Bodhran Daraichean" <Bodhran22@AOL.COM> writes:
>Isn't "creativity" an attribute given to purposeful, sentinent
>actions? I'm not positive, but unless you'd like to give
>god/goddress/whatever credit and say "god made these
>pretty swirls 'cause he made the wind," or "The wind
>made these swirls deliberately," can you really use the term
>"creative" to apply?
Greetings Bodhran,
You ask some pretty important questions. Consider your first
question:
"Isn't "creativity" an attribute given to purposeful, sentinent
actions?"
For me it has two first facets.
Firstly, WHO is going to supply the correct answer of what creativity is?
If the answer is given by anybody else than the questioner so that the
creativity of the questioner is not involved, can the answer be correct at
all?
Secondly, consider the creation of the atom bomb more than fifty years
ago. It was the result of purposeful, sentinent actions. Does it qualify
as an outcome of creativity? Since it was a very destructive outcome, does
creativity have a negative side to it? Does destructive creativity also
involve the transformation of order into chaos?
Your second question is:
"can you really use the term "creative" to apply .....[to swirls in
fluids]?"
It also has a number of facets which we should think of.
Firstly, swirls in fluids do not have to involve humans, for example,
swirls in rivers? Now, when a non-human system performs any process which
looks exactly like some creative preformance of a human, does creativity
apply to the system, or does creativity not apply anymore to that human
performance.
Secondly, the appearance of swirls in a liquid is already a higher
self-organised form in it. This turbulent flow happens when the laminar
flow exceeds the Reynold's number for the setup. The laminar flow involves
a flat plane order while the swirls involve a 3D cycloid order. The
difference is that the turbulent flow is unstable at to low flow rates.
Now, does any unstability in an order undo the fact that it is an order?
I think we cannot just claim that chaos is part of or is not part of
creativity. We will have to justify our claim (yes or no) creatively,
using the mind and the heart to do so. But I am even more convinced that
long before we attempt to justify our claim, we should began to ask
questions and try to answer them. This is, Bodhran, why I appreciate your
questions so much.
Here is a question to contemplate. Do differences inprove our creativity?
The reason why I ask is that differences play a definite role in creating
chaos. If chaos is not part of creativity, why do differences improve
creativity?
Best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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