What’s the big idea is a question I have spent some time on.
Earlier question is , what is an idea ? Sounds easy to answer until you try some things about , what is an idea , are, ideas have no mass !
Also no known wave length. And are not really located in any time or place. Wow !
They also have when acted upon, the power to move mountains !
Also ideas usually precede what comes into existence . Just for example , Hitler had some ideas.
He write them up in a book entitled, Meine Kampf. Some years later 6 million Jews and 22 million Russians were dead all because of some ideas.
Ideas also seem to be immortal. They appear to die and disappear, and then turn up again, over and over again in this worlds history. Good ideas and evil ideas – it makes no difference , they all enjoy being something that is neither dead nor alive,
always capable of being a cause.
Has this anything to do with beings ……human and other wise…. I’ll say YES ! Is there any thing that exists that was not and still is an idea ? Is that what we really are ? Just ideas , floating along the eternities……could be.
Best regards
Phil
From Stanford With Love 
In response to what is an idea:
First question: Is a tree an idea?
We, as sentient beings, have a concept that we call a tree.
Second question: Is a tree and a sentient being’s concept of a tree the same thing?
For the moment let’s take the position that they are different things. The concept of a tree being the response of a sentient being beholding a tree. This presumes the sentient being is of the common mortal variety with which we are all familiar, as opposed to a sentient being who is able to make manifest in physical reality a tree or any other mental construct at will. That is a type of being which as far as I know still only resides in the imaginary realm of literature. In other words only exists as a mental construct or as a concept in the first type of sentient being, the common mortal type.
Third question: Is a concept an idea?
To answer that I will need to make clear my meaning of the word concept. A sentient being, and by that I mean the mortal type and will continue to unless I specify otherwise, beholds a tree, and by that mean perceives a tree through the five senses. The tree can be seen, felt, smelled etc. The perception of the tree through the sentient being’s senses forms a multi-dimensional mental image, for lack of a better word, of the tree in the mind of the being, and here I am assigning one dimension to a sense. So, it would be a five dimensional image.
Forth question: Is this multi-dimensional mental image a concept?
In my perspective a concept is more than that, a concept being a communicable thing. That is a concept is built up of the elements of a language, so that it can be communicated. Beings communicate from one to another through language.
So, how does one communicate one’s perception of a tree to another who has yet to directly perceive a tree themself. Well, one remembers their perception of a tree, and using the elements of language constructs a description of the tree. For my purpose here this is a communicable concept of a tree.
The point is all this was to answer the question what is an idea. So, last question is a concept as I have just described and an idea the same thing?
From my perspective they are different things. The idea here being a sentient being’s multi-dimensional mental image of something, that is raw recorded sensory input of a thing that the sentient being beheld, which is then used as reference from which to construct with language a communicable concept, more commonly called a description. My main point here is that an idea is composed of mental sensory imagery rather than words.
Furthermore, when one is able to construct a mental image more or less accurately from the communication of a concept from another who directly beheld a thing, which the receiver of the concept has yet to directly behold for themself, then the receiver of the concept can be said to have gotten the idea.
Running the risk of confusing things now for the sake of completeness. It must be acknowledged that some ideas are formed in response to completely imaginary things, such as the idea of a concept as I have defined it. Such things lack sensory input from the five senses, yet sentient beings are sill aware of it, and can use it as a reference to construct a communicable concept or description of it.
I will leave you with that, hoping it conveys something positive and useful to you.
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