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Creativity

Creativity as Random Growth

“In a paper posted online in 2013, Sheffield and Miller imagined what would happen if, every few minutes, the blind explorer were magically transported to a random new location on the boundary of the territory she had already visited. By moving all around the boundary, she would be effectively growing her path from all boundary points at once, much like the bacterial colony.”

Mathematicians Are Building a Unified Theory of Geometric Randomness

The quote from the linked article above is freakishly similar to the way I describe the process of creativity. You are effectively stepping outside of something known, thus letting go of its existing beliefs and boundaries, thus allowing you to walking around outside of it, beyond its known edge, thus exploring a complete new unknown. The process of exploring this unknown is exactly as stated above. This unknown is like an empty circle, a landscape of a new world that one has to explore and discover. To do so though, the path around this unknown isn’t linear but random, like your teleporting between points and looking at it from different angles (so you actually feel like a “blind explorer” at first).

Over time, as you teleport between these points and understand what you’re seeing from many points at once, you see and understand the meaning of what you’re looking at. I’ve likened this to a hologram with each perspective or point on the outer boundary being like a beam that adds to the clarity of what you’re looking at.

You are effectively stepping outside of something known, thus letting go of its existing beliefs and boundaries…

Most important of all, this process can be applied to ourselves. In effect, we let go of societal expectations and discover who we are and what we want on our own. In effect, we forge, or grow, our own path just as the quote above indicates. Over time, when we do so, we start seeing the invisible relationships between things which empowers us and gives us new capabilities in the process (which mirrors how emergence works), just as another quote from the article notes below.

“It’s like you’re in a mountain with three different caves. One has iron, one has gold, one has copper—suddenly you find a way to link all three of these caves together,” said Sheffield. “Now you have all these different elements you can build things with and can combine them to produce all sorts of things you couldn’t build before.”

MATHEMATICIANS ARE BUILDING A UNIFIED THEORY OF GEOMETRIC RANDOMNESS

BTW, following this analogy, two of these caves are finding and understanding your Passion & Purpose. Or put another way, these three caves are the three stages of the creativity process itself.

PS. I also just realized that this “randomness” correlates perfectly with how emergence works which is encapsulated by the second stage of the creative process.

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