I'm both glad and unhappy you brought Kant up, as it goes back to already expounded arguments from his work. It seems to be that it often goes in the real world that those 'gross causes' are either too heavily weighed or considered completely absent. When you go to make a case for them taking their due weight you find them becoming more and more of an abstraction. The gross causes are the same as any net cause, but take effect through the sum of many disparate parts rather than as a single unified cause. So if we are to make any real headway towards their consideration, it would be expedient to pursue a type of skepticism about causes or else find yourself chasing some perfect 20/20 vision that doesn't exist.

Thanks Tim, yes your translation makes sense. Where this became a problem for me was the antagonism between practicality and skepticism. It actually made more practical sense to do poor quality work, so our inclinations would lead us to believe we should. But even if we have a complete set of reasons that extends as far as we can think of, the perceived causality can be broken down to higher resolution and examined in more detail. So even the most clear reasons aren't complete.

To do otherwise would be to drown all mystery in probabilities, the chances that something were to be beneficial to company trumping any alternate cause. The proposition gets around this by using the cause itself as a sum total of alternate causes like below:

EVENT GOOD WORK (cause)---> NO FINANCIAL IMPACT (effect)-----> OBSERVATION (effect)

changes to

EVENT GOOD WORK {INCREASING SKILLS, SETTING EXAMPLE TO OTHER EMPLOYEES, OTHER PEOPLE, etc}---> CLIENT SATISFIED, END USER EXPERIENCE IMPROVED, MORE LONG TERM BUSINESS, WORSE TIME MANAGEMENT, etc -----> OBSERVATION

Another equivalent would be

TEST EXPERIMENT COMPLETE (cause) ----> KILL TEST RAT POPULATION (effect) ----> NO PERCEIVED PROBLEM (effect)

changes to

TEST EXPERIMENT COMPLETE---> KILL TEST RATS {cause rats pain in death, reduce empathy towards animals and humans through some real factor, etc}---> TEST EXPERIMENTS LOSE GOAL OF GREATER GOOD DUE TO REDUCED OVERALL EMOTIONAL RESPONSE

When I am adding in these new details they too are based on the same physical phenomena that generated the cause that was a pure and acceptable reasoning. To express the cause in terms of their net effects, these internal forces were filtered out. These are the kinds of reasons that in the real world usually make people say "Are you serious? Give me a Break!" The question was, is it worthwhile to bother considering them?

Thanks Thomasina, this is nice. Thanks for the link.

Cabbage, let me furnish one more example and that's it. Take the occurrence of white rappers. When white rappers came onto the scene via House of Pain, Eminem, etc, some things began changing, all of a sudden white guys everywhere started wearing baggy pants, talking slang, and stuff like that and the sorts of of rap music being created changed. Now did:

a) White rappers influence the kids to wear baggy pants, talk slang and change rap music
b) People start wearing baggy pants, talking slang and rap music underwent change, which influenced the production of white rappers
c) All of the above
d) None of the above
e) From certain perspectives a/b/c/d can be both all true and all false

All we can say for sure is that the act of producing white rap had some significance to reality. So when we're talking about creativity, in my opinion we're speaking about these sorts of processes, where we can substitute the white rapper for the creator. Philosophy then needs to be extra careful about the use of language and internal logic that it employs in order to explain these faculties. But at the same time, the white rappers of the world and the baggy pants wearers may still need to retain their freedoms and liberties to do what they do without being encumbered by all this. However, when it comes to a full philosophical examination, that would bring with it a feeling of inadequacy and misdirection to ignore it.

it sounds like you have in mind something like the expectations or preconceptions with which a consumer engages an artwork, perhaps including expectations of skill-level, medium, genre, style, theme and subtext, even the cultural "identity" of the artist... Is that the right ballpark?

It’s in the right ball park. Unfortunately, in my view there are always challenges to discussing these sorts of things because the language used infers a sort of linear relation that if x happens you always get y, and this sort of talk seems to cause misconceptions at such a microscopic level.

In what sense shall we think of such expectations along the lines of a "contract"? Interesting suggestion.

For artists or general public it makes complete sense to view the whole creative process as a type of game where they’re the player. But when we bring up the ideas of creator/receiver for serious introspection, I think it makes sense to include the ways in which those ideas are somehow artificial. Artificial in the sense of being both man-made and of an artifice or external appearance that seems to distract inquiry from their nature. In this way I’m trying to establish the contract that those involved in the creative process adhere to that is foreign to their own perspectives.

