Originality: Is it still possible?
Killgrimage
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This has been bugging me for a while now. Recently, I found out the number of people who have lived the earth since humans began recording such things. The Public Reference Bureau reports the number is around 106,456,367,669. Cool, that's a big number and it sounds reasonable but then...
I started thinking about all the people on the earth who had ever lived, and all their thoughts by extension their words and actions, and began wondering if there was anything that I had ever thought or done that I could say no one had thought or done before me. I mean, statistically it's a very low probability that anything, even stuff in my head, hasn't been done before. Really, anything.
Now before you say "Killgrimage, what about all the people out there inventing new stuff and creating new technologies for everyone? Aren't they being original?" Well, not really, because I can't count the number of times I've seen a new, hit thing on TV and said "Hey! I thought of that years ago!" But not a high percentage of people act on stuff they think up because that's a shit-ton of work. (The Dyson guy? That vacuum cleaner took ten years to develop! No wonder they cost so much...)
Anyway, what do you think? The idea of not having an original thought in my head is kind of depressing because I'm already blonde
I started thinking about all the people on the earth who had ever lived, and all their thoughts by extension their words and actions, and began wondering if there was anything that I had ever thought or done that I could say no one had thought or done before me. I mean, statistically it's a very low probability that anything, even stuff in my head, hasn't been done before. Really, anything.
Now before you say "Killgrimage, what about all the people out there inventing new stuff and creating new technologies for everyone? Aren't they being original?" Well, not really, because I can't count the number of times I've seen a new, hit thing on TV and said "Hey! I thought of that years ago!" But not a high percentage of people act on stuff they think up because that's a shit-ton of work. (The Dyson guy? That vacuum cleaner took ten years to develop! No wonder they cost so much...)
Anyway, what do you think? The idea of not having an original thought in my head is kind of depressing because I'm already blonde
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But that's ok, because being the original doesn't necessarily mean being the best, or even awesome.
most of what you think has been thought before... but your thoughts are made from your experiences and it is rare that any single person goes through life without original thought. even if that thought is "why don't they make garbage compactors with lasers?" no one has ever thought of that because 90% of the people that have lived have no concept of lasers or garbage compactors.
sure, you repeat the 'universal' themes like "why am i here".... but original thought is easy... even if its "how can i move the TV to avoid the reflection off the mirror that comes from the light outside"
most likely, no one else has considered that particular problem.
While I'm not at all unhappy with my life or the way it's going, I do feel that it makes me less of an individual if I can't do something different.
Umm... a lot of my ideas are based on observing hallucinations. Some of them could be original.
And if your whole life is a hallucination?
Pssh. Hallucinations are, if anything, more stereotyped than day-to-day observances.
Edit: And jesus christ, of course it is. It's impossible not to be. Now, if your definition of "original" is "something that is truly divorced from all other occurrences in every way shape and form" then no, it never was.
Given that knowledge is always expanding, there's always going to be new frontiers of originality.
this question however, has been asked before.
unlikely.
I don't think I entirely agree, and the reason is that I don't believe people today are any smarter or more clever than they were thousands of years ago. With that in mind, someone back then, with no education, probably thought of some stuff similar to what we have new, like the internet, but they didn't have the means or technology to go about making it. You're right about building on others ideas, or rather, building on others technologies to create even more advancements, but that doesn't mean the newest thing hasn't been thought of before by someone else, possibly very long ago.
Do both!
It pretty much is. What we 'see' really doesn't have a damn thing to do with what all the little electrons and quarks and shit are doing. We see an image out brain makes up. We actually think we can see the colour yellow, it's fucking ridiculous. We think crap moves around on a tv screen.
It doesn't really change anything. I've had experiences others haven't. To some degree I've had thoughts others have not.
Why in the hell would someone from 500 BC say "hm, what if we had a network of machines that could talk to each other...", the concepts upon which were constructed the concepts that led to the concept of the internet weren't even in the planning stages. Your context is not their context. Intellect never enters into it.
Originality is as hard to escape as derivation.
You never do anything perfect on your first try.
