Have you ever had a 100% original thought? And if so, what was it?
Have you ever had a 100% original thought? And if so, what was it?
Nope, not me... I'm still trying.
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" ๐
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.
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.
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.
"ilutfrt K.O. hands"
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.
โHrmm. I think โtoiletflushshowerscreamโ is a great Lemmy Usernameโ 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.
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.
Is it possible to know whether you have without knowing all other preceding thoughts?
Sorry, not sure I know what you mean...?
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.
Nope, it's all Simpsons-based up in here.
Lol, upvoted for honesty.
I don't know because I can't know what every person who ever existed already thought about. Unlikely given the total human population.
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.
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.
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 ร 10โ11), 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%."
A variation of something that already exists isn't original.
Does anyone know why UUIDs are split into the chunk sizes that they are?
I can force an all original thought, but then I wouldn't understand it because I thought of it in an all original language. ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
now we're.. not gettin anywhere ๐
Interesting... if someone did come up with a 100% original thought, could they even understand it? Have to think about that one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By original, do you mean an idea that was independently formed or an idea which formed before anyone else could think of it?
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.
Lots of them.
My most common pastime is just sitting around thinking about things, and I'm sure quite a handful. I am the only person who's ever thought that particular thought.
Like thinking about dimensions, the first dimension is a point, the second dimension is a plane, the third dimension is a cube, right?
Then you cross another fourth dimension and that's time, but that fourth dimension could be thought of as a dot in time, that dot being the present moment.
That would mean that the fifth dimension is a plane of time, containing all of the possible past moments and all of the possible future moments for that dot as observed by the observer.
The sixth dimension is a cube of time, containing all of the possible paths and all of the possible futures for every observer within that closed time-like curve universe thing.
So then what's the seventh dimension? Well, that seventh dimension would be a dot, and that dot contains all of the potential cubes of time and the cubes of existence, in which the original universe is from the observer's viewpoint.
So then the eighth dimension would be a plane of all of the potential universes that the observer could have possibly existed in, and then the ninth dimension would be a cube of all of the potential planes of universes in which the observer could observe.
And the tenth dimension is all of that combined together into a single dot, all of the possible universes and all of the possible timelines that have anything to do with the observer who is observing them, folding like an Ouroboros's tail back into its own mouth.
Of course, there's probably a million ways to disprove this thought, and there's probably an untold number of ways why this thought does not congru with our rational understanding of the universe.
It is highly reliant upon there being some sort of symmetry between each of the levels of dimension in numeric order, or in some sort of observable order that can be laid out in a numerical format.
I am aware that it is a flawed thought, but it is a thought experiment and it is fun, and it's one that I came up with just thinking about how the first through fourth dimensions are currently laid out.