The World of SPLectrum
The Generative Value
This post marks a new beginning: the start of the creativity series. It is a breakout from the reality series, dealing with one specific aspect — the dynamic of change. Change happens in many places and in many different ways, but it always traces back to where reality is experienced: to the private realm of the subject.
By now you will know that my blog posts are conversations about my thoughts as they develop step by step. Never mind the far corners I want to reach — they are reached one step at a time. Here it is no different. As I enter into creativity I am going to start at the human level with an easy first step to gain insight, and then continue on a journey all the way into the non-anthropocentric.
SPLectrum holds creativity as one of the three core values of the subject: belonging, privacy, creativity. A subject takes much of its identity from the tools it uses to experience reality — from belonging. But that does not mean reality is experienced identically across all subjects. Each subject experiences in private using tools that are nearly all shared, and as a result has its own experience of reality. Differences in experience can be shared back and it is the feedback of these differences that is the driver of change.
To illustrate this interplay — creativity as a difference experienced in private, and its feedback into the community — I am going to use the example of a musician playing music from a score. The shared tools are plentiful: the instrument, the notes on the score, the skill to play the instrument, the tradition of how to play. All of it arrives from the shared side — little or none of it is the musician’s own. But the musician makes it their own when they play the music as an individual. Many don’t go beyond what was shared with them; others take the music to new ground. And for some of them aspects of their performance make it all the way back, shared with their peers, appreciated by the public, and become standards for others to follow. Individual creativity generates a dynamic of change — creativity as the generative value.
The impact of a single individual, one subject, can be enormous. Here not only on the fellow musicians, but on the audiences in ever wider circles. What started in the privacy of individual experience eventually belongs to countless many. Just imagine: it all started thanks to the agency of a single subject.
That was the whole loop — the difference made, shared back, adopted. This example illustrates just one of many: in general creativity is any sort of difference in the experience of reality by a subject in private. The sharing, the adoption, those are contingent, although they determine the impact of the difference, its lasting power. The child bending a word until it fits, the cook who stops following the recipe — wherever a subject takes in the shared and gives back something of its own, the value is at work.
Narrower still: the difference is simply what comes out other than expected — no value judgement in it. Good, skilful, a success: those are verdicts the outside passes later. In the seat where they are made, the masterstroke and the slip are the same kind of thing — embryonic creativity, raw material before the sorting begins. That is the generative value, here kept to the human case. From outside, only the small part that surfaces is ever seen, and the outside has names for it: creation, discovery, invention, evolution to name a few. And that is where the series goes next.
This post is part of the creativity series. See also The Core Values and the Metaphysics They Disclose.
Photo: Google DeepMind / Unsplash