Arbu1237,

Doesn't look like there are many books on creativity, by current conscensus, but Edward de Bono has plenty of books out that touch on creative left field thinking.

helping smile

The power of the mind to create though. And than with these though, make wonder like making a TikTok.

There is nothing new under the sun; there are no ideas that nobody's ever had. You will never make anything completely different from everything that's been done been before. Creativity is more like being a kaleidoscope; reconfiguring what already exists in a new arrangement. — Vera Mont

Here’s a postulate I’d like to test out:

There can be no distal goal held by life—from bacteria to humans—which is utterly original and thereby never before held in any manner by any lifeform. Nothing new under the sun in this sense. Yet there can occur utterly original heuristical means of best obtaining a given goal, and, in this, creativity can and does occur—such that, for one example, novel ideas can be devised as just such means toward a pursued end. With one such fairly recent example of a novel idea being that termed “meme”.

This will then apply to all contexts in which creativity can unfold: artistic, technological, mathematical, scientific (esp. in relation to scientific hypotheses but also in relation to means of testing these), philosophical, etc.

Hence making creativity necessarily dependent on some intent and the intentioning to get there. And, hence, teleological. Purely accidental results are thereby not a product of creativity—though their newly found application or utility can be.

I have a primitive view of creativity. If something is made that didn't exist before, no matter how many millions of other examples of that same thing exist, the making of that something is creativity. If I take a piece of paper and make a paper airplane, to me that is being creative. That particular paper airplane didn't exist before I made it. If the soil accepts an acorn and grows an oak tree, the soil is being creative no matter how many oak trees are in existence, as that particular oak tree had never existed before.

Your post brings up the situation that some define the word as a synonym of manufacturing (creating things) and others of novelty (coming up with a "creative" solution).

While you bring up a cogent distinction, I’m not familiar with the term “creativity” being used in the first sense of simply “creating things”.

For example, if one follows a blueprint to at T so as to create an item, is one then being in any way creative? I get that one here creates the item in the sense of “bringing it into existence”, but there so far seems to me to be something quite off in expressing that this same act of creation was in any way creative.

How would one then distinguish the creativity of a poet, for example, in bringing a poem into existence from the ability of a non-sentient AI program to via its (fully deterministic) algorithms create linguistic expressions and thereby bring into existence what we would recognize as a poem? Same could be asked of images (AI now being a staple part of Photoshop, for example), sounds, and so forth. And this same train of reasoning can then be further pursued in terms of a non-AI robot in a factory being creative in creating, for example, a certain car part.

Or would one not find reason to so distinguish?

Thoughts?

I was addressing alleybear's usage of the word in his previous posting, which seems to use the term in just the way you are apparently unfamiliar with.