The Refrigerator Problem askphilosophy

For the longest time, I've had trouble knowing how to even think of ideas at all. The following story is to help illustrate some of the problems I have encountered when thinking of ideas.

Imagine the following scenario:

Due to a post-apocalyptic incident, all of our current human technology is destroyed and Earth's landscape is significantly changed. Thankfully not all humans have died, but due to the nature of the incident, none have any recollection of the world as it used to be. Over time, they repopulate Earth and come up with their own innovations. Due to the different composition of the Earth, the way for storing food is vastly different from refrigerators that we use. From different materials to different methods of preservation, these devices are unlike anything we currently encounter.

What happened to our idea of what a refrigerator is? Did the idea "die" with all the physical objects that we would call refrigerators and/or when everyone who had knowledge of what a refrigerator was died? Suppose that due to the sudden changes in the landscape, crucial materials needed to make a refrigerator were decaying and after 5 years, they were no longer available. Did the idea "die" when the potential to be discovered went away? If not, where did the idea "go"?

As strange as it seems, intuitively I want to say that the idea of a refrigerator (say, "if you configure certain pieces of metal like this, attach it to a cooling agent like so and power it with electricity, you get a refrigerator") is still something that exists, even if in our post-apocalyptic world, nobody has any conception coming even close to what a refrigerator is or even what components it would have.

But let's examine about the "creation" of a refrigerator in the first place. When an inventor first thought to tinker with the gears, nuts and bolts that would go on to form a refrigerator, did our inventor at some point "pull" the idea of a refrigerator into existence? Or did the idea of a refrigerator always exist and he just found the configuration and arrangement of parts to know of it? That is, was the idea of a refrigerator non-existent up until our innovator started messing around with different configurations that would lead to the invention or was it something that already existed that he stumbled upon?

At any rate, no matter how hard I try, my intuition keeps on telling me that ideas exist in some way before they are ever thought of and it seems bizarre to think of an inventor as "creating" a new idea. But I also recognize how the idea of ideas being anywhere at all is also problematic. Thoughts?

Submitted June 05, 2016 at 05:42AM by FlummoxedNPerplexed http://ift.tt/1UkE6R4 askphilosophy