Nope, not me… I’m still trying.
Would sodium make a good bath bomb, or would a liquid sodium-potassium alloy be better? What about cesium, if price is no concern? How effective would such a bomb be against someone taking a bath? What’s the best delivery method; maybe something that dissolves in water like dishwasher pods?
I’m reasonably sure nobody has thought that before.
It only occurred to you to think of these things because others thought of them before you, and you heard about them… sodium, bath, bath bomb, etc. So not 100% original. Try imagining something that no one before you has ever imagined before, in any shape or form. I can’t do it and trying boggles my mind.
Every moment of your life, you have been traveling through space and time. Even in the time it takes you to read this comment, you have passed through vast distances on the rock we call Earth.
Space and time aren’t original thoughts… they’ve already been thought of and about by many others before us.
No, but once I thought I did. I was in a fight with my nasty SO, and I finally said to whatever he was being a narcissist about, “Do whatever you want, you always do”. I thought that was a pretty original thing to say as a comeback, and then I read Stephen King’s book Lisey’s Story, and a character in there says the same thing.
Hear me out Play Station… SIX!!!
Lol, you win.
I have fun creating comics. I’m pretty sure sometimes I’m the only one who thinks about that stuff
Just thinking about comics is already unoriginal, something originally created by someone else and that many people have thought about probably countless times by now.
I meant the somewhat “original” thought are what I draw and what I make the character talk about. I mean I don’t know whether they’re really unique but surely haven’t seen/read anything similar to that. (also not implying my artwork is worth of praise in any way)
Sorry, didn’t mean it as a criticism… it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and still can’t come up with a 100% original thought of my own.
Not possible. Every aspect of us is born from the material around us.
I’m not sure about the relationship between thought and the materials around us, but I do know that every single thought had to have been thought a first time by someone.
By original, do you mean an idea that was independently formed or an idea which formed before anyone else could think of it?
A thought that came to you entirely independent of anyone else’s thoughts… something that no one before you has thought or imagined, so that it includes absolutely nothing that’s already familiar to you.
By that definition no human has ever had an “original” thought.
Not true… every thought had to have been thought for a first time by someone, just not by us (it seems).
it includes absolutely nothing that’s already familiar to you
I truly do not believe that any thought exists without context, if you can find any examples I would be happy to be proven wrong.
Well, every single thought had to have been thought a first time by someone, no?
Sure, but by your definition any thought containing any kind of language would not be “original” because it requires familiarity with the language.
Now you’re breaking off into something else that fascinates me… symbolism as a highly efficient method of communication. If you test yourself, you’ll find it takes less time for your brain to process symbols than spoken words… and there’s a very short amount of time in there where your brain understands what it’s looking at without the need of any other language other than symbolism.
In that case, no good ones.
Lol, in that case, I’m not gonna ask.
From your responses to others’ comments, you’re looking for a “thought” that has absolutely zero relationship with any existing concepts or ideas. If there is overlap with anything that anyone has ever written about or expressed in any way before, then it’s not “100% original,” and so either it’s impossible or it’s useless.
I would argue it’s impossible because the very way human cognition is structured is based on prediction, pattern recognition, and error correction. The various layers of processing in the brain are built around modeling the world around us in a way to generate a prediction, and then higher layers compare the predictions with the actual sensory input to identify mismatches, and then the layers above that reconcile the mismatches and adjust the prediction layers. That’s a long winded way to say our thoughts are inspired by the world around us, and so are a reflection of the world around us. We all share our part of this world with at least one other person, so we’re all going to share commonalities in our thoughts with others.
But for the sake of argument, assume that’s all wrong, and someone out there does have a truly original, 100% no overlap with anything that has come before, thought. How could they possibly express that thought to someone else? Communication between people relies on some kind of shared context, but any shared context for this thought means it’s dependent on another idea, or “prior art,” so it couldn’t be 100% original. If you can’t share the thought with anyone, nor express it in any way to record it (because that again is communication), it dies with you. And you can’t even prove it without communicating, so how would someone with such an original thought convince you they’ve had it?
You’ve got it. I don’t think I was clear enough asking the question. Might have done better asking if anyone’s ever imagined anything that’s never been imagined by anyone else before in any shape or form… I don’t know. Funny, not even sure how to pose the question so it’s clear. I tried reasoning along similar lines as you, and ended with the conclusion that every thought must have been thought for a first time by someone… we just got here after the fact. And those thoughts, once original, have all followed us into the present… which tells us it’s indeed possible to communicate entirely original thoughts. So, what do you think?
The problem with that reasoning is it’s assuming a clear boundary to what a “thought” is. Just like there wasn’t a “first” human (because genetics are constantly changing), there wasn’t a “first” thought.
Ancient animals had nervous systems that could not come close to producing anything we would consider a thought, and through gradual, incremental changes we get to humanity, which is capable of thought. Where do you draw the line? Any specific moment in that evolution would be arbitrary, so we have to accept a continuum of neurological phenomena that span from “not thoughts” to “thoughts.” And again we get back to thoughts being reflections of a shared environment, so they build on a shared context, and none are original.
