If you were asked to think of something you never thought of before, what would be the most reliable way to do it?
If you were asked to think of something you never thought of before, what would be the most reliable way to do it?
When I read about how most of our thoughts are repetitive, I wondered if it would be possible for us to have a thought that is completely new or original by will. Is there some way we can have unique thoughts whenever we wish to?
Please note that this question does not focus on our brain's mental capacity or free will to be able to think of something original. You could think of it something like asking you to paint something original; I am not asking if you are even able to paint in the first place, but instead how you would paint it if you could.
Also you should ideally be able to think of something new completely by your own in your consciously aware and normal self, without relying on external factors like taking inspiration from your surroundings or words from a recent/ongoing conversations, looking at the content open in your device, using any drugs or consumables, being affected by strong emotions etc.
Edit: Elaboration in last paragraph
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I think the best way to think of something new (to you, something new to all of humanity is harder of course) would be to pick some aspect of society, your daily life, a technology or social norm you are familiar with,... and analyse which underlying assumptions make it the way it is and then just figure out what would happen if that assumption didn't hold. That is basically what a lot of classic science fiction writers (among others) did. Take e.g. Asimov's Nightfall, a story about a world with (IIRC) 6 suns where it is only night once every 2000 years so people are not accustomed to darkness at all. Or Terry Bisson's They're Made Out of Meat where he questions our implicit assumption that aliens would be meat creatures like us.
The astrophysics nerd in me wonders if anyone has tried to model that six star system, is there actually a stable configuration for that?
Is it really dumb to think it would work like carbon?
It's rather pleasant to consider the way atomic structures and astronomical structures mirror each other.
Unfortunately, no, geocentrism probably still wouldn't hold in that world. There would probably be one main star the others vaguely orbit. In reality probably the stars wouldn't tolerate each other and play nice; they'd subsume one another until there was only one winner.
As in six equally sized stars all in the same orbit equidistant from each other, like a hexagon? That seems incredibly unlikely. How would that form? Even if the primordial disc of gas and dust somehow coalesces into six even clumps, any outside perturbation (e.g. from forming planets or neighboring star systems) would nudge those clumps out of balance and eventually cause some of them to crash into one another.
For a more likely arrangement, think about our closest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system. Binary sun-like stars (A & B) dance in a somewhat eccentric orbit, one a bit larger and brighter and the other a bit smaller and dimmer. Then over 10,000 times further out, a faint red dwarf (C, aka Proxima Centauri) circles them both!
Binary stars are very common, supposedly moreso than even lone stars. If you want to imagine a six-member system, starting building it up like Alpha Centauri but with more pairs. Put a very large pair at the center, a midsize pair circling both, then small stars (perhaps independently captured) on the far outskirts. Something like that would at least be a more reasonable starting point.
But your initial thought isn't exactly stupid though; the universe is absurdly huge (far more stars than grains of sand on Earth) so probability is such that even rare or seemingly impossible things are bound to happen somewhere.
Interesting answer. I admit I often imagine sci-fi scenarios myself without realizing how I am forming original thoughts.