Because technologically we’ve reached a level where the cultural conceptions of the creator and the receiver can work almost solely independent and unaffected, we now have more need I think, when considering the process intellectually, to consider them. When I draw a picture on my personal notepad, To me I’m drawing from my experience and spending some time to get better, but when we evaluate the true value such an act has, we can also consider it’s importance as, say, a cultural act of keeping the notion of the drawing or subject alive, and other such mechanisms. I think a large portion of modern creativity is taken up by these mechanisms that we only have knowledge of theoretically. Thus we can’t build such massive structures of thought on simple premises as we’d prefer to.

Someone mentioned my anthropological view. I’d go along with that. The creative act is a human instinct: to fiddle with things, mix them up, try different fits, stuff we all do. It’s also observed in the form of tool making in some animals, more commonly in apes.

It seems like your answer is right but the reasoning of your arguement isn’t totally firm. It goes a) fiddling, mixing, fitting are behaviours observed in animals and thus likely instinctually derived. b) Creativity involves these. c) Therefore creativity must be instinctually derived.

The issue is that it can be applied like this: a) running and jumping involve mostly legwork b) basketball involves running and jumping. c) therefore basketball must be mostly legwork.

I’m not saying that you’re wrong, in fact there is a lot of truth to this, but it seems something is being held back that is crucial to the connection you’re making between creativity and instinct.

The point is that the thing you’re doing when you create or be creative is something, the same way we consider our thoughts to be something. If it weren’t it would just be a bunch of guys on guitars playing with a drummer as opposed to a band. We might still appreciate it, but its identity as a rock show has character traits indepedendent of the faculties of the ‘creator’ and ‘receiver.’ Not necessarily independent of mind altogether. Apologies for these lacking terms but there’s no noun available for this.

Did the creator make it something, or the receiver? Should we start accrediting our work to others? I dont believe so. But it seems clear that creativity is somehow engaged with this power even before the creative act takes place. So thereby when the creator says ‘I upload my paintings to photobucket because I love to paint and to have someone view it,’ and the receiver says ‘I love to view paintings in this form please make more.’ This doesn’t imply we have a closed conservative system where one entity simply transfers creative energy to a product that is then received and transferred back in the form of demand.

Don’t remeber saying anything about liking the music could you find a quote?

Why would they make an album I wouldn’t like?

Why would it matter to anyone but myself? If there were nobody to measure it’s probability or allow it to affect the outcome, it would have the same meaning to the creator before the result took place. And this discongruity in time is an ugly fact that comes to bear on the type of creativity in the creation.

Yes. I might and that might has some significance aside from my desires and those of the creator.

maybe an example may help?

I visit a music festival and purchase a vinyl disc. This musician might take this as a symbol that this type of music has pleased me, and produce more like it, where in reality it was the cultural act of buying the record itself that was of value for me the receiver, and wasn’t dependent on my buying his record or even any record at all. These two perspectives fall out of alignment.

It could be one loves nothing better than the cottage manufacture of fine artisanal widgets. Now if I'm making them anyway, and people want to pay me for as many widgets as I see fit to part with, at prices I see fit to accept.... Doesn't this have the markings of a happy bargain?

Sorry at this point if it sounds disorganized. But I’m referring to the contract not at the social level but at the individual. It is the disassociated relation where the creator and receiver depend on one another symbolically without real physical dependence. I suppose a sort of cultural contract would be better fit to describe it. That for my experience as a viewer going to, say, an art gallery expecting to find certain works of a certain type I maintain that expectation with another type, and this goes for whether or not the work is ‘received.’

I’m sorry if this sounds muddled. I’m trying to be clear.

The receiver of said creative product comes to be blindsided by their social contract with the creator, who no longer has interest in upholding their part of the implicit social contract. The receiver is now coming to the table with the intention of paying to receive that media that the creator has only offered with an intention to subsist his/herself.

It’s never been any different has it?

That may be your observation but you must admit there have been some changes. I can only appeal to common experience here.

It’s entirely possible for me as a creator to endow an artwork or software program with creativity and exhibit it to an audience without anyone’s assistance besides large web hosting middlemen. It could be a complete blast and it could stay within those pleasure constraints to maintain reason for continuing the project. In this sense I meant it is different from ‘work’ as selling my labour or time to a company in exchange for means of subsistence. Because then I would not have complete freedom only to enjoy the process. The idea is in agreeing to the power structure of essentially working for these companies we implicitly disallow work, or else become a sort of slave. That is, unless the act had some other significance like what we’ve been discussing.

