Creativity comes with a growing enlightenment. If enlightenment is the becoming of aware of self, therefore becoming more objective to reality, he expresses more of his true divine self against the backdrop of a more clear reality.

You don't have to be a realist or an idealist to be creative. Being one or the other might affect your imagination, but it is not a prerequisite.

What is this ‘awareness’? You seem to be saying that in the beginning was awareness, then came creativity.

Your quote states that “Human creativity comes from a gradually developed capacity for awareness”.

What does this gradual development stem from?
And without tools for survival how would the organism, us, survive, enough to develop awareness?

I have no idea how it happened but somehow man learned to make a fire, create fire from nothing. That must have come before awareness, otherwise he would have died and with it awareness.

And how is awareness passed on? — Brett

Fire existed as a process in the environment before humans had the skill to ‘create’ it. A human learns from interacting with fire, developing awareness of it as part of his environment (including its benefits) before developing the skills to create it himself.

What I mean by awareness is receiving new information. We don’t so much pass on awareness as develop it through interaction. In my opinion, our capacity to receive, integrate and transmit new information is a physical process that has developed alongside natural selection, not as a matter of productivity or survival necessity itself. The evolution of the human being demonstrates an abandoning of survival features in favour of developing the capacity for increasing awareness, interconnectedness and collaborative achievement: from the brain and sensory organs to child-rearing, communicative ability and social structure.

IMHO Human creativity derives from a particular level of awareness, but general creativity (as a process of integrating new information) derives from an inherent drive that could be traced back to the origin of life and formation of the cosmos. My descriptions of this ‘drive’ are my own understanding of it, not a definition as such - which I’m not sure is possible.

The evolution of the human being demonstrates an abandoning of survival features in favour of developing the capacity for increasing awareness, interconnectedness and collaborative achievement: from the brain and sensory organs to child-rearing, communicative ability and social structure. — Possibility

I would find it difficult to view these as anything but survival features.

My descriptions of this ‘drive’ are my own understanding of it, not a definition as such - which I’m not sure is possible — Possibility

Of course. I understand that. I'm testing my own thoughts here.

The op brought up the ‘the creative animal’, not ‘the artistic animal’. They’re two distinct beings to me. — Brett

Art is something made visible by using the creative act as a tool, it’s not just the creative act. Art is a metaphor. First there’s the idea, then the visible metaphor. The creative act gives form to the metaphor. — Brett

Yes, that seems right. But, although creativity and art are, in some ways, distinct, we should remember that art is creative. Creation is at the heart of art; art cannot exist without it.

I would find it difficult to view these as anything but survival features. — Brett

I agree - it does require a paradigm shift. We’ve learned to view traits as beneficial from either a survival perspective or a reproductive perspective, and this now comes as natural to us as apologetics to a fundamentalist. But in terms of evolution I wonder, for instance, how we determine that the live birth of a child, who is then completely dependent on an interactive parent for several years, is a survival feature. Do you get the feeling that we’re forcing some features and behaviour to fit the theory because there’s no alternative reasoning and it appears to work for everything else?

Human behaviour along the lines of altruism or love seem to suggest that we have the capacity to override our survival instinct - or is it perhaps to undermine it? This is not an exclusively human capacity, after all. Many animals ignore their instinct to survive and give their lives to a greater ‘cause’. Many religious traditions also suggest that we’ve lost our way, and are trying to regain some position we once had through these acts of unconditional love and altruism, selflessness and martyrdom - that there is a greater calling to connect with and help others that inspires us to ignore our survival instinct in the process. Traditional thought has been that this calling comes from some extraneous ‘being’ - I believe there is no evidence to support this, but I can’t ignore evidence that we can be inspired to risk our life and even give it up for love, creativity or the pursuit of new information.

Religious hocus pocus aside, I think we can either twist altruism, love, creativity, etc into survival traits of some kind, or we can consider the possibility that there is something we haven’t quite grasped yet about what drives us. I understand your preference for the former and I might be completely misguided in this, but to me it feels a bit like squeezing a round peg through a square hole.

