We Are Copy-Paste | The Reality of Living in a World of Recycled Thoughts

[Olga]

Look at little Murray - those eyes are just like his father's. It's always a bit unsettling to me how a child can so precisely replicate the features of their parents. It feels almost like cloning in a way. The way a kid inherits dad's eyes or mom's ears makes us seem like unoriginal, mass-produced duplicates. After all, DNA replication - reproduction - means creating exact copies.

So, when two organisms come together in the ecstasy of love, they don't actually create anything fundamentally new. Sure, they mix and shake things up, but the basic components remain the same. Thankfully, nature is a bit blind and makes errors when copying, but that’s another story. There's something even more troubling than physical resemblance.

That comes later, when Murray starts mimicking the behaviors of those around him. You see this charming boy with attentive eyes, but then he smirks, and it’s exactly like his annoying aunt. A few years later, you might overhear teenage Murray, in a cracking voice, saying, "I believe!" followed by some convoluted nonsense that clearly doesn’t come from him. It's obvious that he hasn’t yet learned to filter what he absorbs. His young mind, like a sponge, soaks up everything without being able to distinguish truth from falsehood. 

With time, Murray will become more discerning, perhaps even dismissive of some ideas, but still, whenever he says something with that confident "I believe!" rest assured, it won't be something truly his own. He might be deeply convinced of the originality of his ideas, feeling like a pioneer, even writing them down and proudly signing his name, but that doesn’t make them his. He stole them. Maybe not on purpose, maybe the real author was so vague that it feels like no one’s at fault, but it’s always a compilation and paraphrase. We’re not talking about scientists - real scientists, not the pop-science YouTubers. 

In science, something genuinely new can emerge, which obliges us to introduce new concepts into collective awareness - black holes, superstrings, and so on. But science pushes the boundaries of known reality, hence the need for new language to describe a previously unseen universe.

And clearly, this isn’t for the majority. Most people are stuck in a stuffy room of informational reality, from which there’s no escape - no matter how you turn the key, not even a window to crack open. All words have been said, all thoughts have been thought and expressed. What’s left is for us to endlessly rearrange those words to form new sentences.

Even that doesn’t always work out. Psycholinguists have an explanation for why this happens - it’s called priming. Simply put, it’s about how a preceding stimulus influences the execution of a subsequent cognitive action.

For instance, if you hear the phrase "Mom is washing the window," and then you think, "What is Dad doing with the car?" there’s a high chance you’ll respond that Dad is fixing the car. You’ll likely structure your response by copying the format of the previous statement. The existence of priming effects has been proven experimentally. During one experiment, two participants, one of whom was an actor, took turns describing pictures. It turned out that the syntactic structure used by the subject often suspiciously mirrored the actor's description. This phenomenon was dubbed syntactic priming or syntactic persistence. Priming also appears on lexical and semantic levels, meaning that in conversation, participants tend to rely on the same images and words.

And when you get home, you might hear your mom say, "Where did you pick up such words?" It turns out that without realizing it, we constantly copy what we hear, and then we mock parrots for doing the same. There’s even a theory of interactive alignment, which suggests that the tendency to mimic others' speech isn’t accidental but necessary to facilitate mutual understanding and conserve cognitive resources. It might also play a crucial role in children’s language development. As kids, we learned words and grammar structures, only to spend the rest of our lives repeating what others said. 

This text is no exception - it's a shameless plagiarism, a collection of thoughts and phrases borrowed from everywhere. I’m not creating, I’m relaying. I’m not inventing, I’m recalling. In linguistics, this pervasive plagiarism is elegantly called intertextuality. If you’ve been a student, you’re intimately familiar with it. That acquaintance began on the harsh day when, while struggling with a term paper, thesis, or some other semi-scientific work, you pulled apart the world’s knowledge base, unraveling sentences from articles, monographs, and textbooks - all of which were themselves pieced together from various patches. Theorists of intertextuality proclaim that every text, written or spoken, existing or in a stream of thought, is woven from other texts. 

In essence, the number of words, despite the richness of language, is limited. Any dictionary compiler will happily confirm this. There are even fewer meaningful combinations of words. The successful ones, as they say, the catchy or effectively communicative ones, are worth their weight in gold.

