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Are there any truly original ideas left? Most books/movies/songs/etc are based upon their predecessors - even technology is an improvement on the previous model.

What do you think?

I think that these days you'd be very hard-pressed to come up with a TRULY original idea, just because of everything that already exists. Nearly everything now has some basis in something that already exists, so it'd be very hard.

I disagree...( sorry if I am doing that a lot these days )....

The creative qualities of the human mind are infinite and even although everything seems to have been thought up or discovered...it hasn't !

Even in Biology and medicine discoveries are being made every day that were not known before in any way !

But biology is not an original idea - the things are already there, waitning to be discovered

about books... I'm not very good in the subject but there was this ...Campbell?

he wrote how a story always looks like... gonna try and find it to sound smart and claim I knew it all along

Indeed we are constantly coming up with new discoveries and ideas, but they all either borrow from existing ideas, or are discovered using existing principles. For example, we can't find a cure for cancer knowing nothing about it--hence such a cure would have to be based on existing research at least partially.

There will always be original ideas, we never stop to expand our consciousness

Of course Biology or Medicine are not original ideas but within these frameworks new thoughts and discoveries are being made all the time.

Yes...I will agree that old discoveries can lead to new discoveries but any NEW discovery is still NEW if it has not been discovered before.

Original thought is only restricted by the numbers of ways that the neurons and axions in the human brain can be connected. These possible connections are almost infinitesimal.

Eh, there will always be some original ideas out there. As time goes on they will just become harder and harder to come by.

Borrowing doesn't make something unoriginal, neccessarily. All of our knowledge is based on what has come before.....

The talented can still come up with something new.....

I have an original idea... but it's a secret...

That throwaway comment is probably the most profound reason why many new ideas and inventions never see daylight.

If you do have a new or original idea then if you want to let it out to the world you are going to have to take out hundreds of very expensive world patents in order to protect this idea.

If you don't protect your discovery people will be very quick to steal it and call it their own.

New ideas are old ideas seen in a different light

By the time you have read all stories available, you will have forgotten about the first one that you read, so it will seem to you as though it is a new idea

As long as it helps better and evolve our society and world does it matter if it has base or not?

-AC

Wel, it would be nice to be able to credit the person who designed it...

Almost all things arnt original even so called original ideas are usually based on and old idea.

I remember a talk at uni about the structure of fiction, and it was claimed that there are a finite number of plots, however there is a lot of ways to developer the finite plots, ergo there is plenty of ways to make something seem original, even though in a way it is limited. But yes and no. Yes, much of what we do is built upon and adapted from things that exist already, but never the less I think there are at least some original ideas remaining, some yet to be discovered. But are there infinite original ideas? Infinite things are rare, and looking at humanity, I somehow doubt it.

In truth there was only one original idea - the very first idea.

"you can't create, you can only discover".. -proverb by peterKSL

you can create your own clothes

Everything in this world has already exist, as a knowledge, haven't observed by human beings, and own clothes is just another possibility of something that is probable of discovery.

example of why I said that proverb--> Thomas Eddison didn't create light bulb, but he discovered it, as a possibility.

Another example would be--> a proverb that I "created" might be the same as someone else, which one can conclude that one merely discovered it as someone else did.

well .. thomas edison 'invented' the lightbulb.. when basically the only thing that really happened was he created it from materials that were already in existence.. including the physics that enabled the reactions to allow the energy to change its form to light