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” 🙄
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.
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.
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.
“ilutfrt K.O. hands”
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