The situation is worsened by the fact that the average language user doesn’t strive for novel expressions. They peacefully tread the well-worn path of clichés. After all, this conserves mental energy and helps avoid misunderstandings. The boundaries of expression become even narrower. And this, in our age of information overload, where words and meanings are relentlessly exploited, and where every device spews a fresh torrent of news.

Everywhere you look, there are fragments, snippets, half-read voices, and quotations, making it increasingly difficult to claim original authorship. One saying drifts from Hitler to Haeckel, from Haeckel to Einstein, from Einstein to Jesus, until it dissolves back into the great intertext—society’s cultural and informational consciousness.

We are literally drowning in informational noise. But it’s not just noise - it's more like the brain is under continuous informational assault, stealing our attention. To transition from a zombie to a person, you need to start enhancing your brain’s abilities now.

Everywhere we look, personal opinions, authorial perspectives, and individual views carefully mimic each other. As you skim through yet another page, it's harder and harder to shake off that persistent feeling of déjà vu. What else is there to say? Postmodernism? The ruthless killer? First, it declared the author dead, because the author’s function is secondary; they’re merely a sieve through which the great intertext is filtered, structuring itself so that scattered blocks of words and phrases form something seemingly logical and meaningful. Or at least, it appears that way to other discourse participants. 

Is there a simpler task? After all, meaning, as we know, is born in the eye of the beholder. Without you, reader, this text would remain a meaningless heap of squiggles. Only your perceptive gaze brings it to life, breathes meaning into it, and gives it direction.

The great intertext, immaterial and abstract, through you and me, creates something tangible and concrete, like a sentient ocean that can take the shape of your thoughts. But we’ve read about that somewhere before. The death of the author inevitably leads to the death of the individual text, whose boundaries are impossible to determine.

You can't say where the water of borrowed ideas ends in your term paper and where the water you poured yourself begins. Despite your quotation marks, references, sources, and anti-plagiarism software, it all draws from the same ocean. So, who will postmodernism kill next? Of course, it will be you, dear reader. Saturated with all these texts, you’re now composed not of 50%, 70%, as is the norm, but 100% water.

Your inevitably quoted consciousness is as unstable and indefinite as the hopeless search for the origins of the quotes that make up your mind. And by the way, as you’ve noticed, that’s also a quote. Peron Moises represents this series of deaths—or if you prefer, rebirths—in this way: during reading, all three—the author, the text, and the reader—merge into one endless field for the game of writing.

In a broader sense, a text can be any connected flow of information. The letter-word form is just one way a text exists. The human personality, which through every lived moment, through facial expressions, gestures, speech, tone, dress, and gait, emits a signal about itself into the world, is also, in some sense, a text. Though some people have utterly meaningless faces. If you've ever seen a humanities graduate clutching a diploma to their chest with a lost expression, you know what I mean. 

Compared to written analogs, we humans are more complex texts—multi-layered, with several hidden planes and rich subtext. But it seems I’m using someone else’s words. Who said that every person is a book? So, I don't know if you’ve guessed it or not, but as a text, you’d probably fail an anti-plagiarism check. Have you ever counted how much of "you" is in you? There’s far too much of other people in you, people you copy consciously or unconsciously, just by being influenced by priming effects and yelling out your system of values.

This is interpersonalism. Please meet and greet it. Everyone is interpersonal. You, me - an assembly of

 borrowed thoughts and behaviors, a compilation, a collage of other lives and voices, a mannequin with plastic limbs from different sets. How did you get to this point? Proud human, the darling of the gods, the pinnacle of the food chain.

There’s nothing in you, absolutely nothing, that is truly your own. Your sense of humor, pieced together from memes, your branded sneakers, and even your eyes—they're your dad's. But don’t get me wrong, this isn't a critique of modern humanity’s loss of individuality. We're not much different from our ancestors. This is just how things are for us as a species.

But today, with the increasing volume and speed of information exchange, these processes are particularly acute and visible. When everyone has equal access to information repositories, it’s very difficult to maintain possession of exclusive knowledge and thinking.

