Original Idea...?

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Is there such a thing...?

I have read so many thoughts, comments and opinions about many different subjects on this forum. admittingly, I have not been one to participate.
However, I read about all of these ideas, but how much can personally be claimed or owned?

Most often, as in my own case, people form opinions about "informed facts" from different sources and interpret them any way we please. It is a matter of what fits the direction or conscious state that you have chosen, and not what is absolute.

I have observed that many people here take credit for "ideas" or even coined phrases that are no more than direct quotes, or regurgitated interpretations of other's stolen words.

Does that constitute an original idea?
Does it go back to the hypothesis that we are all subject to our environments? That we salivate at the dinner bell in some primordial behavior?
Is it possible to contend that those we quote, even the originators of free thought were merely byproducts of hanging around Grampa' as he hoed the garden...?

Is there such a thing as an Original thought, or idea?
Is everything just borrowed and blue...even our time...?

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Moresure:

This links to my conversation of intellectual property above (or perhaps below by now). I don't think original ideas are possible.

We did not invent the unicorn - we rearranged the horn and the horse mentally. We did not invent the dragon - we just make a lizard bigger and made it breathe fire.

I think our thoughts can only seek to correspond accurately with reality. Imagination at times just rearranges it.

TTF

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Re: Original Idea...?
moresure

I believe in the existence of original thought or idea. The fact that I said that is already an original thought. To me, not the others.
What I mean is this: when I say, "true is an adequation between a statement and a fact - even a fact of language - I am not saying anything new. Others have said that, like Aristotle. But saying that I made it my thought, I assumed what I said, and that becomes a part of what I am. Any individual is unique, cannot be duplicated - well, there is the Dolly mistery. Smile

This because anything you say or think is part of your identity, of what you are. Like Borges said: any man recreates in himself the humankind.

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Even an interperetation of an older idea is considered original thought, generally, in the eyes of intellectual property law. However, blatant rip-offs are not protected, if someone decides to sue. This is how original thought works in the real world. As for the intellectual world, I do not believe in original thought, just continuous building on a foundation common to all human beings.

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It seems Cav that you are talking about law - which has yet to be decided accuratly approximated reality in this case.

In other words, just because we decided you can sue someone over 'intelectual property' and defined it - does not mean it actually exists.

TTF

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I think we merely organize thoughts. The thoughts, or information we use, and the patterns with which we form them are learned, not created. Reproduced, recycled, and repackaged.

However, we may become very adept at that prganization, and creative in what thoughts we decide to throw together, and in what scheme.

I think up a lot of fictional stories, and the more I imagine, the more I realize I make no new paper. Just new recylced paper.

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SCoates
The information you receive becomes your idea. A new idea. If you read for the first time "Moby Dick", you create an experience that is unique. Your experience.
And that experience has nothing to do with mine or even with Melville.

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Your "experience" in reading Moby Dick is made entirely from recycled material.

Let's take an example. You name an experience a thought, or anything that you feel is entirely or even partly original, and I will tell you why it is not. Smile

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SCoates

They are original to me. Not to you or anyone else. An experience, a thought or anything I feel are part of what I am, my identity. My pain is something that you can never understand. But if I say "I have a pain" you understand the conceptual meaning, and there I agree, there is no possible originality. The difference is that when I say "I have a pain" I'm refering to something that occurs within my inner experience and you are understanding an abstract concept.
In fact, that is the reason because "Val" is not the same entity as "SCoates".

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I think I have to agree with val here. On several occations I have come across material in books of all kinds that were almost identical to my own thoughts, even when I had no knowledge whatsoever about the existence of these books when I had these thoughts. Reading them in the book afterwards didn't make them less original to me. It simply confirmed my belief that I am able to have original ideas. What I mean is this: I could have read the book, and then thought about the idea and finally adopted it as my personal meaning if I was inclined to agree. Instead I had accuired the knowledge on my own, from the same source as the author of the book, and so it was my original thought. After all, we must consider the meaning of the word original. It is no doubt assosiated with the word origin- the starting point. From the heart of the tree the branches reach over the ground. No two branches are alike, yet they originate the same place.

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Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
-Fran Lebowitz

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
-Dean Inge

Nothing is new except arrangement.
-William J. Durant

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
- Josh Billings

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.
- Abraham Lincoln

I invent nothing. I rediscover.
-Auguste Rodin

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Saying nothing is original is rather harsh isn't it? With that attitude you can never discover anything you do not already know. If you come across something new you will just mistake it for something you know. Learning becomes a process of confirming self-righteous beliefs, and we never grow out of our human adolecense.

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Cyracuz wrote:

Saying nothing is original is rather harsh isn't it? With that attitude you can never discover anything you do not already know. If you come across something new you will just mistake it for something you know. Learning becomes a process of confirming self-righteous beliefs, and we never grow out of our human adolecense.

It doesn't mean that at all... learning and being original are two seperate ideas. I once learned that 2 + 2 = 4 but I wasn't the first one to think that.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Sir Isaac Newton

He may have figured out a lot but it was because the people before him had ideas first... he learned from their ideas. But you can not say his idea was original becasue he used those ideas to formulate his own. He wasn't even the first to think of a heliocentic universe... he just happened to get it right.

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The thought may not be new, but the thinker is. Does that make it original?

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I would have to say... if I lived in an alternate universe where I was the only living thing with absolutely no outside influences what so ever... then yes it would be original.

But there are so many influences in our lives it is impossible for it to be an original idea. We don't suddenly wake up one day and say "Oh my goodness, 2 + 2 = 4." We learn that two plus two equals four. Someone tells us. If we were to claim that as an original idea it would be plagarism.

Original Idea...?

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