Re: Originality an impossibility?
"Originality" is a human fabrication to seperate ourselves from others. It doesn't exist, your environment determines your actions. You have a limited number of decisions in said environment and will react to a stimulus based on habit.
Six cats are thrown in the air. They cannot choose to do anything but either drop and hurt themselves, or flip around and balance their fall. Their options are limited to a very boolean system, or in other words: a resist or a comply. They can either resist or comply. The cats, having the habit of resisting injury, will fall. You can make these situations more complex and add in more variables but they melt down to the same cognitive decisions.
It is amazingly simple to take every miniscule action and span it between the two poles 'resist' and 'comply' in response to a situation (which is imposed by environment). Simply: you can either be a person to resist something or comply with something, but either way you are constrained by the choices spanning between the two poles. No decisions can be considered original or creative. You cannot decide to be original or perform any number of actions thus making yourself original.
But, since the universe is in a void, the universe itself may be original, because it has no restraints and no outer environment to determine it's actions. The universe as a whole is original, and by extension you could make the point that flamingspinach makes (I really like that idea.) but there's nothing you can do to make any difference in your "originality". You already have it, but not in the human sense where we want to set ourselves apart from others based on the difference in our actions.
Oh-- and as for new thoughts. New thoughts are just the processing and reprocessing of thoughts about the world and reactions to the environment we see in nature. It may be possible for a thought to appear that hasn't appeared before in the history of human thought, but as information builds and builds and becomes more and more accessible, it is very unprobable that there will be someone who comes up with something that hasn't been thought up before. You could put your faith in Quantum Physics, but that isn't 'original thinking', that's just die-hard empiricism.
Maybe existentialism was the last gasp for philosophy...
"Originality" is a human fabrication to seperate ourselves from others. It doesn't exist, your environment determines your actions. You have a limited number of decisions in said environment and will react to a stimulus based on habit.
Six cats are thrown in the air. They cannot choose to do anything but either drop and hurt themselves, or flip around and balance their fall. Their options are limited to a very boolean system, or in other words: a resist or a comply. They can either resist or comply. The cats, having the habit of resisting injury, will fall. You can make these situations more complex and add in more variables but they melt down to the same cognitive decisions.
It is amazingly simple to take every miniscule action and span it between the two poles 'resist' and 'comply' in response to a situation (which is imposed by environment). Simply: you can either be a person to resist something or comply with something, but either way you are constrained by the choices spanning between the two poles. No decisions can be considered original or creative. You cannot decide to be original or perform any number of actions thus making yourself original.
But, since the universe is in a void, the universe itself may be original, because it has no restraints and no outer environment to determine it's actions. The universe as a whole is original, and by extension you could make the point that flamingspinach makes (I really like that idea.) but there's nothing you can do to make any difference in your "originality". You already have it, but not in the human sense where we want to set ourselves apart from others based on the difference in our actions.
Oh-- and as for new thoughts. New thoughts are just the processing and reprocessing of thoughts about the world and reactions to the environment we see in nature. It may be possible for a thought to appear that hasn't appeared before in the history of human thought, but as information builds and builds and becomes more and more accessible, it is very unprobable that there will be someone who comes up with something that hasn't been thought up before. You could put your faith in Quantum Physics, but that isn't 'original thinking', that's just die-hard empiricism.
Maybe existentialism was the last gasp for philosophy...
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