Original Thought
Awhile back during a conversation on memes [units of information transmitted between two or more people, often used to describe how fads such as Pogs emerge] a biologist friend of mine postulated the notion that there may be no such thing as original thought. The premise is that all original ideas come about as a merging or mutation of memes already present. Prior to this, I had been attempting to define intelligence as the ability to receive, create and transmit memes. That the more memes that could be accessed at one time the greater the potential for creating them. Transmitting them would rely on the ability to share the idea, we may have ideas all the time, but being incapable of putting them into speech,music or art (of some form) we would be unable to even remember them consciously. The idea of there being no original thought has plagued my waking mind for some time. We couldn’t create an idea, we can only put ones that already exist into different forms until one that can be expressed (survives) emerges.
The term meme is a play on letters based on the word gene. They are often spoken of similar to genetics though for some reason they are no longer treated as a serious subject matter, probably because it is too far encompassing of a term to be useful in most psychological matters.
Recognizing the possibility of no original thought, has given me a reaffirmed concept of how society evolves. One of the main focuses of my attention has been on the idea of social prompting. Social prompting, as I define it, is the information that must already be present in society inorder for a new idea to emerge. An example I often use is that it would have been impossible for someone to develop nuclear science in 1000 B.C., or even 1000 A.D. It applies both to technology and social idealogies.
Perhaps the strongest realization of lack of original thought, is that any truly original thought could not be consciously acknowledged. We define what we see around us based on schemas [how we store categorize information in our mind, word association]. Imagine if you saw something, completely unexplainable in your daily life. Not an animal, not a ghost, but something so totally alien to our comprehension that you could not begin to describe it. How could you remember it? You couldn’t say, oh that’s a blank. You couldn’t think, the blank reminds me of something. It would be so far outside of your grasp of reality that it should in effect be invisible. A more down to earth example would be someone who not knowing how a computer works, would have a more difficult time drawing a picture of a circuit board-if shown the circuit board briefly, than someone who is familiar with the components. We have a need to name things, even if the name is inappropriate, and that naming is based on previous knowledge and experience. So a totally foreign idea or event in life, would be so indescribable that even if it reoccured frequently, we should have no recollection that it ever transpired. The same would hold true with thinking, if we had a moment of extreme clarity or insight, without any basis in the collective social consciousness as told by Carl Jung, it should slip out of our minds completely.
The difficulty may simply be in semantics. Perhaps simply juggling around ideas that already exist is close enough to original thought, in which case simple Artificial Intelligence systems may not be so far from our own. It requires outside input and training in order to accomplish a task. It could most likely not act without some external demand upon it. But can we?
