muddi

For your perusal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk

To answer your question, it's more about traveling back in time rather than traveling faster than the speed of light so it can appear in many places at once

Fair point but I think then it just expands the consideration from linguistic (which is already more than spoken or written, it also covers signed, whistled, drummed, danced, in one case I heard about -- eye movement) to semiotic.

I think that is a linguistic question ultimately. You could take potentially utter a new sentence never before uttered even with the top 10 most used words in a language.

That is one of the most significant things about the human being. Actually I am quite surprised when people come with definitions for human nature eg. fundamentally good, fundamentally evil, homo sapiens, homo faber, etc. that the linguistic potential to turn a small set of things into infinity is often ignored. No other animal can think and speak like we do.

I guess if getting new data is not allowed, then interpolation or extrapolation would be the next best option. Interpolation would be connecting existing thoughts to form or find new ones in between. Extrapolation would be following a train of thought to its ultimate end. This could be done in either the diffused or focused mental states. I like to draw up diagrams for this so I can see the blank spots to fill or direction things seem to be going.

There is also the semantics of the question. It's actually quite an ancient topic, where our thoughts come from. What does "original" mean? The thought originating in our mind, or from some higher realm? I won't go too deep into this, just bringing it up to think about it. The only thing I wanted to say is that maybe our mind is not entirely free and agentive, but actually there is a "darkness that comes before" to reference The Second Apocalypse which we can't conquer, but are conquered by.

On a lighter note, and from my own experience, it is definitely possible to generate new thoughts outside of that diffuse cloud of repeated thoughts formed on the storehouse of experience accumulated so far in our lives. Following practices of mindfulness, we can learn to recognize the noise of our mind and separate those "thoughts" from what we might call more agentive thoughts that we can control over, wherever they come from. I do meditations in these styles and achieve a mental state beyond the diffuse and focused, kind of inverse to dreaming (cf. turiya for this kind of formulation of a fourth state of mind). In this state, you can come to understand things which you could probably never do in the other mental states. Those thoughts feel "cleaner" as if coming from a true origin rather than bounced around a cloud of repeated thoughts like you mention.

But I feel like maybe these thoughts are not exactly the ones you are looking for. They are removed from our everyday sense of living, and not really invested in disciplines we have come up with socially as humans. It would be like asking if a caveman 500,000 years ago would have come up with the solution to how to fix a bug in the code I just wrote. It would have been an original thought for him sure, but kind of besides the point.

Edit: as an example for the interpolation/extrapolation, consider sentences like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" or actual usages of this sort of thing in literature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kir%C4%81t%C4%81rjun%C4%ABya#Linguistic_ingenuity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

The interesting part is that constrained thinking is what produces this

Charity is literally one of the seven virtues which are thought of as opposites to the seven vices or sins (or to take a page from Buddhism, "antidotes" to the "poisons" of the vices).

It's not exactly " charity" as we know it. The Latin word is "caritas" which means "caringness" basically but the Greek word is "agape" which is a saintly kind of love. Compare the increasing intensity of love involved in sympathy/empathy/compassion or love for a friend/family/partner/all beings.

Compassion is literally the thing of saints and which allows one to sit calmly while being tortured to death as a martyr. One of the most haunting things I have seen is that image of Thích Quảng Đức so calmly protesting the South Vietnam government's persecution of Buddhists (CW: suicide by self-immolation). I imagine that is how the Christian martyrs must have held themselves in their last moments

Think of it dialectically, not in a polar way. So called "good" and "bad" have to come together in one for one to be able to surpass the apparent duality. Any enlightenment, individual or social, should come from the stage after good/bad

This is what the sages will say, on the individual level: it's not so much good vs bad as useful or not useful (to some end). We need to understand and maybe learn to control what this "end" is. Similar thing with socialism: it's not class war for the sake of one class winning, but rather abolishing class as a system altogether

Well that's interesting, it's usually the other way around, suppressing the local language and creating a local educated administrative class to further divide up the locals

Gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they mean elections vs other democratic practices like sortition or maybe even direct democracy. The issue being that elections can be rigged or at least turn into popularity contests. Though the other methods have their issues too

Wiktionary is good for the dirty details usually. Looks like it's more complicated than it seems: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woman#Usage_notes

Fellow conlanger!

"War" means acts of physical violence between militants. "1984" is an arbitrary integer.

You're right, there is a "war" going on. I can't believe They are forcing people to associate meanings to words beyond the first entry in some dictionary

I have met people who are able to do this, and believe that everyone can, already or eventually. Unfortunately though their willingness to do it with me never aligns, so I don't get to do this much.