Well, but if we're all rephrasing what we hear from someone else, who came up with the thought originally? If we are all repeating, we have to repeat what someone said, we cannot be repeating what no one said. There has to be an origin, and that origin is probably someone, unless you think otherwise.

Don't you think you learn more from your own experience than from the words someone else tells you? If I tell you how to play tennis, do you think you'll learn more that way than by actually holding the racquet?

I think most of the things we know we know from experience. Even when others have influenced us, our opinion of something is, I think, mainly influenced by our own experience. For now I think that wisdom comes mainly from experience, that's why we can't easily transmit it to another person.

If we can't remember our own original thoughts, that's completely fine, I think, because most of what we know we haven't put into words. And even the little that does, may not come to mind. But we know more about life having lived, than having listened, I think.

We can do a little experiment, if you feel like it and if you want to do it.

These are the rules: I'm going to ask a question and you can't ask anyone the answer, or look it up in the dictionary or internet or anywhere. The answer you are going to give, you should not try to formulate it in an intelligent way. No. You have to say it in the crudest way, just as you thought it, without the need to over-explain. It doesn't need to be a good answer, it just needs to be an answer that is your own thoughts on the matter. It is also not valid to say "I don't know" or anything like that.

The question is this: what is hair? You can write your own definition, just as you thought of it, regardless of whether it is a good definition or not, and then respond, if you wish.

Maybe the definition is not good, I don't know, it happens to me many times.

But after that I would ask you, where did you get that definition, was it influenced by others? And even if so, which may be likely, is your definition more influenced by what others say, or by your own experience during your life with the word in question?

If you decide not to do the experiment, that's completely fine too.

But, I don't know if I understood you correctly.

That may count as an original idea. You know what I mean?

In a sense it is, because you added something to it that it didn't have originally.