When I read about how most of our thoughts are repetitive, I wondered if it would be possible for us to have a thought that is completely new or original by will. Is there some way we can have unique thoughts whenever we wish to?
Please note that this question does not focus on our brain’s mental capacity or free will to be able to think of something original. You could think of it something like asking you to paint something original; I am not asking if you are even able to paint in the first place, but instead how you would paint it if you could.
Also you should ideally be able to think of something new completely by your own in your consciously aware and normal self, without relying on external factors like taking inspiration from your surroundings or words from a recent/ongoing conversations, looking at the content open in your device, using any drugs or consumables, being affected by strong emotions etc.
Edit: Elaboration in last paragraph
I’d take two random words/topics, and try to think of something that involves both of them.
For example, I just thought of a bicycle and of curtains. I immediately imagined a person riding a bicycle with curtains stuck in their wheels, getting torn more and more as they tried to cycle away. That’s a thought I don’t think I ever had before.
I tend to do exactly this whenever I am bored, however I often keep coming up with the same combinations of words.
Pick randomly from a long list of nouns then
Maybe try different directions. I just tried and imagined a giraffe nudging a fried egg off the roof of a car on a hot day. The heat and how it sears fur on your face is a different thought from someone riding a bike with wheels caught in curtains because the bike idea is more visual and emotional (frustration, probably) and the giraffe one is more physical (heat).
To be fair, I’m quite sleep-deprived.
I think the best way to think of something new (to you, something new to all of humanity is harder of course) would be to pick some aspect of society, your daily life, a technology or social norm you are familiar with,… and analyse which underlying assumptions make it the way it is and then just figure out what would happen if that assumption didn’t hold. That is basically what a lot of classic science fiction writers (among others) did. Take e.g. Asimov’s Nightfall, a story about a world with (IIRC) 6 suns where it is only night once every 2000 years so people are not accustomed to darkness at all. Or Terry Bisson’s They’re Made Out of Meat where he questions our implicit assumption that aliens would be meat creatures like us.
Interesting answer. I admit I often imagine sci-fi scenarios myself without realizing how I am forming original thoughts.
The astrophysics nerd in me wonders if anyone has tried to model that six star system, is there actually a stable configuration for that?
Is it really dumb to think it would work like carbon?
It’s rather pleasant to consider the way atomic structures and astronomical structures mirror each other.
Unfortunately, no, geocentrism probably still wouldn’t hold in that world. There would probably be one main star the others vaguely orbit. In reality probably the stars wouldn’t tolerate each other and play nice; they’d subsume one another until there was only one winner.
As in six equally sized stars all in the same orbit equidistant from each other, like a hexagon? That seems incredibly unlikely. How would that form? Even if the primordial disc of gas and dust somehow coalesces into six even clumps, any outside perturbation (e.g. from forming planets or neighboring star systems) would nudge those clumps out of balance and eventually cause some of them to crash into one another.
For a more likely arrangement, think about our closest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system. Binary sun-like stars (A & B) dance in a somewhat eccentric orbit, one a bit larger and brighter and the other a bit smaller and dimmer. Then over 10,000 times further out, a faint red dwarf (C, aka Proxima Centauri) circles them both!
Binary stars are very common, supposedly moreso than even lone stars. If you want to imagine a six-member system, starting building it up like Alpha Centauri but with more pairs. Put a very large pair at the center, a midsize pair circling both, then small stars (perhaps independently captured) on the far outskirts. Something like that would at least be a more reasonable starting point.
But your initial thought isn’t exactly stupid though; the universe is absurdly huge (far more stars than grains of sand on Earth) so probability is such that even rare or seemingly impossible things are bound to happen somewhere.
Probably mushrooms
Treat words as coordinates in the space of all possible concepts, and add a few together. I think that fulfils your constraint of not “taking inspiration from…words from a recent ongoing conversation” since you can, if you wish, pick the words in your own head.
Or - drugs. Drugs are good too. I don’t know why you’re applying these artificial constraints to this problem as if there is some notion of “purity” or “cheating” to the practice of idea-generation. Is an idea any less worthy, insightful, or useful because you came up with it while using a chemical tool to do so?
An intriguing read! Thanks for sharing.
Mushrooms, you will have wild thoughts
Even then my hallucinations were informed by memories and events from my life, people, or sounds.
It’s hard to even know if seeing pure geometry is an original thought. I don’t actually think a truly original thought is possible. Everything takes from everything else, in some small way, and builds on it.
psychedelic drugs
Also you should ideally be able to think of something new completely by your own, without relying on external factors like taking inspiration from your surroundings or words from a recent/ongoing conversations, looking at the content open in your device etc.
If it could be expressed in existing ways, would it still count as entirely new or unthought of?
What I meant was to not rely on objects or scenes near where you are positioned in order to think of something new.
This is like coming up with an original name for a D&D character: you just put together sounds until you get something that sounds cool. Here is one:
Bryo-Kernatz
Once you have the name it helps you imagine the character it might belong too.
Does dreaming it count?
Considering most of our dreams are unique and not really thought of by ourselves at will, I wouldn’t count it
Regarding your last paragraph, I don’t think I could do it. I can’t think of a single time that I have thought of something I’ve never thought before where it hasn’t been catalysed or at least shaped by external factors.
So to answer your question without that constraint, I’ve found good success in actively seeking out viewpoints that are different to mine. Some years ago, for example, I was a leftist who felt like ACAB was unreasonably inflammatory and “surely not all cops”. I googled something like “Why ACAB is true”, and found some compelling arguments. I tried to then debunk those arguments by trying to find evidence or reasoning against them, and I continued in that way for a while, and now I’m an anarchist.
It took a long while to get to the point of identifying as an anarchist, but the ACAB thing was a great example of what caused me to think in a way that was novel to me.
If we are talking about thoughts that are original not just with respect to me, but the wider world, I’ve found good success in reading outside of my field. I’m a scientist at heart, and I have studied biochemistry to a graduate level. That’s the main field I work in. I’m a very stereotypical, systematic scientist, and that means I’ve not had much exposure to art or literature or other parts of the humanities.
I’ve been learning linguistics recently and there have been a few times that the way I have understood some core concept is distinctly different and perhaps even surprising to how my linguist friends would see it. Not wrong, just different. Everything I have learned is shaped by everything I’ve learned before, so I’ve found a lot of value in diving into fields that are outside of my wheelhouse.
Sometimes, I find concepts or methods that I don’t understand well enough to say I know them (without more work), but even those are useful to me. They make me think in a way that is unfamiliar to my scientist brain, and that makes me more likely to have thoughts that no other scientist in the conversation has thought of before.
I’ve found a lot of utility and fulfillment in leaning into having a wide but not especially deep pool of knowledge surrounding my primary domain. I wish I could learn all of the things much more deeply, but I’ve come to appreciate the power of the paddling-depth water surrounding my main area.
I’d just think of something positive about myself.
