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The Improbability Of Original Thought: Look What I Did Mom!

Ermintruder

Ermintruder

The greatest risk is to risk nothing at all...
Joined
Jul 13, 2013
Messages
6,206
"There's nothing new under the sun"....including aphorisms like this one.

I was awoken this morning in the middle of the night by the sound of some revellers walking past the house in a noisy drunken gaggle of selfish indifference. My immediate instinctive thought, without any bidding other than visceral fury, was:

`Give them an inch, and they'll take a light-year'

I would swear that I've never heard this idiom before, from any source, and believe it was a self-generated novel quip made-up inside my head. Just a silly little nothingness, aphoristic but apposite. And in my half-sleeping state, I wondered if it might be a Unique Thought.

Of course, it's not. Not even a Google whack (remember them?), a search on Google shows as just 34 instances. This one will be the thirty-fifth. Mine is therefore rare, but not the first-ever use of the phrase.

So is it actually possible to have a unique thought? A truly-individual, unprecedented, non-convergent insight that nobody else has thought of, or (importantly) could think of?

Do all the communal experiences, exposures, drivers, fears, shared motivations, make us all neocogintively alike, just to be little molds of each-other? I'd consider that to be an unoriginal sin.

Or: is this just teleological tail-chasing?
 
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Hmm. I don't know. It might depend on what exactly you mean by "orignal".
Having spent time with people who have (for lack of a better term) disorganized thoughts - by which I mean various degrees of schizophrenia and/or psychosis - I've heard some pretty original-sounding things.

One could argue that disorganized thoughts don't count, or that even psychotic delusions can be catergorized under certain tropes (mind control rays etc.) but that might be nit-picking. IMO. Besides, I've heard things that might be considered original even then, and those "disorganized" thoughts can contain strokes of brilliance that the most mentally healthy person would be hard-pressed to produce.

The questions I have defeat Google on a daily basis, and I'm definitely not the most original-thinking person around. It bugs me, actually, that enough people haven't written about the same subjects I'm curious about for it to register on an internet search, or to be found in an average bookstore or library. Same with scientific research. The papers I can find always seems to miss what I'm looking for. :( For a person with truly original thoughts (if there are such) it must be maddening to have no guidance and to always have to be at the leading edge of an idea. Not everyone has it in them to successfully convey new thoughts. Look what happened to the doctor who first suggested hand-washing would reduce the spread of disease - his career was ruined. That kind of thing happens all the time.

It could be that there isn't so much a lack of original thought as that original thoughts are often met with hostility by the established order.
 
I'm not sure that we need more original thinking: I meet many people - young and not-so-young - whose fuzzy, self-contradictory and twisted thoughts make me dizzy. Subjecting them to analysis would certainly provoke hostility, since the established order now is exactly this form of derangement.

In almost every case I encounter, these original thinkers will plunge into the big stuff: Good versus Evil, Existence of God, the Meaning of Life etc. etc. with a glorious sense of exploring virgin territory. They quickly get swallowed by dragons.

Productive thoughts will almost certainly be based on earlier knowledge and more "shoulders of giants" than "out-of-the-box" - to juxtapose ancient and modern clichés.

Years of using Google etc. to uncover plagiarism in students' work, however, suggests that - outside of standard phrases, any half a dozen common words could be employed by a child in a combination not previously recorded. Occasionally they make sense! :cool:
 
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JamesWhitehead said:
I'm not sure that we need more original thinking: I meet many people - young and not-so-young - whose fuzzy, self-contradictory and twisted thoughts make me dizzy. Subjecting them to analysis would certainly provoke hostility, since the established order now is exactly this form of derangement.

In almost every case I encounter, these original thinkers will plunge into the big stuff: Good versus Evil, Existence of God, the Meaning of Life etc. etc. with a glorious sense of exploring virgin territory. They quickly get swallowed by dragons.

Productive thoughts will almost certainly be based on earlier knowedge and more "shoulders of giants" than "out-of-the-box" - to juxtapose ancient and modern clichés.

Years of using Google etc. to uncover plagiarism in students' work, however, suggests that - outside of standard phrases, any half a dozen common words could be employed by a child in a combination not previously recorded. Occasionally they make sense! :cool:
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I find this a bit worrisome though. If we discourage the attempt to create original thoughts and ideas, how will anything new be discovered? Just because those thoughts may be fuzzy and contradictory, there is the process of sorting the wheat from the chaff and finding out what works and what doesn't. If a young person starts to ponder the meaning of life and the questions of good and evil, IMO the important thing is that they are doing it at all, not that they aren't getting it right the first time.