Don’t you think that a massive coorporation that makes money off artists caught in this cycle of despair would have interests in preserving it in such a state? Their profits are made from masses of content and subscribers engaging interactively in their frameworks. They are making money from these people being unsuccessful.

usually the aim is to produce stuff that's partially designed to please oneself and others with more or less the same tastes, and partially designed to be able to attract (or maintain if one has already attracted) a currently viable audience.

Yes I also see things the same way, but I get the feeling that it’s like playing ping pong in a tennis court. I don’t see how with such a mass of semi-aimless creators for them not to be horribly taken advantage of by capitalists and as before I used the slave hyperbole but it’s not that far off.

If our notion of creativity extends beyond this it would probably give the creators more power.

Yes it feels as though if it were only a set of in-built drives, we’d simply be following directives of our instincts like a bird building it’s nest. Though in actuality that’s a good description of what we’re doing, it doesn’t alone describe the striving of the act that is it’s character. There is something sociological left out from Brett’s purely anthropological perspective, as well as something individual.

I’m still struggling to understand our position and the issue you’re looking at? The internet has freed up artistic creativity, and other more obscure interests, by artists and niche interests being funded by individuals supporting the work of others they like.

There was no supposition that something was wrong intended, it just seems like lots and lots of work is being produced and received by the public and there isn’t really any clear modern concept of why anyone is really doing it.

Your position seems in line with Brett. You both believe the creator and the receiver to be clearly defined separate entities, that the creative has a set of clearly defined properties that isn’t affected substantially by environmental factors. I do agree that this is a virtue, but by no means defines an ideal way of being. If all that mattered was the creator, the work is all a sort of collective self-gratification. To be realistic the artisit doesnt have reason to exist in a vacuum.

In my opinion there are two aspects to creativity. One is an awareness of or familiarity with the materials and constraints of a particular creative space... The other aspect is the capacity to interact with the highest potentiality of that creative space

So your view is essentially the same as Brett’s, that it goes no further than a problem-solution relationship. Inventiveness. In this case, creativity for someone else's benefit would be work, in the sense that most cultures find this type of activity to be so. And to create only to the benefit of industrialists would be a type of mild slavery.

The creative animal is most creative when they’re in a position where they’re not fighting for survival (financial, career, life, etc), not under pressure to produce, and not worrying about physical evidence of their creative act.

+1
It’s deceptive, like ‘love,’ that is all fashionable to call just another word, but always seems lacking in definition as such.

however, is more valuable - not because it has a higher use-value, but because the creative process is more demanding and time-consuming

There must be more because stopping here we’d be in danger then of claiming that a work that took weeks by Salieri took more creativity than a work that only took one hour for Mozart. Even though Mozart was trained from childhood and it maybe took him less effort.

I certainly do agree that there’s a vast difference. Perhaps we are guilty of looking at what is, and not whats striven to be. The two works appear the same to the viewer. That when the viewer entered into the social contract to view and the creator to create they engaged in a sort of common undefined notion of the creation. Even if that contract fails the notion still has a magnitude of creativity in it, don’t you think?

Using evolution theory to describe things like creativity poses a deficiency problem for me. That is by what do we measure it? To say something exists for this or that reason is as much as to say how something exists and doesnt really tell us much about it besides the conditions that it is currently under. How does something come to be an effect of natural selection? There must be some agency, because it’s not impossible it could have been some other way.

I can’t say the explanation that it is that skill whereby animals came to use their brains to find new ways to survive is not incorrect but doesnt encompass it totally, this includes virtually any behaviour that favours selection. Then craftiness, betrayal, even murder are all creativity. What isn’t creativity then?

I mean you said you gain satisfaction from doing ‘good creative work.’ Apologies if this is in any manner offensive as thats not my intention at all. But that the context of the work within a discourse does not create pleasure or isn’t motivated from it. This being that you can’t really have the purpose of creating meaning out of pure survival, but through interaction with something like what Berkeley calls ‘spirits’?

would you then say that the work is successful in it’s own right but doesn’t seek to have meaning in the sense that the delivery of your creativity and its reception forms a closed, conserved system?

I think what you may be getting at is the meaning of the creativity. Being distinguished from it’s self contained rules for its existence.

A work environment that genuinely inspires creativity, therefore, must be one that values and trusts the creative process: where not all time, effort, thought or research is evident in the end product.

This is interesting, so someone who arranges a photograph with an AI program and another with their eye. Though to the viewer there is no conscious difference these are nevertheless not equivalent.

So you do work, labour, for a client. Besides profit, what are the characteristics of the the social exchange? Do you receive different levels of individual satisfaction from having the identity of a composer, or receive greater insight into the lives of others? The world?

