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The old, original version, of the Journey (into?) Imagination ride with Figment at EPCOT had the best explanation for creativity that I ever saw.
It didn't so much say that creativity as most think of it is a myth, but I'm convinced that and ride wear / decay combined killed the ride and pressure from executives never let the message it did say get said the same way ever again.
Creativity is just the result of all the environmental exposure, all of the ideas, influences, muses, and necessity needs combining through the analog supercomputer that is the human mind to result in an output that it finds either a solution or interesting enough to share with others. That's all creativity is. The same thing that we're trying to approach today with giant info-network models, curated data, and a loose prompt.
That doesn't really tell us what creativity is, that describes inputs to a black box without addressing what's in the box. I might say, "an airplane is just aluminum and fluid dynamics, that's all an airplane is," and I don't think you'd accept it as a definition.
I don't understand or appreciate what the mystique of creativity is. The inside of the black box could just be your brain randomly remixing concepts and evaluating the variations. Most of them are probably nonsensical (“purple monkey dishwasher”) but some of them are interesting (“monkey dishwashers”) and then you take that idea and keep mixing it. The ideas that gets mixed are just whatever you’re able to pull into context, so ideas you’re familiar with are more likely to get mixed. Sometimes you struggle to come up with creative ideas, and it’s because you’ve run out of new ideas to mix with so changing your environment helps by injecting new ideas.
But at its core creativity is, at a practical level, just remixing ideas and applying some value metric against them.
Regarding the article, you can apply creative remixing at multiple levels so a creative nonfiction writer may start with fixed facts but can still remix the order, presentation, format, where to begin/end, etc.
By the same token, I don't understand the reductionism, and the desire to say creativity is "just" this or that. I don't think any of these explanations are complete (eg I don't find that moving to a new environment gets new ideas into my head as much as that I need time to allow the idea in my mind to form more fully, and a change of scenery helps me get out of my own way & let the process happen; it makes sense to me that we'd simply have different experiences of what it is to be creative and what works for us individually) and I don't understand what's to be gained by reducing or devaluing it.
Like when I read these comments I'm just left scratching my head and wondering, "what's the point here? Why assert that creativity is something narrow and well defined?" I don't per say think it's mystical, but it seems apparent to me it's quite subjective and broad. So I just don't really understand where you're both coming from. I'm open to hearing more about it.
I think the core of my objection is that I think creativity involves discovery as well as remixing. Often as a software engineer I'm assembling lego bricks other people have developed in order to build a new shape. That's straightforward remixing and I think it is a creative endeavor. But sometimes I come across something more challenging that requires experimentation and stumbling down wrong paths, until I discover an architecture that generalizes wonderfully and which addresses problems I haven't even considered yet. I'm a bit of a mathematical platonist, and I think that structure existed in some nonphysical way and that I uncovered it through empiricism and a pinch of cleverness. But I don't think it's really a product of my genius - I'm not all that smart - as much as that it's an almost inevitable result of how the universe works, a minima in some manifold that I was traveling down. I realize that might sound romantic or mystical, but that isn't how I see it.
What defines creative ability?
How about the ability to create a new story?
Such 'new stories' always seem to build on old stories, however, and the attempts to create entirely novel creative works that don't relate to past history have never gained much traction. Avant-garde art, who remembers that? People want something to refer to, so it's always the fact that popular new works of art and music are derivative of past works in some sense.
Let's consider some of the great works of creative fiction and literature in recent human history, as examples. The Lord of the Rings and Dune come to mind, but if you read all their antecedent sources, you do find in that list the Bible and the Quran, respectively don't you?
Now about those ancient cuneiform tablets and their influence on their own derivative works, ahem.
Creative ability isn't an "ability" so much as a modality people who are creative are stuck in. Creative people have an itch to make something. I think I am a creative person and I don't quite even think it has anything to do with the quality of your work when determining whether you are creative or not. I say that because between people, if we want to draw a distinction which would motivate the definition of a creative person vs. someone who isn't, the range of creative impulse is so striking in how binary it is. It seems to me you basically feel the need to do it or you don't.
Creativity is the persistent and powerful impulse to do something for the sake of doing it, not necessarily for money or attention, simply for the satisfaction of knowing once this didn't exist and now it does. That's all. Some people are intelligent, lucky, and hard working and may be they are Cervantes, Shakespeare, Beethoven, types, but that has to do with, I'd argue something separate from mere creativity...
It may be that there are only so many basic stories. It makes sense that very old books would contain them. All the archetypal story types can be found in Greek literature.
I suppose it isn’t a limit of creativity that stops us creating utterly new stories, as much as that there aren’t really any completely new ones to be told.
"Where Do Ideas Come From?"
That blank stare from Super Dave gets me every time.
While the article offers a number of glimpses from different perspectives I’ve found Otto Rank’s Art and Artist to be the most piercing and cogent analysis of creativity I’ve read. If this article was at all interesting I’d highly recommend it.
Just another reminder that, once you learn about reification, it pops up everywhere. Us humans have a horrible habit of taking abstract concepts and gradually, as we use them over time, starting to believe the words associated with the concepts (necessarily constrained relational mental pictures) are like real, tangible, denotable things that exist, like an apple or a ball.
I wouldn't be surprised if the book reviewed in the article is 100% correct and that the concept of creativity is just that, and it's really improper to think of it like some possessed "trait". I also wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people never learn or realize this and go on treating it as though it's some inherited special something. That's really how it is with all psychological concepts. Intelligence and mind emerge in an environment they aren't some weird, immutable properties you are or aren't born with. We are a mixture of genetic templating and environmental feedback and constant adaptation. This is why IQ tests are moronic. This is also why it's silly to ask if machines "think". Cognitive systems think. Humans and a variety of other organisms and tools form cognitive systems. We are nothing without our inputs and milieu.
I’m not sure about the origins of creativity in general, but here, in this video, you can find one possibility for creativity in management and generally in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Creativity flows so naturally, it sure takes a lot to stifle it.
As often seen, whatever it takes to limit or inhibit creativity altogether, too much of the time there's more than enough to prevail.
Seems like that's a kind of surplus most worthy of complaint.