[cheeko1234]

I had written a comment but thought this article conveyed my thoughts better:

Just the idea of 'independent thought' itself is a contradiction:

Independent thinking connotes the idea of being able to think on your own, to convince oneself on the truthfulness or validity of information received, rather than being swayed by the opinion of others.

However, the premise on which the prevailing conception of independent thought is constructed is faulty.

A Thought is interconnected; no disassociated thinker lives on an island all by themselves.

Can we truly think on our own, independently, in the purest sense of the term? Aren’t our thoughts inevitably contaminated by the ideas, philosophies, and biases we have deliberately and subconsciously imbibed over the course of our lifetime?

Besides, it is hard or impossible to evaluate how “independent” our thoughts truly are, for the simple reason thoughts represent the accumulation of our lived and learned experiences.

Yes, imagination is an important component of thought; yet we do not imagine in a vacuum — we merely adapt and rearrange familiar realities to compose new patterns and entities.

Or to put it more charitably, don’t we all stand on the shoulders of giants — the teachers under whom we studied at their feet; the parents, families, and communities with whom we imbibed their cultural ethos?

Granted, some of the more enlightened among us might experience the occasional “quantum leap” in thought processes, thereby giving birth to innovative approaches to solving problems.

Likewise, when you scratch any of these “independent” thought sequences with the tip of a pencil, underneath you’ll find it is nothing more than existing knowledge repurposed by identifying and combining different patterns and connecting the dots.

Source of the excerpt above: https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/how-independent-th...

Some useful books and links:

Naval Ravikant: Let us Not talk Falsely Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euzoOkBUzsQ

List of Cognitive Biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/...

How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life Paperback – March 5, 1993 by Thomas Gilovich

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Reading most articles from lesswrong.com or slatestarcodex.com

Slightly unrelated: You analyzing yourself in such critical way reminds me of myself.

The only persistent solution to this was meditation using Sam Harris waking up app (it's free if you email them).

https://wakingup.com/