I’m not sure what you’re referring to here, what are the new forms of creativity that work against monetisation?

Apologies if this leaves out many people's experience who were involved in the pre-2000 creative environment, but this was supposed to refer to the 'YouTube,' 'BandCamp,' Kickstarter,' media. These forms are now causing some friction against the traditional creative structures. By working against monetization, I mean that the majority of the individuals participating, at the same time as competing with industry pros, they are also setting out with not even the slightest intention of making money, or appealing to others for their appetites, but rather has greater emphasis on the appetites of the creator, and the pleasure it brings them to take on a social identity, feel wanted, etc. The question I was trying to reveal is, 'what constitutes this pleasure and these appetites?' But obviously describing the creative process itself if important to gain an concept of it.

What I’m trying to say (i think) is that the only true creative act today is one that has ‘value-use’, because creating is an instinct for survival. It has to have a purpose that benefits survival or movement forward, otherwise it’s indulgence.

So by this you are saying that small time YouTubers are in a sense setting out in the lottery of being discovered among 1.8 billion users, in order to turn this into a survival mechanism. Or it has some survival purpose beyond social use, such as helping them think more creatively when picking up women, and increase their chances of sexual selection. What would be some examples of the survival purpose of this?

I'd like to correct myself there, that technically I don't think that what I said was totally right, where I said "but not involved in the definition thereof." Because obviously, creativity has as it's aim to produce an original new thing. But it's not a definitive quality inherent in the product, but in the intention.

One thing we know about creativity is that it involves the creation of something that is somehow, in some way, new and different.

I'd argue that it being new and different is a property of originality rather than creativity. The quality of the work being not like other works is unmistakably a common motivation in creativity, but not involved in the definition thereof. If it were, then something could be both creative and non-creative between two different times, and in two places where something that was considered new and different is now no longer the case. Then once it were forgotten or distorted about which event came first, one could say that anything that was later copied by others was no longer new and thus not creative, where the original act was, in fact, a creative act.

No, I'd never say anything like that. I'm the guy rather diametrically opposed to any judgmental normatives like that.

If the goal is to create a catalogue of all we know about creativity, it would be clearer to eliminate the supposition of the self and determining free will from your definition and just say, 'It is the re-arrangement of matter/materials into a new form' rather than 'you take materials and rearrange them...' etc.

The definition makes sense to me. So what we're really doing is taking some materials or ideas outside of their natural state and arranging them to serve ourselves, like an exaggerated form of resourcefulness. In your view then, would art purely for other's sake be a bastardization from it's true aims unless it served oneself in some way?

I fully agree. Though to be clear one’s object doesn’t really have use-value to them-self.

Thanks Brett. So your point is that the painting of a picture is not distinguishable from a chimp using a stick to catch birds. The decision of said chimp was from the get-go motivated by need for prey. Thereby the decision was likely of the form ‘if I spend time x to create a stick and do y it will achieve z.’ So would this be any different if the chimp instead of coming up with the idea paid another chimp 30 bananas for their stick and to be trained how to use it. The stick would then have some use-value imparted to it by the first chimp.

Would you expect chimp 1 to give away his stick that he worked for, simply for love of creating sticks? Even if he really loved making them surely he’d realize that was liable to cause him problems.

Supposing there were an deity, and they had power over everything, and human existence had no such quality as Free Will, there would be no transgressions of his rule and thereby no need for teachings.
Really when it comes down to it, it seems to me like science has come to replace religion as a set of ways to act and describe things. From this point of view it is essential that Free Will be destroyed wherever it appears, as it is an existential threat to the idea that all phenomena can be described, analyzed, and studied.

Loved Islam, that may be an overstatement?

The Real is what happens against the Reality, while the Reality happens all the time. Here (and this is not a Christian apologia)

The Real, Reality, and the Imaginary. It feels as though Lacan would have considered both Christ and Jesus to be a mixture of Imaginary and Real. But he's also a psychologist so that seems appropriate.

Hi ritikew, no question my post contains some bias. I don't pretend to escape it, but I do endeavour to.

You bring up the use of technology in process as well as consumption, which is good. To do work itself is easier, and to do large-scale work has been ever increasingly become more 'fun.' Take music for instance, who knows how many fun toy-like devices have come out to create that with, and do things that used to take hours to do with old technologies. In this way, the part of the reward, so to speak, for creative work that is the 'fun' part is greater.

The question is would it be better if there was no 'work' to the process, or not. And the creator was just purely enjoying his/her self? It it my opinion that the process of having that enjoyment is in part derived from the social value of the act itself.