Discouraging exploration of ideas that may be off the beaten path may bring new discoveries to a halt.

Consider the story of Daniel Shechtman, who won the Nobel prize for chemisty in 2011, for the discovery of quasicrystals:
Dr Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science to convince others of what he had first seen in his lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington - formerly called the National Bureau of Standards - on an April morning in 1982.

For years, the researcher was "ridiculed" and "treated badly" by his peers, he recounts.
The Nobel laureate first created quasicrystals by rapidly cooling molten metals, such as aluminium and manganese, by squirting the mixture onto a cool surface. By sending an electron wave through a molten metal "grate", the Israeli researcher was able to see how the wave was diffracted by the metals' atoms.
Under the microscope he observed that the new crystal was made up of perfectly ordered, but never repeating, units - a structure that is at odds with all other crystals that are regular and precisely repeating. Dr Shechtman himself is said to have cried "Eyn chaya kazo", which translates from the Hebrew as "there can be no such creature".

"The head of my lab came to me smiling sheepishly, and put a book on my desk and said: 'Danny, why don't you read this and see that it is impossible what you are saying,'" Dr Shechtman recounted in an interview with technion.The Israeli researcher was later told that he was a disgrace to the group and asked to leave.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15181187

It seems obvious to me that if he hadn't pursued the idea, even after being told it was impossible, his discovery would not have been recognized. Probably countless discoveries would have been lost throughout the ages. What if Newton or Hawking had never bothered thinking about physics?

Sorry, I just can't get behind the idea. :(
 
Please note, FMBdom, that my references to the potential un-uniqueness of creative thought is quite-independent from the ersatz validation imparted as a consequence of being found via a whatever-brand of search engine.

What I am perhaps positing is an absolute creative plateau that has been reached maybe a long time ago, resonant with the allegorical proposition expounded by Fukuyama in
The End of History and the Last Man

...but this in terms of the end of all original creative thought, rather than a socio-political endpoint of unassailable compromise.

Shrinking thinkers? Zero heroes?

'No More Heroes'
The Stranglers

Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn
Whatever happened to dear old Lenny
The great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?

Whatever happened to all the heroes?
All the Shakespearoes?
They watched their Rome burn
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?

No more heroes any more
No more heroes any more

Whatever happened to all the heroes?
All the Shakespearoes?
They watched their Rome burn
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?

No more heroes any more
No more heroes any more
Click to expand...
 
JamesWhitehead said:
I'm not sure that we need more original thinking:
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Oh dear.
There's fun to be had here looking at bamboozled responses to the free-flying mental gymnastics surreal or pictorial thinkers enjoy without the inherent perils of self-diagnosing themselves as being brainiacally challenged.

A good idea doesn't mind who it happens to. Ask anyone in a creative field and they'll say they've tossed around and rejected ideas that were taken up by someone else independently around the same time.
 
I'm completely sure that we need more original thinking!
 
I was just 'seconding' you.
 
Yes to more original thinking, and indeed more thinking in general. There seems to be a trend towards a kind of anti-intellectualism in all things at the moment. A pensive, inquiring character is considered too 'serious' or 'highbrow' by some and open to accusations of being 'up yourself'. On the contrary, I genuinely don't understand those who amble through life not really thinking about what they're doing and what it all means. Even if we come to the conclusion that ultimately there is no meaning to what we do, at least we've considered ideas and concepts.

To go back to Ermintrude's original point, clichés are abundant but I think there's still ample room for new creative ideas. I think it's just that we've become 'comfortable' with established concepts. New ideas are hard and take time and effort to produce. The mainstream is exactly that - art (and increasingly, products) endlessly reproduced from a few simple concepts (look at Hollywood - or maybe don't!) - it's at the periphery that new ideas are explored.
 
Novena said:
... To go back to Ermintrude's original point, clichés are abundant but I think there's still ample room for new creative ideas. ...
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Just a comment on the viability of jumping from the OP's particular example to conclusions about original thoughts / concepts more generally ...

There's a big difference between the levels of originality or novelty involved in generating a variation on the expression of an established idiom (or 'meme' if you prefer ...) versus generating a totally new or unique concept. After all, this particular idiom (which traces back to the 16th century) exhibits a recognizable structure of the form:

"Give X _(unit of distance measurement)_ and X will seek or pursue _(larger unit of distance measurement)_."

