Nope, not me… I’m still trying.
“ilutfrt K.O. hands”
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.
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.
Hear me out Play Station… SIX!!!
Lol, you win.
You ever give a rimjob to someone who can fart the ABCs? They can butt fuck your tongue, while you’re tongue fucking their butt.
My name is [redacted] and I approve this message.
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.
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.
In the nineties, I read a book by Tim Allen. I believe it was titled I’m Not Really Here. In it, from what I can recall, he tells stories (I think the opening one is about dropping his wife off at the airport), recites facts (the one I remember is about how much a shaving nick can heal per hour of sleep), and explores philosophical concepts.
The last one is the relevant one here. At one point, he pontificates upon the existence of free will. He posits that free will can be demonstrated by thinking of an object that is not inspired by your current perceptions or other external influence. For example, if you thought of an orange when there was no orange you could see or smell; and no one was whispering “orange” to you; and you hadn’t eaten an orange recently; and whatever else, then you had free will, as you had a thought that was not externally controlled. I have problems with this theory, but will put them aside from the moment.
Ever since I read that, I think of it any time I try to be creative or ponder free will. I have wondered whether, going along with the concept as described, that means that I lack free will - because attempting to verify it will always be externally inspired by the passage.
If that’s the case, does that make Tim Allen my deity?
Before posting this comment, I looked up the book, so in case you’re curious: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1058798.I_m_Not_Really_Here
Apologies if I have poisoned anyone else’s free will based thought experiments.
edit: Little bit of an improvement in grammatical consistency.
Very interesting, I can see how that could become like a thorn in the brain. But I can also imagine how an original thought might require an unusual and/or surprising set of circumstances that might cause you to forget Tim Allen’s theory just long enough for the thought to occur to you independently… like one of those aha or eureka moments. Also, I’m not sure about the connection you make here to a deity… there are plenty of things firmly planted in our memories, doesn’t mean everyone and everything that planted them are gods.
The deity part was intended to be a bit of levity. If free will does not exist, some people might suggest that the brain is just a set of electric and chemical reactions, while others might suggest an external figure such as a god might shape your actions within the world. If the latter, whomever is making the decisions could be said to be planting your thoughts. Since Tim Allen did that to me, it would place him in the category of deity.
A bit of a stretch, perhaps, and obviously the joke fell flat. I’m sorry if the logic doesn’t hold up - I was and am very sleep deprived currently. Sometimes that makes me funnier, but sometimes not. I certainly don’t mean to represent him or any individual as an actual deity.
Oops, I thought you were serious, sorry :)
No worries… I get a few flashes of almost genius, interspersed with many of remarkable stupidity… at least you only need to wake up (or get some sleep).
I keep going back to the fact that every thought had to have been thought a first time by someone, so that it has to be possible to have an original thought. Could it be then that maybe we’ve just finally run out of humanly conceivable ideas?
If you confine your question to thoughts / ideas, I would imagine it’s difficult if not impossible to ever know, depending on how you define a thought / idea.
Far from every thought is expressed and, of those that are, they may often be expressed but missing nuance. As such, even if you have a 100% original thought, you might not even be aware.
Additionally, and again, depending on how you define a thought, I must imagine that there are so many possible permutations that it’s reminiscent about that “deck of cards” fact: there are more ways to shuffle a 52-card deck of cards than there are atoms in the universe (or something like that) … Though, with thoughts, the number of variables likely means it’s at a much greater scale.
However, though original thoughts might be available, any individual is not guaranteed to have one.
If the question is more about a statement or expressible opinion, it becomes easier to quantity.
I’ve had a hard enough time trying to think an original thought without redefining what a thought even is, so its dictionary definition is fine for this purpose.
I can’t fathom how we wouldn’t be aware if some thought suddenly occurred to us that was entirely foreign to everything familiar to us in this world.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean that it would be easier to quantity if in the form of a statement or opinion… original is original.
I’m not sure how I could be aware of whether a thought was truly original. Many of the other comments in this post are random things like “coconut car cacophony” or whatever. It’s possible that no one has ever thought those words in conjunction before, but does it count as a thought or just a barrage of words with no meaning behind them? Additionally, if they do comprise an original thought, how would I know? I don’t feel a burst of originality while thinking those words and, if I did, I probably wouldn’t trust it.
A statement or expressible opinion would be something I could research. A thought is harder to define. I can’t guarantee no one has ever said “coconut car cacophony” before, but I can look for it; if someone has expressed a sentence (or opinion) that has actual meaning (unlike my three words), I can look for things that might have derived from that statement. For example, “e=mc^2” was likely an original thought, but it has since become commonplace (regardless of an understanding of its meaning) and, if I were to have that thought without a prior introduction to it, I could look for it or other physics theories for which it was the basis. Finding it or derivatives, I would be able to determine that someone had thought of it before I did, verifying its prior existence.