Creation is at the heart of art; art cannot exist without it. — Pattern-chaser

Totally agree.

Edit: what I meant was that the creative act is not always artistic.

But in terms of evolution I wonder, for instance, how we determine that the live birth of a child, who is then completely dependent on an interactive parent for several years, is a survival feature. Do you get the feeling that we’re forcing some features and behaviour to fit the theory because there’s no alternative reasoning and it appears to work for everything else? — Possibility

Yes, I do sometimes consider that possibility. The birth of a child is not something I think a man and woman sat down and considered and decided that a child added to their chances of survival. But eventually it’s possible they saw having male children as beneficial to their survival when they have grown. It doesn’t take much thinking for a male to impregnate a female. Nature seems to have sided with rape here.

There’s a lot in your post I don’t agree with, but then it becomes a conversation about evolution, which I’m happy to have, but it’s for another conversation, unless everyone wants to go that way here. Though I have to say I don’t go for ‘the selfish gene’ idea.

I am puzzled that, in this discussion, some posters seem to minimise the importance, or even presence, of creation in the creative process*. Have I misunderstood, or missed something? :chin:

* - I claim only that creation is at the heart of the creative process. Important to state there is more to the creative process than creation, though. :up:

I am puzzled that, in this discussion, some posters seem to minimise the importance, or even presence, of creation in the creative process*. Have I misunderstood, or missed something? :chin:

* - I claim only that creation is at the heart of the creative process. Important to state there is more to the creative process than creation, though. :up: — Pattern-chaser

I understand the confusion. The suffix ‘-ive’ turns a verb into a tendency, inclination, character or quality. This, for me, suggests that the potential is known to exist, but doesn’t require completion of the act in order to be true. Someone doubting this tendency, though, will obviously require a completed act as evidence.

But in my view a specific completed creation (particularly a successful one) need not be part of a process that tends towards creation in general.

in my view a specific completed creation (particularly a successful one) need not be part of a process that tends towards creation in general. — Possibility

Any specific completed creation is surely the result of a creative process?

Any specific completed creation is surely the result of a creative process? — Pattern-chaser

It can only be an anticipated result while the process is occurring. Because a process is still creative even if a result is not yet specified. For it to be purely creative, the process should be sufficiently open-ended so that, while some kind of result may be anticipated, no specific result/creation is expected to be completed within a certain timeframe - otherwise the creative process is limited.

Most creative process, particularly in industry, is necessarily limited because a result is expected in within a timeframe. These observable or measurable limitations provide evidence of the process - they are not the process.

We book-end the creative process with a nothing and a something because we can’t measure or define the process itself. But in my experience, creative process begins with nothing more than awareness of potential that arguably was always there, and ends only when awareness ends.

When I ‘finish’ a creative work as part of my job, it’s only according to the specifications of the job that I can refer to it as ‘complete’. The process in my experience is ongoing because I am still aware of potential in the work. I can theoretically repurpose all of its components to meet alternative specifications if required.

But eventually it’s possible they saw having male children as beneficial to their survival when they have grown. — Brett

Consider an early human who must continually be aware of and then run from wild animals outside of his cave in order to find food and water to survive. A human who runs from an animal towards a bushfire will escape the animal but perish in the fire, producing a null result in terms of evolution.

But a creative human not in immediate danger who observes this situation can recognise the potential of fire to deter wild animals. By integrating this new information with:

- what he knows from interacting with fire in situations when he isn’t trying to survive a wild animal but instead trying to survive a fire, and

- what he knows from interacting with fire when he isn’t threatened by either the fire or wild animals,

the creative human can then determine a way to harness the potential of fire in deterring wild animals, thereby increasing awareness of his own capacity - in this instance for survival.

I see human creativity as an additional dimension of awareness that enables us to integrate information from both stimulus-response and memory to increase our awareness of potential. As described in my previous post, this potential is not necessarily limited to survival - rather it is our focus on survival that limits it by requiring a specific result.

