GLANVILLE ON "STUDIES"​ OF CREATIVITY VS. THE REAL THING

https://www.muurileht.ee/en/powering-up-interview-with-ranulph-glanville/






"I must first point out that I’m not interested in studies of creativity — the majority of stuff that is produced ends up being either too naive, unsympathetic or just an advert for personal opinion. In order to analyse creativity, in order to develop an understanding of it, people often do something that destroys it. It’s like biologists, who studied life in a Petri dish by killing things. The way in which they studied the activity of living was to kill something! According to Humberto Maturana, life is the process of maintaining itself — which he called autopoiesis. He changed things so that you didn’t have to destroy the thing you wanted to examine in order to talk about it. What I think happens all too often is that we destroy creativity in order to talk about it — for instance, creativity to me is about wholes and not about breaking things apart, into particles and procedures and so on. When we do that – break the whole into parts and mechanical procedures – we are destroying the very thing we want to examine by using the wrong sort of model. That’s why I’m generally not interested in discussions of creativity — what is it, how is it etc.


However, another approach would be to measure the number of experiences we have, which we can approximate to the number of brain states or something else like that. If we take your experiences, add them to mine and let them interact, the result is not twice as many experiences but, actually, a square of the number of the experiences. Let’s say we all have, within our lifetime, roughly the same number of experiences (this is not about the exact numbers but about the sense of scale) then the combinations between all the experiences of both of us is the square of the experiences either of us has. If it’s three people, it’s the cube. If it’s four people, then it’s to the power of four. And when it’s six or seven billion people then it’s to the power of six or seven billion. This is a staggeringly large number. If you wanted to write out 2 to the power of six or seven billion in full, you could start right here today and you would die before you’ve finished writing that number. These unbelievably big numbers are beyond practical computation. We could say that the richness of everything that is not “me” vastly exceeds the vastness of what is “me”.That is to suggest there is always, in the world around each of us, a whole lot of material we may mine. One way of being creative is not to isolate oneself, but to look outwards into this enormous network of everything that isn’t me, treating it as a resource. In the world around you there is an infinitude of ideas, of understandings that might have never occurred to you. I suggest that one way of sourcing and amplifying creativity is to look outside yourself. Very simple."