genius and through that be able to replicate it in some way.

There was an article in the BBC news about how Plato had hidden his real thoughts and discoveries that were dangerous to the Greek religion at the time. This allowed him to preserve all of his knowledge without being considered a heretic. From this scientist have figured that Plato figured out the relationship between music and mathematics. I think this once again shows how religion can really fuck things up and keep us back in the stone ages. We could have been flying around in hover boards already but some religious lunatic had the nerve to say: "Sine and cosines defy the gods!".

Well I still love this article. It says so much about human creativity and intelligence. Being smart isn't the ability to sit down at a desk, and focus on a problem. Sometimes it's working on something else, coming back, and using your creativity to see things in a new late. Intelligence is as much writing a book as it is making equations for gravity and light/matter/mass interconnections. Intelligence is synthesis. Taking two ideas, mixing them and creating something different. That's what true intelligence is and why it's so hard to measure.

Synthesizing ideas isn't something that can accurately be measured right now. Much of it is objective, though some of it isn't such as creating the idea of capitalism. However synthesizing communism is brilliant still, though not the norm. Which is another reason synthesizing new ideas would be such a hard thing to measure.

If only there was a way to make such creativity accessible to yourself at will, society would probably be a lot better and so would everyone's lives.