I’m not positive about this, but what I suspect is that we’re maybe not capable of having thoughts that are 100% original… that we’re in fact all followers in this sense, each of us following sets of different ideas originally coming from some place else. I do believe however that it’s possible for an original thought to come to us from these other places that we can’t express because there are no words to express them. The example I gave elsewhere in the thread is of a man I knew who almost died… he claimed to see something when he was unconscious that he said he couldn’t describe because there were no words to describe it. And I think this is where the spiritual realm comes in, which a lot of people think is nonsense and don’t believe in… but then can’t explain why they seem incapable of having 100% original thoughts that are purely their own.
I don’t know because I can’t know what every person who ever existed already thought about. Unlikely given the total human population.
It doesn’t matter if someone else has already thought it, as long as you thought it entirely on your own, without first hearing it from some place else. Also, every thought has to have been thought a first time by someone, so it has to be possible.
“Hrmm. I think ‘toiletflushshowerscream’ is a great Lemmy Username” is probably an original one.
Hmm, that might be one, or close… just not sure it’s 100% original.
Thought about it… Lemmy and usernames and what people think of usernames are not original thoughts. It has to be 100% original.
Nope, it’s all Simpsons-based up in here.
Lol, upvoted for honesty.
I would ask: is it possible for two thoughts to be completely distinct from each other (according to however you’re defining original). If no, then by definition only your first thought is original because after that all thoughts can be thought of as a variations on that thought (and you said variations weren’t allowed)
I think your definition of 100% original is so restrictive that it kinda loses all meaning.
To actually answer, I think emotional reactions are some of the most original thoughts that I have. Like the experience of pain is original even if you’ve heard words describing it before. And if it’s not original, then it’s not original only to your own previous experience. In fact, the experience of having all thoughts/sensations is original, even if some sense of the meaning of that thought is not.
Consider that every thought had to have been thought for a first time by someone. And thoughts and emotions are entirely different things, so that doesn’t work. Interesting though, what you said about our first thoughts being original… that hadn’t occurred to me, need to think about that one.
Are there any two thoughts that are distinct from each other. Or is there only 1 unique thought (Choose any and then all others are a variation of it).
Also I disagree that thoughts and emotions are entirely distinct. Or does ‘thoughts’ refer just to language? Are visual thoughts thoughts? And if so, why not remembering the experience of pain?
Are memories thoughts? Or do I have to be commenting on the memory with language for it to be a thought? I feel like memories are 100% original too, since they’re a re-experience of something that happened to you, not based on anything that someone else has previously thought.
Yes, I’d say our thoughts can be distinct from each other… conversely, I can’t see how all our thoughts can be mere variations of one original thought when we’re obviously capable of thinking about many unrelated things.
Yes, I’d say memories are thoughts when we actively remember, and the experiences they stem from are the origins of those thoughts… but original only to us, not original in nature… unless we’ve somehow had an entirely unique experience.
No, we don’t need to express ourselves vocally in order to be having thoughts… hence, private thoughts.
Is it possible to know whether you have without knowing all other preceding thoughts?
Sorry, not sure I know what you mean…?
Unless you know every thought that has ever been thought, there’s no way to know if your thought is original or not.
Start by coming up with a thought that you think might be original, see if you can at least do that.
I believe that in this context, original does not mean you are the only person who ever had this thought. I mean, it’s a thought that you generated yourself without somebody else having given you the information needed to generate that thought in the first place.
Yes, that would count as an original thought… whether someone else had already thought it or not doesn’t matter, as long as you yourself thought it entirely on your own.
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.
I just did it by thinking up this UUID: 4d6b3a08-e1b5-407c-bb6c-cbac830ff4bd
“the annual risk of a given person being hit by a meteorite is estimated to be one chance in 17 billion, which means the probability is about 0.00000000006 (6 × 10−11), equivalent to the odds of creating a few tens of trillions of UUIDs in a year and having one duplicate. In other words, only after generating 1 billion UUIDs every second for the next 100 years, the probability of creating just one duplicate would be about 50%.”
ls /dev/disk/by-uuid
4d6b3a08-e1b5-407c-bb6c-cbac830ff4bb
Damn. Off by one.
Does anyone know why UUIDs are split into the chunk sizes that they are?
A variation of something that already exists isn’t original.
Then the last “original” discovery was “fire”, and I’m not even 100% sure about that. Everything else is a variation of something that previously existed.
An original thought doesn’t have to be the discovery of something.
