Can we imagine something new which is completely different ?

A

art_dex

Registered Member
Hi ,
let me explain my question a little bit: -

So my question is
"Can we imagine something new which is completely different from our
previous knowledge ?"

here "Something" means any kind of substance or material which you have
never seen or heard before. for simplification i could say
"Can you imagine a new colour ?" - this new colour should be completely new,
it is not mixture of any previous colour you know ?
 
You can imagine concepts or events that you have never seen/heard before,that's where fiction comes from. I can't imagine a color that's not a mix of other colors, because that means that there's no way to descibe it. It's just a random thought, like trying to think of nothing.I also can't imagine an end to space.
 
No. It is an impossibility to think of something analogus to a wholey distinct colour which is not a shade of a present one. Without the necessary sense-data, one cannot imagine such a thing. One can also not imagine a different taste, nor a different smell.
 
how did our inventions come about, it was jsut htinknig abut soemthing differently, nothing even been made out of soemthing new and completly different to my knolage anyway
 
Of course you can. At some point in every ancient tribe, there had to be the first guy that pointed at something and used a unique grunt, trying to signify a correlation for another person. The idea to communicate an idea to another person with an unchanging verbal symbol had no prior example for the people involved. The fact that it might have a genetic impulse (if Stephen Pinker is to be believed) should not discount the fact that it is a brand new thing for that individual.

The reason philosophers love these types of questions is because they are so sematically driven. You can always say that any invention was based off of knowledge of some sort, which they pretend to imply that no new thing can be thought of. Like someone else said, it is a tautology when you hold as your premise that any new thought required the ability to think, which means you hold past experiences, hence nothing is new. That is just silly thinking, in my opinion.
 
Swivel:

We are not claiming that there are no new thoughts, just that one cannot think of something which one was not exposed to in a general sense in the senses. One could not think of colour - or even sight - and have a clear mental picture of them without sensory preception. This does not mean we cannot recombine sensory input.
 
swivel said:
....The idea to communicate an idea to another person with an unchanging verbal symbol had no prior example for the people involved.
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Did you ever actually attempt to convey the quality of an experience that was totally new to yourself, but not yet known, not at all to the person to convey to?

--- Ron.
 
perplexity said:
Did you ever actually attempt to convey the quality of an experience that was totally new to yourself, but not yet known, not at all to the person to convey to?

--- Ron.
Click to expand...
Another way of expressing what Ron just said?
Did you ever actually attempt to convey the quality of an experience that was familiar to everyone but unrecognized by anyone you attempt to explain it to?
 
Kaiduorkhon said:
Did you ever actually attempt to convey the quality of an experience that was familiar to everyone but unrecognized by anyone you attempt to explain it to?
Click to expand...

Such as a cruel truth, for instance?

There is never a shortage of things they'd rather not be reminded of.

--- Ron.
 
I was thinking of the same problem a few weeks ago, but haven't given it thought since. Many of you don't seem to have understood it properly. One example is, of course what has been said earlier: can a man born blind imagine what sight is? Here's another one:
Can you visualize a fourth spatial dimesnion? I used to think that the brain being three-dimensional meant that we could not. But I don't think that's right. We're merely storing and processing information in our brain. There is nothing standing in the way of storing information about ofur dimensions on a three-dimensional or even two or one dimensional objects. For example, it is possible to contruct figures of any dimensions and store them on the hard disk of a computer. Then is it possible for us to visualize a fourth spatial dimension?
 
Rosnet said:
Then is it possible for us to visualize a fourth spatial dimension?
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There is actually a fourth dimension, at least, and it is easy enough to visualize.

I refer to chirality.

If you wanted to create an absolutley identical Universe from scratch you'd need to know if it was a right handed universe or a left handed universe, for it is possible to envisage the whole thing as a mirror image of itself, and thus in every spatial dimension, inside out and upside down, so to speak.

--- Ron.
 
No, that's not really a fourth dimension. It does not contribute a fourth degree of freedom. If everything is viewed in terms of particles, you would need only three dimensions to describe the universe completely.
 
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Rosnet said:
No, that's not really a fourth dimension. It does not contribute a fourth degree of freedom. If everything is viewed in terms of particles, you would need only three dimensions to describe the universe completely.
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Well. Einstein says it's 'time', and time is at least partially comprehensible as the interval between two or more events. There's a lot more detailed comprehensions of the 4th dimension at http://forums.delphiforums.com/EinsteinGroupie
 
This is going wonderfully well, because no one here seems to know the least bit of physics or mathematics. I said, <I>spatial</I> dimension. Time is <I>so</I> not a spatial dimension- it's a temporal one. There is no problem in visualizing time (except again in the form of a fourth spatial dimension, like we would have to do if we tried to draw a 4D spacetime graph).
 
art_dex said:
Hi ,
let me explain my question a little bit: -

So my question is
"Can we imagine something new which is completely different from our
previous knowledge ?"

here "Something" means any kind of substance or material which you have
never seen or heard before. for simplification i could say
"Can you imagine a new colour ?" - this new colour should be completely new,
it is not mixture of any previous colour you know ?
Click to expand...

Do you mean that this "something" is composed in such a way that no single part of is just a recreation of something already existing? Like a donut and coffee mug seem to be different.. however they are actually topologically the same. So these two don't count.

A new color? No.

The answer to the general question is quite possibily no. As far as I know, everything in reality can be represented in some fashion by mathematics... and as we all know, mathematics is a system setup by a short list of simple rules, called axioms. We just build the complexity off these rules.

Can we form new axioms? Sure... but in all likelyhood these new axioms are just generalizations of other axioms or that these new axioms were just previously unknown, but there.
 
Rosnet said:
This is going wonderfully well, because no one here seems to know the least bit of physics or mathematics. I said, <I>spatial</I> dimension. Time is <I>so</I> not a spatial dimension- it's a temporal one. There is no problem in visualizing time (except again in the form of a fourth spatial dimension, like we would have to do if we tried to draw a 4D spacetime graph).
Click to expand...
An interval between two or more events is spatial.

A 4-D supercube is a space-time graph. Any 3-D entity moving at right angles from itself is 4-D space-time.
 
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Rosnet said:
This is going wonderfully well, because no one here seems to know the least bit of physics or mathematics. I said, <I>spatial</I> dimension. Time is <I>so</I> not a spatial dimension- it's a temporal one. There is no problem in visualizing time (except again in the form of a fourth spatial dimension, like we would have to do if we tried to draw a 4D spacetime graph).
Click to expand...

Yes. You can view a 4D hypercube in 3D two ways: Time or spatial "reflection." With time, you would see a 3D cube expanded with time. Spatial, you would see basically a cube within a cube, but this is because every vertex must have 4 corners. And plus, in 4D spatial-space you could see the entire 3D object at one time, just like us 3D beings can see an entire 2D object at one time.

Visualization is fun :cool:
 
Absane said:
Yes. You can view a 4D hypercube in 3D two ways: Time or spatial "reflection." With time, you would see a 3D cube expanded with time. Spatial, you would see basically a cube within a cube, but this is because every vertex must have 4 corners. And plus, in 4D spatial-space you could see the entire 3D object at one time, just like us 3D beings can see an entire 2D object at one time.

Visualization is fun :cool:
Click to expand...

According to Einstein, everything we see is 4-dimensional, we haven't gotten around to recognizing it, beyond that fact that it is somehow bonded with time. Re. http://forums.delphiforums.com/EinsteinGroupie
Total Field Theory (reinstatement of Steady State universe and abandoned Cosmological Constant)
 
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