The New Era of Creativity

Back in high school, I came across an article in Wired Magazine that sported this illustration:

(I was able to find the picture, but not the article for some reason….)

The article focused on the attributes of the left brain (analytical) versus the right brain (intuitive, holistic) and why we will and must focus more on “right brain skills.” The fear of outsourcing jobs to other countries was running very high, and the authors’ maintained that in order to maintain economic prowess we will have to better foster the right brain. It’s easy to outsource methodic tasks. It’s hard to outsource the creation of a brilliant new idea.

This article led me to take a more conscious interest in creativity. Furthermore, I’m very excited by the prospects of creativity.

One thing I’ve learned since paying more attention to creativity: We have no idea what it really is. But, we know it when we see it.

When we encounter something creative, it seems to come from another planet. “Who came up with this?” , “I would’ve never thought of that”, “Brilliant!”, “Beautiful”, “Well that’s stupid,”–these are all reactions to creativity.

To provide some sort of definition, here’s the safe and broad definition from Sir Ken Robinson: the ability to generate new ideas of value. (Paradoxically, the best way to come up with valuable ideas seems to be to have many ideas.)

The definition has a critical point. Creativity leads to value.

So why am I so interested in creativity? And why should you be more than ever?

We are now starting to gain widespread access to powerful tools that allow us to transfer creativity into value and fully realize the potential of individual creativity. We’re on the cusp of a new era of creation**. This is why I’m constantly going on about open source hardware, open data, open government, open source software, DIY Bio, and new fabrication tools.

The Creatives are here and now they’ve got the tools they need to learn almost anything and, soon enough, make almost anything. The Creatives can now more quickly and easily get into a position that allows them to create, which is both exciting and dangerous.

-Kevin
3.22.2010

**When we use the term “creation” and “create”, it’s a little pretentious and potentially very off base. We don’t truly create (read: “make something out of nothing”). We innovate (“combine things in new ways”) and construct (“put things together”). The cognitive of ability we refer to as creativity is largely rooted in the ability to make distant and unlikely connections between concepts. Consequently, I think it’s important to keep our humility and bear in mind that true “creation” is something left only to the gods and higher powers.

Bryan Hernandez

Would you then say that no human has ever created anything, including concepts, ideas, and means of expression?

Kevin Vogelsang

Yes. No human has ever "created" anything from nothing. I certainly can't think of any good counter-examples.
Even extremely abstract things like math/physics work comes from mental models and pre-existing connections. You might be able to speak on this better than I can since you decided it was a good idea to take 18.033 and the like.

Bryan Hernandez

18.034, get it right, sucka.

OK, then if even ideas are recombinations of pre-existing ideas, then this
suggests that all ideas can be derived from a single set of "axiom-ideas"
that were created somehow in the beginning. If this is the case, what are
those original ideas? And also, can an idea be in existence without the
existence of a mind? If there were no people, would those ideas continue to
live? If so, then one could correctly make the argument that nothing ideas
are not even innovated, they're simply discovered out of the darkness.

I think that in mathematics, axioms are generally considered as truths from
which we derive all theorems, etc. Axioms cannot be proven, they just are.
But, I believe the axioms are more or less believed to be axioms because
they just make sense as they provide the most results in further
derivations. If you forget about the requirement to be useful and provide
much derivationable utility, the choice of axioms is arbitrary.

Some other issues I see with this are physical laws that are empirically
validated but not derived. Schrödinger's Eq is a good example, which is
claimed to be "handed down to him by God," because there is no derivation
for it, and there has yet to be any observed inconsistencies.

[image: i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi = \hat H \Psi]
Newton's 2nd Law, F = ma, is also another good one, even though it isn't
true.

Kevin Vogelsang

When it comes to those axiomatic ideas/concepts, from the human perspective, they are what we observe in the world. We "innovate" what appears in nature. We attempt to boil these observations down to abstract models so we are better capable of manipulating the observations.

As I've mentioned before, although we spin it differently for the sake of our egos, we do actually "discover" new things. They exist without us within a space of ideas. If there are in fact fundamental laws and models, which there seems to be, this is certainly true.

The fact that axioms can't be proven points to the fact that we're simply recombining things that just simply seem to exist and "make sense." The same goes for any natural laws that are empirically validated. The majority of nature (the physical world we didn't make) is a recombination of these laws.

To try and put all this concisely: We live in a generative system that humans are capable of furthering with their intellect. Instead of waiting for randomness "to create," we put in the extra energy to reduce entropy and "create."

Newton and Schrodinger's equation both came from observation and a little luck (Schrodinger got the model right, that model is based on something). The subconscious is a powerful observer that speaks to us through our intuition. Don't most of our ideas and thoughts seem to come from nowhere?

The New Era of Creativity

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