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, 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.
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?
psychedelic drugs
I’d just think of something positive about myself.
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.
Interesting answer. I admit I often imagine sci-fi scenarios myself without realizing how I am forming original thoughts.
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.
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.