If you do want to draw an arbitrary line at what a thought is, then that first thought was an evolution of non-/proto-thought neurological phenomena, and itself wasn’t 100% “original” under the definition you’re using here.
Very interesting. So to be sure I’m understanding you, let’s suppose what you’re saying here is bang-on… wouldn’t that mean we are each and all followers by nature and can’t be anything but?
I think that’s overly reductionist, but ultimately yes. The human brain is amazingly complex, and evolution isn’t directed but keeps going with whatever works well enough, so there’s going to be incredible breadth in human experience and cognition across everyone in the world and throughout history. You’ll never get two people thinking exactly the same way because of the shear size of that possibility space, despite there having been over 100 billion people to have lived in history and today.
That being said, “what works” does set constraints on what is possible with the brain, and evolution went with the brain because it solves a bunch of practical problems that enhanced the survivability of the creatures that possessed it. So there are bounds to cognition, and there are common patterns and structures that shape cognition because of the aforementioned problems they solved.
Thoughts that initially reflect reality but that can be expanded in unrealistic ways to explore the space of possibilities that an individual can effect in the world around them has clear survival benefits. Thoughts that spring from nothing and that relate in no way to anything real strike me as not useful at best and at worst disruptive to what the brain is otherwise doing. Thinking in that perspective more, given the powerful levels of pattern recognition in the brain, I wonder if creation of “100% original thoughts” would result in something like schizophrenia, where the brain’s pattern recognition systems are reinterpreting (and misinterpreting) internal signals as sensory signals of external stimuli.
This is seriously fascinating to me. I kept this bit to myself because I didn’t want it to affect people’s answers, but the thread is old enough now… my question and its answer arose from my religious beliefs, and here you are arriving at the same answer scientifically, that we are all followers by nature.
It eventually occurred to me after hearing the word “sheep” thrown around enough times that I’ve never met a person so original that they follow nothing and no one. Being told, for example, that I’m incapable of rational, intelligent, independent thought (because of my religious beliefs) by people who believe themselves to be superior critical thinkers… when the very idea of “critical thinking” was originally born from the mind of Socrates… another mere man, as fallible as any other, who himself believed he was guided by an inner voice that he alone could hear. So we religious folk are commonly ridiculed for aspiring to follow God by people who follow a mere man that, by today’s definitions, would be diagnosed a schizophrenic. I do love irony, seriously, I really do.
To be clear, I’ve been debating religion with people for a very, very long time, so none of this upsets me in the least… I just find it all extremely fascinating.
Anyhow, the conclusion I eventually reached is that there’s very real danger in denying our own nature as followers, because that’s when we open ourselves fully to the risk of blindly following anyone and anything.
Ah, I think I misread your statement of “followers by nature” as “followers of nature.” I’m not really willing to ascribe personality traits like “follower” or “leader” or “independent” or “critical thinker” to humanity as a whole based on the discussion I’ve laid out here. Again, the possibility space of cognition is bounded, but unimaginatively large. What we can think may be limited to a reflection of nature, but the possible permutations that can be made of that reflection are more than we could explore in the lifetime of the universe. I wouldn’t really use this as justification for or against any particular moral framework.
Ok, thanks for taking the time, I enjoyed chatting with you.
How would you know the thought is original if you don’t know all thoughts?
Wouldn’t matter if someone else had the same thought, as long as you thought it entirely on your own.
All my thoughts are my own.
Yes, it does seem that way, but our thoughts are influenced pretty much non-stop on a daily basis.
Nope, it’s all Simpsons-based up in here.
Lol, upvoted for honesty.
Only for hyper specific things.
Such as “why is this radio transforming broadcast frames into unicast frames for only OSPF packets causing the neighbours not to form.”
Doesn’t work… you’re still thinking of things that have been thought by others before you, which is why it occurred to you to even think about them.
An inside-out fish regurgitating an upside-down top hat
100% original… fish and regurgitation and upside-down and top hats have all been thought of before.
If we replaced the Oceans with orange juice that would probably be bad. But if we all work together we can do it.
100% original… oceans and oranges aren’t original.
Can I use English words? Because they aren’t original. I’m not so sure about this exercise.
I’m not sure, but I think maybe it goes beyond that, that maybe we wouldn’t have the words in any language to be able to express it. I knew a man once who passed out, went into convulsions and almost died… we had to call an ambulance and he was taken to the hospital. He later said that when he was passed out, he saw something he had no words to describe… years later, he showed me a magazine article about a man who’d had the same experience (of having no words) and said, “This is what it’s like”. Even then, years later, he still couldn’t tell anyone what he’d seen. So maybe that’s the best we could come up with, someone saying they’ve had a thought with no words to explain it? I’ve never had a 100% original thought, so I’m just guessing.
I don’t know because I can’t know what every person who ever existed already thought about. Unlikely given the total human population.
Yes. But I can’t write it down or use any words to even attempt to describe it because then it wouldn’t be “100% original” 🙄
Expressing it wouldn’t make it unoriginal… it’s when you share it with others and they become influenced by it that it’s no longer original on their part if they repeat it in some form or other.
