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.
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.
Pick randomly from a long list of nouns then
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.
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.
Interesting answer. I admit I often imagine sci-fi scenarios myself without realizing how I am forming original thoughts.
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.
Probably mushrooms
Depends on how unique the thought needs to be. You could simply count up from 0 and eventually you’d encounter a number you’d never thought of before, like 145,398, which I’m pretty sure is a number I’ve never thought about. You could do this forever and still be having technically unique thoughts.
The problem, I think, is that all thoughts seem to be a product of previous thoughts. Totally new thoughts are driven by external stimuli. We can, however, mutate an existing thought into a new one. I think this would be my process, take a common thought and change one aspect of it at a time until it’s unrecognizable.
The problem, I think, is that all thoughts seem to be a product of previous thoughts. Totally new thoughts are driven by external stimuli. We can, however, mutate an existing thought into a new one.
This is an amazing interpretation of what I had in mind. Obviously you cannot easily think of something that would not exist in this universe, however you could create combinations or alterations of existing objects to form a particular scenario that you would not get to experience in real life, similar to how much scenarios are created in our dreams.
That’s my interpretation of the creative process behind fiction and invention also. You take a familiar concept in your mind and mutate it with the goal of either making something more efficient or effective (invention) or of creating engaging narrative (fiction).
I guess if getting new data is not allowed, then interpolation or extrapolation would be the next best option. Interpolation would be connecting existing thoughts to form or find new ones in between. Extrapolation would be following a train of thought to its ultimate end. This could be done in either the diffused or focused mental states. I like to draw up diagrams for this so I can see the blank spots to fill or direction things seem to be going.
There is also the semantics of the question. It’s actually quite an ancient topic, where our thoughts come from. What does “original” mean? The thought originating in our mind, or from some higher realm? I won’t go too deep into this, just bringing it up to think about it. The only thing I wanted to say is that maybe our mind is not entirely free and agentive, but actually there is a “darkness that comes before” to reference The Second Apocalypse which we can’t conquer, but are conquered by.
On a lighter note, and from my own experience, it is definitely possible to generate new thoughts outside of that diffuse cloud of repeated thoughts formed on the storehouse of experience accumulated so far in our lives. Following practices of mindfulness, we can learn to recognize the noise of our mind and separate those “thoughts” from what we might call more agentive thoughts that we can control over, wherever they come from. I do meditations in these styles and achieve a mental state beyond the diffuse and focused, kind of inverse to dreaming (cf. turiya for this kind of formulation of a fourth state of mind). In this state, you can come to understand things which you could probably never do in the other mental states. Those thoughts feel “cleaner” as if coming from a true origin rather than bounced around a cloud of repeated thoughts like you mention.
But I feel like maybe these thoughts are not exactly the ones you are looking for. They are removed from our everyday sense of living, and not really invested in disciplines we have come up with socially as humans. It would be like asking if a caveman 500,000 years ago would have come up with the solution to how to fix a bug in the code I just wrote. It would have been an original thought for him sure, but kind of besides the point.
Edit: as an example for the interpolation/extrapolation, consider sentences like “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” or actual usages of this sort of thing in literature:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirātārjunīya#Linguistic_ingenuity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
The interesting part is that constrained thinking is what produces this
It is fascinating to see how deep you went into explaining the philosophy behind having an ‘original thought’.
It would be like asking if a caveman 500,000 years ago would have come up with the solution to how to fix a bug in the code I just wrote.
This line was the perfect analogy to make me realise how I had overlooked this aspect of my question: the limit to what you would consider a unique thought. Its definition is as vague as defining what is right or wrong.
I am genuinely grateful for you having took your time to write such an elaborate response to my post. You answered the question in the exact manner I was looking for and also included some of your personal thoughts that made me perceive my own question at an angle even I could not think of before. I almost feel like this post isn’t worthy of such a high quality comment. Hope your day goes great the same way you made mine.
psychedelic drugs
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.
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
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.
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?
I think that is a linguistic question ultimately. You could take potentially utter a new sentence never before uttered even with the top 10 most used words in a language.
That is one of the most significant things about the human being. Actually I am quite surprised when people come with definitions for human nature eg. fundamentally good, fundamentally evil, homo sapiens, homo faber, etc. that the linguistic potential to turn a small set of things into infinity is often ignored. No other animal can think and speak like we do.
Not necessarily, note that I wrote, “expressed in existing ways” and not, “spoken/written in existing ways”. Expression itself has a greater breadth than language alone, e.g. movement, drawing/painting, instrumental music arrangements, etc.
It includes language, absolutely, but it is not limited to language, which makes for a more challenging question imo. If not expressed in existing ways, it would meet the criteria of entirely new and unthought of, presumably, but it would also likely fail to be recognized as an expression at all.
Fair point but I think then it just expands the consideration from linguistic (which is already more than spoken or written, it also covers signed, whistled, drummed, danced, in one case I heard about – eye movement) to semiotic.
What I meant was to not rely on objects or scenes near where you are positioned in order to think of something new.
I’d just think of something positive about myself.
do something I haven’t done before and that would promt a reaction I haven’t had before
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.
