I’ve been gone for a while; but, during my hiatus, I’ve continued to try to learn as much as I can. I’ve thought about life and death, human stroke and computer crashing, whether or not viruses were the start of multicellular life forms. I’ve come back here many times looking for new thoughts, despite many instances of the BSOD. But, other than in science outside these forums, I’ve found very little that’s new.
Are we all doomed to nothing more than putting new words on to old thoughts–saying the same old things, repeatedly, but using different words each time we iterate those thoughts? Are we regurgitators?
I don’t really mind if we are. It just makes it difficult, sometimes, to answer some topics without vomiting up the answers we’ve already given.
I’d like to set up a challenge–to come up with an entirely new thought, no matter what you’ve talked about in the past. See if you can break yourselves away from your set patterns. The thought doesn’t have to be new to the world, just new to you. I’ll say at the start that I’m not sure I can meet my own challenge, although I like to think that my thoughts constantly grow as I grow through my thoughts.
Chose your new thought and express it–then defend it as vehemently as you’ve defended your old thought. Is there anyone willing to try?
I don’t think we always are. I think we are 99% of the time. I think it’s much like what CN is always whining about–nothing new under the Sun at ILP–but he’s prone to hyperbole. To see the creativity of human thought, you have to look at it at much larger scales–how thought changes through history and across the world. Communism and Capitalism, black holes and worm holes–all these concepts were not only non-existent a thousand years ago, but probably could scarcely be conceived.
Now, my reasons for believing this are not only based on my observations of how the history of thought has changes over the millennia, but on my own theory of mind and how it works–I would call this a novel thought as I have never come across an idea close to it (Berkeley’s idealism comes closest but even that is a fair degree distant from mine). I’m not going to defend it here (although I can if we get into it), but you can visit my website by clicking the link “my thoughts” in my sig. What it would say about human thought is that, like any form of mind, it is a qualitative experience, and the nature of qualia is such that it is, in principle, unlimited in its flow. This means that absolutely any quality of experience is possible–even ones we cannot imagine–and therefore I do not think that human thought is limited to the same old regurgitated tripe (although it tends to stay within certain predefined limits 99% of the time, but this is why I say in principle it is limitless).
If you want an idea what the potential for novel human thought is, consider its neural signature. Our abstract thoughts are, for the most part, confined to the prefrontal cortex. This is a massive jumble of interconnected neurons. A single thought corresponds to a certain pattern of neural firing within this network. Given that there are literally billions of neurons in this brain region alone, and given that each neuron can have upwards of a thousand connections to other neurons, the number of combinations of interconnections, and hence the patterns of neural firing, are staggering. It’s true that for the most part, only a certain range of patterns will be seen to go on in a given brain of an individual from a given community (with its own beliefs, values, scripts, memories, customs, etc.), but the range of possible patterns is in principle almost countless.
How about TV and radio waves adjust our minds and animal minds? Its not just the sounds but, the electric energy that causes difference. What would happen to minds if all radio and TV waves worldwide ceased for say half a year? This would allow time for energy waves to change and cease. Would their be a noticeable difference in health and behaviors of creatures? I would say yes and if there was a greater time of no waves it would cause a significant change to all or most if the waves were turned back on. Sanity and physical health would be affected.
How bout there’s trillions of entities that move faster than we and our most sophisticated scientific implements can detect. They’re bumping into us all the time, but we don’t feel it, because we react a trillion times slower than them, and they’re bumping into us every which way, so the bumps cancel one another out. Perhaps these bumps have a cumulative effect, but it’s so subtle, it effects us gradually, incrementally, over the course of many, many years, and perhaps some diseases can be attributed to asymmetrical/excessive bumps from these entities. Yes, they’re moving so fast, one of them could stop right in front of you, take a nap, get up and go in less than a trillionth of a nanosecond. We should construct new scientific instruments to see if these entities are out there. Perhaps we could use them to our advantage, find a way to slow them down or speed us up, or harness their energy somehow. Maybe we could construct a video camera capable of filming a trillion frames per nanosecond in order to catch a glimpse of one or two of these entities, or maybe the frames could be combined into a single frame.
Like the myriad combinations of the 7 basic colors that can create various pastels, we take what is given and through permutation and modification come up with what we claim as our own thoughts. It’s not that we come up with something totally novel as if from nothing, that is something fresh having never been encountered before. The brain is singularly incapable of creating that way. What we were given was in Nature long ago then through man’s schemes we’ve added to the knowledge over the ages.
So you search within the knowledge you have and find what you already know. Nothing more is there. If you’re clever enough, you ‘create’ something new from applying alterations to what is there already. And much of what you know is what you have been given.
Exactly. The creation of concepts is also their complication: the term here most appropriate is bricolage. Thinking is the activity of bricolage; the thinker is the bricoleur par excellence. One never starts from nothing, but assembles different elements of a conceptual plane, inflecting it in a unique way and pushing it forward in a way emblematic of one’s own style of thought. Thinking is filmic, in this respect: think of the cinematic auteur that takes from a slew of traditions, cutting and pasting (pace Burroughs) in order to bring into being a new genre of his own. Why expect anything more radical from thought itself?
This doesn’t mean that thought cannot think the new; on the contrary, this is the very condition for the possibility of the new, the very recipe for its creation. If you see in this mere repetition clothed in different linguisitic costumes, it isn’t because you ask too much of thought, but, on the contrary, because you misunderstand its mechanism from the beginning.