Changing one, the other, or both the parenthesized variables represents a spin on the way this well-worn concept (meme, whatever ...) is expressed without really changing the relationship of smaller-versus-larger that underlies the idiom's usual implication.

Fellow conversants and I have often generated such variations on this particular idiom over the decades, though I don't specifically recall if anyone used this specific (light year) twist.

If you'd spontaneously thought or said:

"Give 'em an inch and they'll take a worm" (pun on 'inchworm')

... you'd have altered the implied semantics of the expression - either for nonsensical / humorous effect or to convey some meaning I can't conceive at the moment. This evidences more originality than merely changing units of measurement invoked, but the result is cryptic enough to possibly not stand for anything on its own, much less something distinct from the implication of the conventional expression.

To take this particular example further ...

If you'd thought or said:

"Give 'em and inch and they'll take a wormhole" (sort of s second-order punning on 'inchworm')

... one could well argue you'd generated a variation representing a new spin on the idiom's implied semantics and not just its expression - i.e., a distinct idiom meaning something along the lines of:

'they'll circumvent you entirely'
... rather than ...
'they'll presume to take more than what you offered'.
 
It is difficult to generate thoughts that are on the border between BANALITY and MADNESS. That are Original but still connected to some reality. I know two examples:

1)
"Sadness: the first powder to be abided upon waking. It may reside in tools or garments and can be eradicated with more of itself, in which case the face results as a placid system coursing with water, heaving"
http://biblioklept.org/2012/04/19/intercourse-with-resuscitated-wife-ben-marcus/
From Ben Marcus’s collection The Age of Wire and String

2)
There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15396/15396-h/15396-h.htm

There must be more.
 
I knew this would be fun.
Yesterday, disconnected from the Internet and allowing my mind to play with concepts, I came up with a mad King Lod who decreed that everyone have a music box stitched inside them. On Sundays, he would go around with an armed guard and stop random members of the town and ask them to play their tune for him.

The problem with a lot of people is they're so immersed in the web, they've forgotten how to think creatively while passively grazing at ideas and images put in front of them without taking them further.
 
jimv1 said:
...The problem with a lot of people is they're so immersed in the web, they've forgotten how to think creatively while passively grazing at ideas and images put in front of them without taking them further.
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I started railing about a perceived decline in younger folks' imaginative capacities - and blaming it on progressively increasing engagement with media, toys, etc., that had become all too 'literal' - back in the 1980's.

It's only gotten worse with the arrival of the Web, ubiquitous access to the 'Net, and the ongoing evolutionary fusion of previously disparate media within one venue.

If one is barraged by an endless stream of 'dots' (items) and the dots are ever more 'literal' (representing something more explicitly and narrowly than before), there's neither time nor motivation to ever learn how to connect-the-dots.

I've noticed what seems to be a perceptible decline in imaginative capacity (i.e., ability to portray / manipulate something in one's mind, without external props) and a parallel decline in both motivation and ability to 'think creatively inside the presumptive box', much less 'think outside the box'. IMHO the former (as a deficit) probably contributes to the latter.

... And it seems to be getting worse as time goes on.
 
EnolaGaia said:
I started railing about a perceived decline in younger folks' imaginative capacities - and blaming it on progressively increasing engagement with media, toys, etc., that had become all too 'literal' - back in the 1980's.

It's only gotten worse with the arrival of the Web, ubiquitous access to the 'Net, and the ongoing evolutionary fusion of previously disparate media within one venue.
.
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So, so tragically true.

I cite the excellent-but-depressing "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business", by Neil Postman (which many here will almost certainly have read already), and also the savage analysis of "Looka Yonder: The Imaginary America of Populist Culture" by Duncan Webster (another probably-familiar work, I'd expect)

People born within the internet age are developing a quantum incapability in respect of analysis and creativity that totally-eclipses the supposed numeric disability we 'suffered' at school as a consequence of the advent of the pocket calculator. Now children are addicted to accessing absolute 'facts' from Wikipedia (which I could edit, right now) and obtain sociomatic definition by what others apparently perceive of their false 2D online superselves.

Nobody is truly engaged to be married or partnered or employed until it's been announced upon the Book of Face. The holiday is defined in terms of Instagram assertions of hedonistic orgasm. It will not end happily...not without an intervention of truce and proportionality.
 
I once came up with what I thought was an original name for something. Here in Melbourne, developers like to keep the 'heritage' fronts of old warehouses and such, and then stick standard, boring apartments behind them. Then they sell them as 'warehouse living', which basically means you add (and pay for) your own kitchen and bathroom. I referred to this architectural practice as 'facadism'*, thinking I was being clever. Well, someone else had already coined that term. I was very disappointed.

