IDEOLOGY, CONDITIONING AND ORIGINAL THINKING

A small discussion in Socio class today made me go into a thought spiral. A small phrase about ideology being borrowed that was thrown in in the class got me thinking about the whole issue of ideology, conditioned knowledge and original thinking.

This is basically my proposal: There have been great amount of writing on the greatness of human intelligence, its unlimited capacity and the general wonder that it is. However, most people have overlooked one great flaw or shortcoming in the human intelligent order: our extremely limited imagination/ creativity. All our existing thinking patterns are nothing but products of conditioning of a particular social structure or existing thinking patterns. Thus, there is really no such thing as a novel idea, creative thinking, creating new forms of thinking, etc. When we think we have come up with an original idea, it is nothing but furtherance of existing cognitive order and knowledge based. There can be no original idea, no new theory which is not already based upon existing knowledge. Even if this idea is in sharp contrast to the existing order, it is still dependent on the knowledge base for its survival.

So can there be any original thinking at all? IS there anything called original or is it just an extension of the present knowledge based? Can there be a single thought that is free from all other thoughts, from previous conditioning? The answer is no!!!

Even in rebellion, one can but see the influence of present conditioning!Historically, there've been ideas that have dramatically shifted from existing moral order. Ideas that are contrary to the present thinking patterns which are known as paradigm shifts... Marx, Montesquieu, etc might have all architectured these shifts but doesn't the shift literally mean that they're moving from an existing position of perception to a new one because of whatever shortcomings they found... Such revolutionary ideas are not really that revolutionary... It is a change in thinking but within the same conceptual frameworks and social structure...

Let me move on to the next aspect - imagination.
One of the high points of human intelligence is our supposed great imagination capacity. Again, following the logical sequence, I believe that our imagination wither has a long way to go or it's just that we can never really achieve higher levels of imagination. We cannot imagine new things. Our imagination always requires supply of material from real life for fabrication.
Have you ever wondered about the fact that we can never really dream of unknown things. Every element that presents itself in a dream is a product of previous experience. We never really dream of unknown faces or locations. We use, in different proportions, things that we have previously viewed to fabricate dreams.
Like the anti- cliché goes: Man created God in his own image!

Let us take a more practical example... Something that has been eluding me for quite some time. We've all watched alien movies... The depiction of the aliens provide an excellent example. We've always created figures and images of aliens in more or less human or animal terms. We use the concepts, imagery, etc known to us in diff combination to try and recreate alien images. For ex: aliens always use eyes, some form of organs for movement, and basically are represented as a mutated form of organisms that we have encountered. We are never able to transcend this limitation of our imagination. If we take this step further, apart from the use of known organs, aliens are also represented in the familiar concepts. Concepts such as vision, movement, life, cognition, communication, interaction, survival, etc. What if aliens are unknown to the concept of vision or movement? What if aliens don't know what sensation is? what if there's no death for aliens? What if...

Ultimately imagination is heavily dependent on knowledge, and knowledge is acquired... thus with the law of transitivity, imagination is acquired and hence, cannot be new or original!