ignirtoq

Ah, I think I misread your statement of “followers by nature” as “followers of nature.” I’m not really willing to ascribe personality traits like “follower” or “leader” or “independent” or “critical thinker” to humanity as a whole based on the discussion I’ve laid out here. Again, the possibility space of cognition is bounded, but unimaginatively large. What we can think may be limited to a reflection of nature, but the possible permutations that can be made of that reflection are more than we could explore in the lifetime of the universe. I wouldn’t really use this as justification for or against any particular moral framework.

I think that’s overly reductionist, but ultimately yes. The human brain is amazingly complex, and evolution isn’t directed but keeps going with whatever works well enough, so there’s going to be incredible breadth in human experience and cognition across everyone in the world and throughout history. You’ll never get two people thinking exactly the same way because of the shear size of that possibility space, despite there having been over 100 billion people to have lived in history and today.

That being said, “what works” does set constraints on what is possible with the brain, and evolution went with the brain because it solves a bunch of practical problems that enhanced the survivability of the creatures that possessed it. So there are bounds to cognition, and there are common patterns and structures that shape cognition because of the aforementioned problems they solved.

Thoughts that initially reflect reality but that can be expanded in unrealistic ways to explore the space of possibilities that an individual can effect in the world around them has clear survival benefits. Thoughts that spring from nothing and that relate in no way to anything real strike me as not useful at best and at worst disruptive to what the brain is otherwise doing. Thinking in that perspective more, given the powerful levels of pattern recognition in the brain, I wonder if creation of “100% original thoughts” would result in something like schizophrenia, where the brain’s pattern recognition systems are reinterpreting (and misinterpreting) internal signals as sensory signals of external stimuli.

The problem with that reasoning is it’s assuming a clear boundary to what a “thought” is. Just like there wasn’t a “first” human (because genetics are constantly changing), there wasn’t a “first” thought.

Ancient animals had nervous systems that could not come close to producing anything we would consider a thought, and through gradual, incremental changes we get to humanity, which is capable of thought. Where do you draw the line? Any specific moment in that evolution would be arbitrary, so we have to accept a continuum of neurological phenomena that span from “not thoughts” to “thoughts.” And again we get back to thoughts being reflections of a shared environment, so they build on a shared context, and none are original.

If you do want to draw an arbitrary line at what a thought is, then that first thought was an evolution of non-/proto-thought neurological phenomena, and itself wasn’t 100% “original” under the definition you’re using here.

From your responses to others’ comments, you’re looking for a “thought” that has absolutely zero relationship with any existing concepts or ideas. If there is overlap with anything that anyone has ever written about or expressed in any way before, then it’s not “100% original,” and so either it’s impossible or it’s useless.

I would argue it’s impossible because the very way human cognition is structured is based on prediction, pattern recognition, and error correction. The various layers of processing in the brain are built around modeling the world around us in a way to generate a prediction, and then higher layers compare the predictions with the actual sensory input to identify mismatches, and then the layers above that reconcile the mismatches and adjust the prediction layers. That’s a long winded way to say our thoughts are inspired by the world around us, and so are a reflection of the world around us. We all share our part of this world with at least one other person, so we’re all going to share commonalities in our thoughts with others.

But for the sake of argument, assume that’s all wrong, and someone out there does have a truly original, 100% no overlap with anything that has come before, thought. How could they possibly express that thought to someone else? Communication between people relies on some kind of shared context, but any shared context for this thought means it’s dependent on another idea, or “prior art,” so it couldn’t be 100% original. If you can’t share the thought with anyone, nor express it in any way to record it (because that again is communication), it dies with you. And you can’t even prove it without communicating, so how would someone with such an original thought convince you they’ve had it?

Math, physics, and to a lesser extent, software engineering.

I got degrees in math and physics in college. I love talking about counterintuitive concepts in math and things that are just way outside everyday life, like transfinite numbers and very large dimensional vector spaces.

My favorite parts of physics to talk about are general relativity and the weirder parts of quantum mechanics.

My day job is software engineering, so I can also help people get started learning to program, and then the next level of building a solid, maintainable software project. It’s more “productive” in the traditional sense, so it’s satisfying to help people be more productive, but when it’s just free time to shoot the shit, talking about math and science are way more fun.