(*I don't know how to do a cedilla!)
 
poozler said:
(*I don't know how to do a cedilla!)
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On Windows, I use the Character Map tool to do non-standard characters.
Start menu > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map
 
Ulalume said:
... It could be that there isn't so much a lack of original thought as that original thoughts are often met with hostility by the established order.
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Don't both of these issues result from a ubiquity / uniformity of thoughts (concepts; memes; etc.) among a given population?

Such conceptual 'sameness' among the general population stifles the generation of new, truly 'original' (novel) thoughts.

Such sameness among the smaller population of the Powers That Be stifles the consideration and acceptance of such novelties if and when they emerge.
 
Well, Ermintruder wasn't the first person to ask if there are original thoughts...

I particularly liked Enola Gaia's long post of 21st Feb 2015, above.

Firstly, either we have capacity for original thought or we have somehow lost it, because every thought that has ever been had must have been original once.

However, we now have almost unlimited access to the words and thoughts of creative minds, scientists, humorists and philosophers from the last 2 or 3 millennia. This means inevitably that if someone independently has a new thought, it is likely that someone will be able to find an earlier example. The same thought can be brand new twice, but now it is much easier to spot the duplication.

Another aspect of our information-rich well-educated western world is that new ideas tend either to fit neatly into or directly oppose pre-existing ideas. There is little or no unexplored territory, and that which exists is accessibly mainly to the very specialised and highly educated mind.

The original example, "Give them an inch and they'll take a light year," was a substitution of a larger unit into a well established phrase. Enola Gaia's "...and they'll take a worm" was a nifty sidestep, and the extension to "...and they'll take a wormhole" took the idiom from meaning "a much greater distance" to "a cunning alternative route."

However, even that was not a completely novel idea. Someone somewhere must have thought of someone else, "If I allow him the smallest opportunity, he will find a clever way to beat the system." The difference is that Enola Gaia's expression of it was novel and humorous.

And here's where I think there is room for new ideas: words. Certainly in English we have words that sound the same (homophones), words that mean the same (homonyms), and words that sound or mean almost the same. The human mind can hear connections based on accidental similarities of sound or spelling, and make new and often absurd ideas which come out as puns or plays on words. Most of these are trivial and predictable, but a few are truly the human mind at its genius best. Similarly, we can perceive apparent or fanciful similarities between unrelated ideas which we can express as similes or metaphors, and in so doing, sometimes see the world in a genuinely new light.
 
Mikefule said:
This means inevitably that if someone independently has a new thought, it is likely that someone will be able to find an earlier example.
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If it is actually aired/shared online by the 'ducer...

And by way of uneasy differential diasagreement with the proposition of unoriginality:

One of my many worries as I slip closer to the exit door is that it is possible (I firmly believe) for certain thoughts / concepts / designs / inventions to exist inside of my consciousness (semi-latently) and effectively nowhere else (or, neverwhen else). It's one of the things that still drives me.

I'm not meaning fantastical insubtantiable fripperies (well, some of them, as well!!) I'm meaning certain uncompleted practical/applicable answers to certain complex and simple problems that the world may not even know it has, let-alone be aware it has defecits for.

I'm not clear when you say ....
Mikefule said:
And here's where I think there is room for new ideas: words.
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... if you mean that lexilogicalism is the only route with headroom for true originality, then I respectfully disagree (instinctually and existentially).

Our Fortean mission may, all-in-all be an abreactive ontological hunt for tails and grails, finding just in their stead tales and stales... but there's miles to go before we sleep.
 
I've thought for some time that for anything 'new' I come up, professionally or personally, it's impossible to know for sure if it's 'my idea' or 'some other stuff assimilated long ago and re-cycled'. I simply can't tell.
 
Coal said:
I've thought for some time that for anything 'new' I come up, professionally or personally, it's impossible to know for sure if it's 'my idea' or 'some other stuff assimilated long ago and re-cycled'. I simply can't tell.
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I doubt anyone could tell ... Unless one were some sort of feral genius he / she would have developed a base of knowledge and linguistically-mediated conceptualization / expression in concert with others.

In other words, everyone is to some extent 'pre-programmed', and the only concepts guaranteed to be truly original would be those obtained by somehow breaking out / breaking free from conventional wisdom, extant belief systems, etc.
 
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