You're right, someone from 500 BC wouldn't have thought about it in those terms. But they probably were thinking "Hey, I need to talk to my buddy who is a village away, how can I do that without actually walking over there?" Thus things like pigeons would be used to send quick text messages like "C U @ teh sacrifice" or something. It's not the internet, but I bet you people back then were wishing they could talk or convey data quickly to each other, which is essentially what the internet is.
I guess if you're working with a narrow definition of first try... And you smuggled "perfect" into your lexicon. That wasn't there the first time around.
For example, I've done some awesome shit with LEGO stuff, and my first tries weren't complete until I was satisfied with the result.
The 9/11 Hijackers also did something new, and they did it exceptionally well. You could define the entire series of attacks as one try, or you could say that the second plane to hit the WTC was totally derivative.
well... are we talking about original thought or original concept? because yes the concept of "hey i want to move something so that i can see it better" has been thought before whereas the "i want to move my computer monitor so that i can avoide the glare from my big screen tv and strobe light" might not have been.
They're pretty intimately connected, I think.
What do you mean by done well if not approaching perfection? And the only way to do that is through trial and error eventually telling you what the hell was wrong with your 'original' idea. At which point it is no longer original.
It was hardly a new idea when they came up with it.
No. No it is not. If that's the case than every method of communication developed in the history of the universe is basically the internet.
Broadening terms to absurdity doesn't prove the point. A is different from AB, even though they share many features in common.
But the objective does not matter here. If you're the only person who thinks the way you do in your town, or state, or country, then yeah, you'd count as pretty fucking original. There's no way that you're the only person who thinks the way you do in the world, but that doesn't matter in the least.
To be one in a million means that there are 6,700 people just like you somewhere in the world.
To be one in a million in a city of 2 million means there is 1 person just like you somewhere in that city.
Approaching perfection and perfection are not the same thing. I can do something well without doing something perfectly. My first attempt may very well be passable. You also seem to be assuming that an original idea necessarily had something wrong with it. That doesn't strike me as so.
Using a plane to attack a target was done by Kamikaze pilots in WWII, hijacking airliners is old hat, and the Empire State Building ("a building in New York") has been hit (though unintentionally) by a plane in the past. For that matter, the WTC has been attacked before. Heck, the broad idea was even spouted by... Tom Clancy, I think? But using hijacked civilian airliners to Kamikaze-style attack the WTC? Never been done before.
But it is. I can't think of a single thing that has never been improved or refined, and the very process of refinement strips away at the 'originality' of an idea.
And all of this is tangential to my primary point, which is simply that there is no real reasoning behind fetishizing originality.
You could argue that artistic productions rarely get refined. Hell, remakes usually suck. Products though, yeah. I'm having a hard time imagining... hmm. Foods? I mean, they get refined, but it's literally a matter of taste.
so 1 in 17x10^33 vs 1x10^11
I would imagine, on one side of the spectrum, you can have a more stringent and wide? (can't think of a better word) view. Communications is always communication. The idea of a network of horseback couriers and the idea of a network of machines are identical in that they are mechanisms to transmit/share information. The details does not matter.
If humanity had this view of originality, it would be impossible to have an original thought. For example, even before spaceflight was conceived, a caveman would have perhaps eaten some bad mushrooms and dreamt that he was walking on the moon. After returning to consciousness, the idea of traveling to the moon came to be. Even if the prospect of traveling to the moon involves riding a magical water dragon, the idea has already been hatched, and no musings thereafter are original. No original idea could ever not be conceived because between the wild ideas and crazed hallucinations of the 100's of billions of people, there will be very little left out. Even revolutionary ideas such as Hugh Everett's multi-world interpretation could have been thought up by a stoned beggar.
On the other side, you can have a very loose? view. Every object is made up of different atoms. On top of that, every object exist in different space and time. Everything is different. If you see the world like this, every act and idea is different because they are carried out and hatched by different entities.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that the question is not whether originality exists, but what your concept of originality is. Where do you draw your spot in this 'spectrum'...?
Has anyone quoted Dali in saying that "Good artists copy. Great artists steal.", yet?
He stole that from T. S. Eliot.
Yes. You probably have.