But a creative human not in immediate danger who observes this situation can recognise the potential of fire to deter wild animals. By integrating this new information with:

- what he knows from interacting with fire in situations when he isn’t trying to survive a wild animal but instead trying to survive a fire, and

- what he knows from interacting with fire when he isn’t threatened by either the fire or wild animals,

the creative human can then determine a way to harness the potential of fire in deterring wild animals, thereby increasing awareness of his own capacity - in this instance for survival. — Possibility

This is not the same is creating fire with a flint or rubbing a sharp stick against wood to create heat and then a flame.

This is the Macmillan meaning of ‘create’: to make something new or original that did not exist before.

Would you agree?

Though your fire story could be regarded as a creative act, or thought, that has a beneficial result. I really don’t know how to classify that.
Of course there’s the possibility that it may never have happened.

As described in my previous post, this potential is not necessarily limited to survival - rather it is our focus on survival that limits it by requiring a specific result. — Possibility

The result is purely chance. Early man was not seeking a specific result. You cannot say I’m going to invent a specific thing, because you must already be aware of aspects of that thing. Once the original thing is made real then it can be applied in different ways. This is the advantage that ‘creating’ gives to man, the instinct or desire for ‘fiddling’ throws his genes forward.

Though your fire story could be regarded as a creative act, or thought, that has a beneficial result. I really don’t know how to classify that. — Brett

It’s the need to classify it that complicates our understanding of it. It’s not like humans ‘creating fire’ can be mapped out or clearly defined as a single, linear process with a start and finish. It’s a complex, multi-dimensional process of integrating information across a wide variety of experiences. To suggest that someone happened to be idly rubbing a sharp stick against wood and accidentally ‘created’ fire, then looked for different ways to apply it, is ignorant of the wide variety of ways we receive, process and integrate information.

The result is purely chance. Early man was not seeking a specific result. You cannot say I’m going to invent a specific thing, because you must already be aware of aspects of that thing. Once the original thing is made real then it can be applied in different ways. — Brett

I’m not suggesting that early man intended to invent fire. Early man intended to not be killed - this is a specific result. He had to already know that fire existed, and that it could be ‘created’ under certain conditions, before he could determine how he could create it when required for the specific purpose of survival.

Chance is observing (and remembering) the spark that occurs when a flint rock happens to fall on another. Chance is happening upon a fire in its infancy and observing a spark turn into a flame. A combination of chance encounters with fire over time, as well as deliberate interactions (fiddle with things, mix them up, try different fits) both with and without requiring specific results - all of these subjective experiences (including internal thought processes) were integral to a ‘completed’ act that first demonstrated ‘man creating fire’.

But the entire creative process on which this ‘completed’ act depends can’t be described as creating fire or surviving without distorting our view of it - reducing it to less than the complex web of its necessary contributions. Hence a specific result, anticipated or otherwise, cannot be used to accurately describe the creative process. If we’re hoping to understand creativity and what it means to be creative - to possess a tendency or inclination to create - I think we have to get past this focus on a completed creation.

I see human creativity as an additional dimension of awareness that enables us to integrate information from both stimulus-response and memory to increase our awareness of potential. As described in my previous post, this potential is not necessarily limited to survival - rather it is our focus on survival that limits it by requiring a specific result. — Possibility

It’s hard for me to make clear, and I maybe missing something myself, that without a creative act that contributes towards survival there will be no second act. And as a consequence, only those who can manipulate that creative act will survive. The focus on survival doesn’t limit potential because of, as you say, requiring a result. It’s only the result, and a specific beneficial result, that enables that potential to live on. In the past any creative act without a tangible result, without contributing towards wellbeing, results in atrophy. Of course no one can know which act is going to be beneficial, natural selection sorts that out. Only the most beneficial acts survive because they travel with the creator who survives and thrives because of the benefits of the creative act.

I may or may not be making sense. I’m open to others who might be able to clarify what I’m saying, or prove me wrong.

As I understand it, you (and I would imagine, many others) see a ‘creative act’ as an act in which one creates - and so any creative act that does not result in anything objectively tangible or useful is a waste of time, energy, attention and effort on the creator’s part. Because if nothing can objectively exist as evidence, then what’s the point? Please correct me if I’m wrong. I can see the logic in this argument.

