I haven’t celebrated xmas for several years now and it’s seriously been so liberating.

Sorry, didn’t mean it as a criticism… it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and still can’t come up with a 100% original thought of my own.

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.

Just thinking about comics is already unoriginal, something originally created by someone else and that many people have thought about probably countless times by now.

Forrest Trump.

Lol, you win.

In all seriousness, he strikes me as someone who’s compelled to act out something from his past, maybe even his childhood… if true, that’s very scary given the immense power he has today, that he simply can’t be reasoned with like with a healthy-minded person.

ETA Even scarier, the same appears to also be true of Trump, and the two of them have now paired up together.

I’m not sure, but I think maybe it goes beyond that, that maybe we wouldn’t have the words in any language to be able to express it. I knew a man once who passed out, went into convulsions and almost died… we had to call an ambulance and he was taken to the hospital. He later said that when he was passed out, he saw something he had no words to describe… years later, he showed me a magazine article about a man who’d had the same experience (of having no words) and said, “This is what it’s like”. Even then, years later, he still couldn’t tell anyone what he’d seen. So maybe that’s the best we could come up with, someone saying they’ve had a thought with no words to explain it? I’ve never had a 100% original thought, so I’m just guessing.

An original thought doesn’t have to be the discovery of something.

Now you’re breaking off into something else that fascinates me… symbolism as a highly efficient method of communication. If you test yourself, you’ll find it takes less time for your brain to process symbols than spoken words… and there’s a very short amount of time in there where your brain understands what it’s looking at without the need of any other language other than symbolism.

Lol, ok, forget I was here.

I’ve had a hard enough time trying to think an original thought without redefining what a thought even is, so its dictionary definition is fine for this purpose.

I can’t fathom how we wouldn’t be aware if some thought suddenly occurred to us that was entirely foreign to everything familiar to us in this world.

Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean that it would be easier to quantity if in the form of a statement or opinion… original is original.

Oops, I thought you were serious, sorry :)

No worries… I get a few flashes of almost genius, interspersed with many of remarkable stupidity… at least you only need to wake up (or get some sleep).

I keep going back to the fact that every thought had to have been thought a first time by someone, so that it has to be possible to have an original thought. Could it be then that maybe we’ve just finally run out of humanly conceivable ideas?

The first to explore the thought was Plato, approx 2500 years ago. Try again :)

100% original… oceans and oranges aren’t original.

Wouldn’t matter if someone else had the same thought, as long as you thought it entirely on your own.

I’d say it’s because we’re ridiculously spoiled (Canadian here).

Just let it happen naturally, as you’re getting to know each other. If you’re truly the sane one, they’ll eventually see that you’re sane and explaining your family history won’t be as daunting anymore.

Very interesting, I can see how that could become like a thorn in the brain. But I can also imagine how an original thought might require an unusual and/or surprising set of circumstances that might cause you to forget Tim Allen’s theory just long enough for the thought to occur to you independently… like one of those aha or eureka moments. Also, I’m not sure about the connection you make here to a deity… there are plenty of things firmly planted in our memories, doesn’t mean everyone and everything that planted them are gods.

I’m not sure about the relationship between thought and the materials around us, but I do know that every single thought had to have been thought a first time by someone.