From .1 to n
Can we ever truly create anything new? Is it possible for us to go "from 0 to 1"?
“To create is, properly speaking, to cause or produce the being of things”
—St. Thomas Aquinas
Can we ever truly create something new? Is it possible for us to go “from 0 to 1”?
Peter Thiel famously declares in his book Zero to One that “Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n… But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.”1 When someone makes 1,000 copies of a typewriter, for instance, this takes the world from 1 typewriter to 1,000. When someone comes along and invents a computer, this involves an act of creation, according to Thiel, and takes the world from 0 to 1.
I would like to propose in this brief essay that we never truly create anything—we never actually “go from 0 to 1”. Instead, we make things out of what has already been created. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval theologian, notes that “To create is to make something from nothing”.2 In classical terms this is called creatio ex nihilo—creation from nothing—and it is something only God can do. In contrast, humans are able to combine, rearrange, develop, and mold things that already exist into novel forms and objects. For instance, we do not create fire from nothing; we make fire from wood. We do not create smartphones from nothing; we produce them via clever arrangements of glass, metal, and plastic. And so it goes. Humans do not engage in creatio ex nihilo, therefore, but rather something closer to fabricatio ex aliquo—making from something. The full range of human making, we may say, is from .1 to n.
This may strike the reader as a pedantic point to make. I do believe however that this has quite huge philosophical and religious implications. The most important is simply that, by recognizing our inability to create ex nihilo, this reminds us that we are not gods. This seems like it should go without saying. But alas! This appears to be something that must be restated and understood anew in every age. Even today, there is a tendency towards self-deification by humans. (As an aside, there is also a tendency to sometimes deify our technologies, such as AI. But this is a mistake as well. AI cannot engage in creatio ex nihilo any more than a rock can. Though it may be tempting to refer to AI as a digital “god”, it is even in principle not one!)
While our fabricatio ex aliquo—our making from something—can steer us from self-deification, it can also remind us we are not mere beasts either. We are not limited to just receiving the world as we find it. We can make things that have never been made before. We can design new products, build beautiful buildings, write wonderful poetry, and so forth! We just do so with concepts and materials that already exist.
In this light, we are like writers in a way. The greatest writers all describe how their trade to them feels more like discovery than invention. Stephen King says he believes “stories are found things, like fossils in the ground”3, and J. R. R. Tolkien said of writing The Lord of the Rings that he “had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere; not of ‘inventing’”4. To be sure, these writers are not just passive recipients of their works. They actively show up day after day, put pen to paper, & add their own ideas. That said, there is also a real sense in which they are not the sole, or even primary, Creators of their texts either. Likewise, we are not the Authors of the cosmos, but we are not just its readers, either: we are co-authors (or, sub-authors, to be specific). We do not go from 0 to 1, but we are not limited to mere 1-to-n replication either. There is a middle way we can take—the path of co-making—and this involves going from .1 to n.