It’s hard for me to make clear, and I maybe missing something myself, that without a creative act that contributes towards survival there will be no second act. And as a consequence, only those who can manipulate that creative act will survive. — Brett

It seems like you’re referring to a particular survival situation as an entity: those who can create fire will survive, while those who don’t have sufficient experiences to make a correlation between the flint, wood and their own hand movements will... freeze to death? I’m not sure what specific situation or pending threat you have in mind that is averted by being able to create fire. In a certain life-and-death situation, yes - only those who can make fire will survive. But to me, the creative act incorporates the integration of all the necessary information/experience in order to recognise one’s own capacity to use making fire as a tool for survival, and act on that awareness when the situation arises. Of course that recognition may only occur in the moment, but the information must already be a part of the system.

I’m trying to offer a different perspective here, because I get the impression that you are attempting to describe a creative act from the outside. Have you ever tried to describe it from within the act? As a participant - not as an observer or even a creator at the completion of the act, but as someone being creative right now?

When you see another human ‘creating’ something, what you can observe or deduce from them about the process is taken to be the creative act in itself. But what about when it is you being creative? Do you recognise the difference between the question ‘how am I being creative?’, and ‘how does it appear that I am being creative?’

But to me, the creative act incorporates the integration of all the necessary information/experience in order to recognise one’s own capacity to use making fire as a tool for survival, and act on that awareness when the situation arises. — Possibility

This is what happens after the creative act. The creative act of starting a fire is followed by the use of it, being able to ‘recognise one’s own capacity to use making fire as a tool for survival’.

those who can create fire will survive, while those who don’t have sufficient experiences to make a correlation between the flint, wood and their own hand movements will... freeze to death? — Possibility

I would think that fire contributed to our development in more ways than just keeping warm.

In its origins the creative act, the process, wasn’t a conscious act. (Is it today? I’m not sure). It had no intention, it was the behaviour of an animal that ‘fiddled’. There were creations that failed, disappeared with their creator, just as particular genetic features that hampered an animal’s success disappeared with the animal who could not survive.

The creative act is as random as that. Not all creations are good or moral. Even if the creative process is long and drawn out, taking and using, thinking and adjusting, even if it takes years for the realisation of an idea, nothing of it will survive if there is no beneficial result. The moment the animal (man) finally struck with the flint and made the connection he could repeat it, that’s the result. Without that you may still call it the creative process, which it is, but it’s still a mechanism, if you like, that contributes to survival.

Admittedly there were many previous little creative acts that went nowhere and appear to be done for the sake of being creative, but if there’s no result then what can it affect. If there was only the creative act, the process, and that was enough, would we be here? How long can this process go on without effect? To live like that is an indulgence, the threat to survival is not real if pointless acts are carried out and there are no consequences. No animal I know of can live and survive like that, except the domesticated dog or an animal in the zoo.

Of course the creative act opens us up to other potentials, but it can’t keep opening up potentials endlessly, forever. A potential is exactly that, the capacity to develop into something. What is a potential that never develops into something?

Have you ever tried to describe it from within the act? As a participant - not as an observer or even a creator at the completion of the act, but as someone being creative right now? — Possibility

The act, participating, creating, being creative right now is the description from inside.

I’d like to try and clear up a few things, if I may.

I agree that mixing things up is a factor in the creative process. I disagree that this ‘desire for fiddling’ encapsulates creativity. It is how we process and integrate information as we ‘fiddle’ or generally experience the universe that gives us our creative advantage. We can fiddle all we want, but if we couldn’t recognise and correlate between entities, value and meaning, then we wouldn’t be where we are now.

I agree that the creative process contributes to survival. I disagree that it must contribute to survival in order to exist. I understand that this is difficult to follow - unless you can relate to the experience of being aware of partially formed or continually evolving ideas.

