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.
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.
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.