Where Do New Ideas Come From? How Do They Emerge? Epistemology as Computation (Information Processing)

This essay presents arguments for the claim that in the best of allpossible worlds (Leibniz) there are sources of unpredictability andcreativity for us humans, even given a pancomputational stance. Asuggested answer to Chaitin's questions: "Where do new mathematicaland biological ideas come from? How do they emerge?" is that theycome from the world and emerge from basic physical (computational)laws. For humans as a tiny subset of the universe, a part of the new ideascomes as the result of the re-configuration and reshaping of alreadyexisting elements and another part comes from the outside as aconsequence of openness and interactivity of the system. For theuniverse at large it is randomness that is the source of unpredictability onthe fundamental level. In order to be able to completely predict theUniverse-computer we would need the Universe-computer itself tocompute its next state; as Chaitin already demonstrated there areincompressible truths which means truths that cannot be computed byany other computer but the universe itself.