I agree and have already stated that the creative process alone is not enough. Something needs to be produced from it, otherwise we lose track of it - but to call it a ‘result’ in terms of a ‘completed’ act is false, because the creative process is ongoing. I can produce something that attempts to demonstrate where I am in the process right now, but by the time the paint is dry on a tangible result, I could begin another to demonstrate how much the process has already evolved. An example of this is the evolution of iPhone technology.

And I disagree that there are pointless creative acts, because all acts have the potential to advance the creative process - just as the man who escapes a wild animal only to perish in the fire can provide vital new information for another man observing that may not be immediately apparent. The more we are aware of these creations that ‘failed’ or disappeared with their creator, the more information we have at our disposal. It pays to be aware, to interconnect and to enable others to achieve, even as we fail.

Of course the creative act opens us up to other potentials, but it can’t keep opening up potentials endlessly, forever. — Brett

Are you sure about that?

A potential is exactly that, the capacity to develop into something. What is a potential that never develops into something? — Brett

A potential isn’t exactly anything - it’s more open-ended than you might think. Potential is the capacity to develop. I don’t see specific potentials, therefore, but rather ‘potential’ as a source to draw from.

Integrating information from a long series of failed experiences, even across several generations, can increase our chance of success. Likewise, pursuing information from anomalies and atypical data that might otherwise have been discarded by scientific process helps to advance our understanding of the universe. This is how the creative process operates alongside natural selection and rational thought, to increase overall achievement.

I’m not sure what we’re disagreeing about, in fact I’m not sure if we are disagreeing.

The word ‘fiddling may have become a bit too literal. By ‘fiddling’ I do mean how we “correlate between entities, value and meaning“. That is being creative, maybe being conscious and being creative are the same thing: “how we process and integrate information”.

I disagree that it must contribute to survival in order to exist. — Possibility

I can’t see it any other way.

to call it a ‘result’ in terms of a ‘completed’ act is false — Possibility

Call it a step, then.

This is how the creative process operates alongside natural selection and rational thought, to increase overall achievement. — Possibility

The creative process and rational thought work together, natural selection has the final say.

Any specific completed creation is surely the result of a creative process? — Pattern-chaser

It can only be an anticipated result while the process is occurring. — Possibility

Yes:

Any specific completed creation is surely the result of a creative process? — Pattern-chaser

I disagree that it must contribute to survival in order to exist.
— Possibility

I can’t see it any other way. — Brett

This is what I mean by examining the creative process from within the process - it exists for the creator long before it contributes to survival, and has the potential to continue existing even as his creations fail to contribute to survival (whether he falls back on another survival method or perishes). All it takes is for someone to be aware of it.

The creative process and rational thought work together, natural selection has the final say. — Brett

Not the way I see it. ‘Final’ say on what, exactly? The creative process is such that there is no finality except what we make of it. Every step in the process has the potential to be a dead end or a step forward, depending on how we look at it and interact with it.

By ‘fiddling’ I do mean how we “correlate between entities, value and meaning“. That is being creative, maybe being conscious and being creative are the same thing: “how we process and integrate information”. — Brett

This is how we’ve been creative in the past, but I don’t think it’s how we’re being creative now. I will try to explain what I mean by this, because the way I see it, to be creative now requires us to be conscious in a further dimension. Instead of interacting with an objective self as universe (like most animals), humans developed the capacity to view the previously ‘universal’ self as a finite entity within an infinite physical universe, where we interacted with everything not as stimuli but as other entities from specific positions within space and time, to which we attributed objective values and meaning.

But we’re now developing our capacity to view the previously ‘universal’ physical cosmos as a complex web of finite processes within an infinitely unfolding universe. Here, we interact not as entities, but as interconnected processes on complex trajectories across spacetime, value systems and networks of meaning.

While I agree that a specific creation can result from the creative process, I disagree that a creative process ‘surely’ results in a specific completed creation. I hope you follow the distinction.

From the creator’s perspective, a pure result of the creative process is always a work in progress, never a ‘completed’ creation. It is ‘completed’ only in terms of the limitations of product specifications, contractual agreements, value systems, etc. To anticipate a specific result in the creative process is to limit the process. It is not a requirement of the creative process to ‘complete’ a creation, let alone a specific one.