A trend that emerges in one corner of the globe can, in fractions of a second, cross thousands of miles and infect entire continents. You take pride in your personal values and beliefs, cherish your rich inner world, but let’s be honest with ourselves—today, it’s hard to find a better word than “copy-paste.” But I feel it - I feel the protest growing in the minds of the most resilient readers. Isn’t human individuality found in the diversity of the qualities they possess? Here you take one thing, there you gather another, and now you’re a carrier of a completely unique set of data.

Not quite. Not only do we, as inhabitants of the same environment, share common sources of information, but no matter how omnivorous you are, the end picture is more or less the same for everyone. Let’s be honest with ourselves—our merits in this diversity are no greater than the merits of a trash bin that unites different kinds of waste under its lid.

I look inside myself with a playful squint, as if to say, "We’ve had our fun, now let’s go," and what do I find? An empty house, filled with the dust of others' phrases and habits. It makes me wonder—did my laugh, which has carried me through so many adventures, first light up on someone else’s face before I noticed and shamelessly stole it? Here, standing before an ancient ruin of a person, shaking off the dust, rises the age-old problem of the value of one's own existence.

What’s there to love about me? With an emphasis on me. My appearance owes me nothing. I was born with it, so my face isn’t really me. The same can be said about my character and temperament. My mind, my knowledge, my worldview—I took all of it from other people. I listened to my parents, read books, looked around, filling myself with the world like an empty vessel.

Once all this is gone, what’s left? Put another person in my place, give them the same traits, surround them with the same conditions, and you’ll be amazed at how much they’ll resemble me. They could become just as worthy a son to my parents, a friend to my friends, a lover to my girlfriend. No one would notice the substitution.

So, what’s there to love about me? And setting traps everywhere, I fall into one myself. What kind of words are these? I? Me? That’s something we can still figure out. In broad terms, I is the consciousness that identifies itself as a person. But what about the me of, say, five years ago? What do we call that? After all, personality, ego, self - these are first and foremost an individual complex of attitudes and knowledge about the world.

In other words, the software running on the brain’s processor. And in five years, not to mention longer periods, oh, how everything can change. If I met myself from 2008, I’d probably spit in his face. Not much time will pass before you no longer exist. Your current self will no longer exist, though no one can say exactly when because it’s a smooth and ongoing process of reinstallation, updating, and rethinking.

This process of renewal even happens to our bodies. It takes anywhere from 14 days to 20 years for most of your organs’ cells to be completely replaced by new ones. So, in 20 years, physically, almost nothing of your present self will remain. And who will you be, my successor? Will you want to shake my hand? But one thing is certain—you will be a different person, feeling and thinking differently.

Is there anything more ephemeral than human beliefs? Right now, they seem unshakable, carved in stone. Liberals and conservatives puff up their chests, proclaiming they’d rather die than adopt the views of their opponents. A young man swears eternal love to his girlfriend. Of course, her presence makes everything extraordinary. Marta insists she’d never in a million years give her wristwatch, a gift from her father, to a stranger.

But then a hypnotist’s voice rings out. "When I count to ten, you’ll want to take off your watch. You’ll find it uncomfortable on your wrist, an annoying burden. One, two, three." And she emerges from the trance. The girl really does take off the watch, hands it over, and even with some indignation, refuses to take it back.

That’s her new belief - her belief, you understand? That's what she believes, that’s her I. And what does the world around us do if not hypnotize us? With endless images, stories, suggestions, the swaying of branches outside, the ticking of a second hand. We hypnotize ourselves, reinforcing our beliefs and convictions, identifying ourselves with them.

They, like the cells in our bodies, gradually die off, and then new ones appear in their place, and what you recently called “I” no longer exists. It’s as fluid and changeable as a river, into which, as you know, you can’t step twice.

Final Thoughts: This exploration of identity, originality, and the human condition strikes at the core of what it means to be an individual in a world flooded with information and inherited traits. It touches on the unsettling reality that much of what we consider uniquely "ours" is, in fact, borrowed, influenced, or directly copied from others. Our sense of self is not a fixed entity but a constantly evolving construct shaped by external stimuli and internal reconfigurations. While this might seem disheartening, it also opens up a dialogue about the nature of creativity and self-awareness. Recognizing the fluidity of our identities can be liberating, encouraging us to embrace change and growth rather than clinging to a static sense of self. After all, the beauty of human experience lies in our ability to adapt, evolve, and reinvent ourselves as we journey through life.