Asklemmy

42489 readers

2475 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Can you name any objectively unique human creations or thoughts that were not derived/inspired from another source? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This is intended as a very abstract philosophical question.

Like Einstein with relativity was inspired by a man falling from a roof and a moving train. Most creative ideas seem to boil down to a person moving ideas across domains. Do you think this is always true even if the person is unwilling to admit the root thoughts, or perhaps they are completely unaware of the connections they subconsciously made? Is there truly a provably unique thought or is everything a product of experience?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Everything has to come from experience I think, but it doesn't always feel like that. I know some songwriters say it's like a fountain they cannot turn off, coming from somewhere else. Often when I have a problem I am stuck on, letting it go and sleeping works, I can wake up knowing things I didn't know when I fell asleep.

Things coming from experience doesn't rule out original, unique or novel ideas at all, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I can't really say either way. Like the enormity of human knowledge intuitively implies a likely probability of unique thought, but I struggle to name an example.

I have been wondering if my missing intuitive connection here is the scope of human experience.

I think sociologists call it tribal epistemology, which posits that humans primarily rely on their immediate social groups for information and understanding, often finding it difficult to grasp perspectives beyond these. I get the impression the scope of human knowledge and creativity may be directly caused by the true scale of human experience that we struggle to comprehend.