From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Jan 08 2003 - 13:48:03 MST
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Nathanael Allison wrote:
> Are creative thoughts just random occurances?
Certainly not -- thoughts in general (creative or otherwise) have to be
based on personal experience, so they cannot be "random". Just as it
is easy for Natasha to have "creative" artistic thoughts compared with
me (her experience dwarfs mine in that area), it may be harder for her
to have "creative" thoughts about programming because in that area her
experience (I think) is somewhat less than mine.
> If so than memes are just random occurances?
To some extent -- but they are still largely based on personal experience.
I'd highly urge readng the books from my personal reading list (maybe also on
the Extropian Reading List) by William Calvin (http://www.williamcalvin.com) --
he does a really good job explaining one possible physical representation for
"thoughts" and how creativity might develop from that.
> Assuming that all humans have creative ability and are creative is there a
> possible measurment of creativity?
Its one of those "I know it when I see it" observations. History is filled
with people who were recognized (sometimes after the fact) as being very
creative. It seems it would be hard to develop a measure of "creativity" that
could be applied in everything from sculpture to economics to physics.
> It seems that certain people have more ability to connect seperate thoughts
> together? Isn't this what we assume intelligence is?
Not really -- "intelligence" (at least IMO) seems to involve the number of
thoughts you can juggle simultaneously, some rate of retreival aspects and
the ability to chain or group together things in logical patterns. It seems
to be "volume" and "speed" (i.e. bandwidth) related.
Creativity on the other hand seems to be a "recognition" capability. It
leans on intelligence -- since the more things you can look at or group
together per unit time, the more likely you are to discover something
interesting -- but there is a crucial aspect of intermixing several
thoughts and then the perception that that intermix has some novel and/or
useful properties. Two people could have the same creative thought and
one could recognize it as useful and run with it while the other could
not perceive it as useful and discard it. I think creativity may be
quite context sensitive.
> (I got a little ahead of myself there, thanks for the input, nate)
> (My dominant societies theory may have just been a natural random occurance
> of creative thought? or was it a reaction to some enviromental stimulus?)
I think it is reasonable to assume that if a society can get itself
on the "creative" path -- and that specific path has some elements
of improving the quality of life (i.e. enabling less time required
for physical survival) -- then the society could be on an upward
spiral of creativity. [Obviously if the vector is to develop increasingly
creative sculptures that do little to support people in the physical
reality (cheaper food, water, housing, etc.) then you end up with a
very creative society, but not one with the means to bootstrap itself
into increasing levels of creativity.
> Please reply and add scientific data if you want to. Scientific data is
> always good. My lack of it means that I am most likely wrong. It's a good
> thing I'm more or less just asking questions.
The books by Calvin have a reasonably good scientific basis behind them
in that he is trying to tie thought to the actual physical architecture
of neurons in the brain.
Robert
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