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.
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.