I see you’ve clicked on my post. Feel at home, I guess.
Waking up at 3 am, random thoughts come at my head. Here in The Cod Pond, we will ponder about interesting things and stuff.
Listen to calm beats while reading. Here’s one for you.
Whenever I come up with an idea, like for a project or something, I start to speculate more about it, and my mind drifts to existential things. These thoughts had always been stuck to my head since I was a high school student, and it continues to stay so. There are about 7.73 billion people on Earth today, according to Worldometers , each with unique and wonderful minds. That number doesn’t even include the many generations of people born before. These billions of minds think everyday, observant of the things that happen around them and creating ideas of what they think of the world, too.
In history, great minds like Aristotle, Confucius, Einstein, and many more introduced ideas that were revolutionary and changed our perspective of the world. Their ideas may be influenced by factors in their lives, their observations and experiences, that resulted in them gaining the idea, like how Newton discovered the existence of gravity because of his observation of the apple that fell from the tree. Sometimes, I begin to ponder. Since all of us think and generate many ideas in our life, maybe every idea that we will ever think have already been thought by another person first.
Could this mean that we could not say that the ideas of the famous philosophers, of people, and yourself, are truly original? I mean, the possibilities are endless. They might be exposed to the same factors that led you to your idea, thus also thinking the same idea that you had.
As I’ve done my research on the subject, I’ve found some websites that enlightened me on the idea of “originality”. There, it said,
Twain wrote that, ‘The kernel, the soul, let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism.” Twain believed that there was no such thing an original thought or an original idea, because every subject on Earth had been pored over, written about and analyzed.
Does that mean that originality itself is a myth, and that no creative idea exists independent of another idea? The answer is yes and no. Yes, there are original ways to express thoughts, ideas, concepts and philosophies, but no, the actual subject upon which these thought, ideas, concepts and philosophies are based on, are not original.
It further supported my previous claim, that since everything has already been thought of, there are no original ideas anymore.
In a June 2012 article in The Guardian, once-celebrated German author Helene Hegemann, who published her debut novel at 17 to rapturous reviews, but was later outed for having lifted some sentences from another book, said pointedly:
There’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity.
I had to include this here because it really solidified the statements beforehand and introduced us to authenticity. You can read more here, they elaborate more on the topic.
Could this also mean that time is already predetermined, only designed to go on one path, even with different variables? Maybe, in other realities, if Einstein never existed, or went to another path in life, could another person have come up with his General Theory of Relativity? Will there be revisions on the other person’s version? If the first person who would’ve discovered fire failed, could another prehistoric man had done it?
Is this how the laws surrounding the universe correct itself? When a part goes missing, will it find another and continue its purpose? Will it only follow a singular, yet diverse path, full of many variables yet only resulting on one outcome?
Stay tuned for more pondering in The Cod Pond.
Cod in the Drain 