It’s possible to follow others on a journey, walking in their footsteps, while keeping your head up and your eyes and ears open.
Aha moments can’t occur in a vaccuum.
Can they?
I can’t figure out how you’ve connected the first two statements here. But, a vacuum, being devoid of change, wouldn’t be measurable by increments of time.
Do moments exist outside of a vacuum?
Creativity can’t occur without training. More precisely, creativity can’t occur without first to some degree making others’ paths/visions one’s own.
Hmm, perhaps aha moments are vacuums that swallow up all of existence.
Eureka!
Our thinking and insight does not occur in a vacuum. That’s true. But can you elaborate more on what you mean here:
What I mean to say is this: your “creativity” is useless to others if they don’t know what you’re on about at all.
Hm, this is something else entirely from what you said before. Anyways, I disagree. I like to visit art galleries and for many of the pieces I can say that I have no idea what the artist was thinking, feeling, or getting at…yet their work still produces ideas and feeling in me.
so do mosquitoes.
okay…not exactly ideas and feelings of the same class…but yes.
Either way, your statement, “creativity” is useless to others if they don’t know what you’re on about at all, is false. You don’t have to have a good understanding of a thing to find it useful.
If you can’t connect to someone else’s creativity “at all”, then you wouldn’t find it useful.
All I’m saying is emulation is not the opposite of creativity. Creativity can’t exist without emulation. I mean, crimey - you’ve at least got to emulate the way your parents eat, drink and shit.
This is very vague. What do you mean “connect to someone else’s creativity”?
no…that’s not all you’re saying…I agree with you here, but you then make an entirely new statement:
In what way? Define your terms.
No, I think those behaviors are instinctual, and not learned by observing others. And I don’t understand how you suppose eating/drinking/shitting is analogous to creativity…
anon-----are you wanting to be emulated for your creativity on ILP…
Fuck it. You’re right Fuse. I’ve contradicted myself, and I’ve overstated my case. But I think you’re being a bit disingenuous.
Creativity isn’t simply doing something different. There is more to it than that. If you find something meaningful enough to call it “creative”, then you connected to it.
Creativity is, by definition, relies on convention. If you display complete ignorance of basic physics, the physics community won’t take your random speculations on quantum mechanics seriously. You might accidentally, or at best spontaneously/intuitively say something that someone who knows something about physics knows how to recognize and take seriously by putting it into context, but the real creativity here belongs to the scientist who recognized the needle in the haystack.
Don’t be silly.
I prefer to walk ‘with’ others on their journey. Even if ‘they have’ gone before me, I prefer to walk with them.
Aha moments indeed can and do occur in a vacuum.
What are the pauses within the thoughts in our minds but vacuums?
What are the pauses between those wonderful musical notes which make up - say for instance, Debussey’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun?
Many aha moments are felt within vacuums because that’s where the stillness/emptiness lies which precipitates them.
Wonderful epiphanies may appear within those moments filled with absolutely nothing.
Well I don’t know how I’ve been disingenuous. I’m just trying to have you clarify what you’re talking about. If you explain what you mean then I don’t have to make as many assumptions.
Is it impossible for a person to be creative and have no one, or very few people, be able to connect to his work? I think that has happened many times throughout history.
Really, by definition? I can’t say whether I agree or disagree because I’m not sure what you mean.
Say you reject the foundational laws of physics and propose new theories that the physics community at large doesn’t understand and doesn’t take seriously. Say your theories are discovered to be accurate and recognized for their usefulness many years later. Were you not creative before the recognition?
What I mean is this: you don’t think mosquitoes are creative, just because they “produced” something in you.
I just talked about this. I said what I meant. It’s the part you didn’t quote.
“Emptiness” is interdependence. No vacuum. Between thoughts is between thoughts. When I’m between NY and Boston I’m not nowhere.
And I never said that. I said that even if I don’t understand what was going on with an artist, a painter, their work can still be meaningful or useful to me. It was a poor analogy on your part to compare the ideas and feelings one gets from an intriguing painting to those one gets from a mosquito. Mosquitoes do produce ideas and feeling in me, but I do not find them intriguing or useful.
No I mean something different.
I am not talking about theories or ideas that are accidental. In my hypothetical, the physicists are wrong in their assumptions of how the world works and you can justify your alternative ideas that you have thought about and tested. However, for whatever reason, physicists won’t listen to you or can’t understand you or aren’t willing to give up their current interpretations. In the future, they will come to accept your ideas. So again, in such a scenario (can you really not think of similar real-life examples?), were you not creative until people recognized you as creative?
You might though. And it would be a creative act on your part if you did. You might find it a poor analogy, but it serves my purpose.
Then you’re talking about theories that relate to a context that is understood by multiple beings.
Yes, you aren’t creative unless it is possible for others to recognize your creativity. What else could creativity be?
I hope it’s not too presumptious of me to quote a wise man out of context in support of my argument. Only the first paragraph is directly relevant, but the rest is at least indirectly relevant, I think:
Of course I admitted that I’ve overstated my case, and I actually also think it’s overstatement to say that starting a sentence with a lower-case letter is “just wrong”. But I agree wholeheartedly that “…at a certain point, when certain key rules (or enough non-key rules) are ignored or broken, you’re simply not writing or playing chess in a meaningful way.”