Emerging Futures

2021-11-12

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Volume 9: Creativity Unmasked. Let's begin with An interview with the Ocean

So, you wake up and feel like cooking an egg. The sun is shining and the windows are open. The morning is cold and the cat wants to be fed. There is much to do today and the knees are already radiating a subtle pain into your awareness. The floors are cold and enlivening as you make coffee and feed the cat.

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Despite everything that needs to be done, this morning it came over you:

I’m going to make eggs for breakfast.

Perhaps it was while dashing to the bathroom to pee, or washing your hands — something with water? Who knows. Now the feeling is there: Boiled Eggs for breakfast.

It's not really an idea, there is no big vision or grand plan. It’s just a sense you are feeling.

You’re not much of a cook. Toast, boiled eggs, salads, rice, quinoa, and these days heating up Trader Joe's plastic bags of stuff.

Mornings are too busy to think about cooking. You need to hit send on that sales proposal before the kids wake up, get them out the door then dash to the office for another zoom meeting.

As you grab eggs from the fridge in a well formed smooth habit and put the pot under the faucet a memory surfaces:

The last time I boiled an egg it cracked and some of the white seeped out and cooked floating in the water…

You fill the pot with water, add salt

What was that?

It’s all one long movement unfolding — opening, grabbing, filling and setting on the stove

The sense accompanying it starts to evolve

...That was something -

You feel this provocation as you reach for the eggs

There’s a shrug in you body

Hmmm!?

Your face makes an expression

Why not?

The water comes to a boil

It’s barely there but as you reach for the first egg

Let's crack the eggs first:

You crack an egg tentatively into the water

Your hands seem to be telling you

It's going to be better than having to peel them later...

But you sense it's not looking good: the egg is going everywhere and dissolving into thousands of strands

Shit the bubbles are messing this up!

As you look and sense, you instinctively reach and turn down the fire

Watching, sensing…

Ok, that was a mistake. Let's try putting the second egg in ...slower...

In your body's reaction you’re sensing directly: you need help

Your arm sweeps the counter with your eyes:

The coffee cup!

That feels right

It’s all happening very fast

You take the last gulp and crack an egg into the cup

Now there’s less of a plan — the feeling is:

Let's make it work

Even before that, it's underway

The cup and your hand lower to the water's edge, its hot -

Maybe it should go below the surface?

The egg gently releases from the semi-submerged cup into the water at the very cusp of boiling

You bend closer, your senses alive to the changes

Smelling eggness...

Now what?

Your body slows down and you sense time expanding as your focus shrinks your field of awareness

It’s as if the moment is saying:

Lets see what happens

Meanwhile, the egg is moving from liquid to jelly like

This change is triggering something in you:

Ha! I have a jellyfish!

A smile creases your face as experiences connect: beaches and kitchens

There is a sense of recognition and a vague concepts emerges

I have discovered a jelly-fish egg!

What's happening?

You peer down

It’s hard to tell -

I have to poke it and

Your back pulls you upright and arm and eyes reach around

It’s already in your hand

The sugar spoon, excellent!

Poking, it responds with an almost solid feelingness...

Oh!

The spoon on its own finds a way to coax the jelly fish to the edge of the pot and drag it up

Careful!

Fuck!

It’s on the floor

Three-second rule!

A shake of salt

Huh!?! That's kind of interesting

Not bad

In your mouth you feel that it is almost soft and almost rubbery. This sense provokes you…

What if tomorrow I cook my jellyfish eggs - less?

Or lower temperature?

What else could I try?

More water?

What if I cook it in my coffee?

Fuck that’s stupid

Gotta run

Wait till I tell the kids about this approach and how eggs can give us jellyfish eggs!

Fast forward. A few weeks later. You are serving your egg dish to friends (who never eat eggs ever):

“This is really great — how did you come up with the idea?” They ask.

“Oh, you know, one morning I was in a rush and I had this idea: what if I crack the eggs first and softly boil them? So I tried it, it worked, and jellyfish eggs were invented!”

“That's so cool, you always have these great creative ideas. I wish I was creative but I never have any ideas”

What does this all mean?

It’s just a story, but we’re pretty sure you recognize this experience. This is a humble and modest everyday moment of creativity (and obviously poached eggs exist, but there was a first time…).

This week we have been looking at (1) how reality is creative, and (2) how this is the source of human creativity.

To understand the what, where and how of creativity, there are a few things to consider. Let's start with the background context of the story:

• Prior to anything happening, we are already in motion and deeply embedded in an ongoing world.
• We are alive, embodied, sensing beings feeling the world around us directly and responding directly to this world
• Our worlds are rich with stimulus — signals of change and variations. Cold floors warming up as night transitions to day.
• These stimuli ripple continuously through our beings shifting our stance, gait, mood, awareness — we are fully of-a-world.

From this we can understand five things very concretely:

1. We are radically EMBODIED beings:

1. We are fully embodied creatures (moving, acting, sensing with the specific bodies we have -- male, female, young, aging, encultured, specifically abled, etc.)
2. Embedded in a specific environment and life project (being a parent, being in a kitchen, etc.)
3. Extended (fully entangled with tools: stoves, pots, running water, hard floors…)
4. Enactive (we have co-shaped this environment as it has co-shaped us -- put us in another kitchen in another culture and we would be totally lost -- our hands would not know where to go or what to do), and finally
5. Affective (our abilities to do things are far more felt and sensed directly and engaged directly as a type of bodily “know-how” then they are reflectively thought through). Most of what is happening in our story in the kitchen is know-how that occasionally tips into conceptual thinking. But more often to the degree there is “thinking” it is of a vague nature -- types of vague articulations of a worldly provocation (the egg doing something odd leading to “hmmn… gotta turn the temp” -- at the exact moment you are doing it)

NOTE: This is all coming from the Enactive Approach -- that we wrote about in more depth in last week's newsletter – Vol. 8.

2. The world is SPONTANEOUSLY CREATIVE:

1. The physical world is in continuous variation. There is change everywhere we look and this change is always crossing critical thresholds: the liquid of an egg becomes solid. Still water becomes boiling. Gas ignites and becomes fire. Near these transition points the quantitative changes become a difference that makes a difference.  We shift from change-in-degree to a change-in-kind.
2. Forms are emerging, varying and changing as the environmental dynamics push them in new directions. The particular proteins of eggs have the latent capacity to tighten rapidly when heat is applied. The possibility of an egg transitioning from liquid to solid “haunts” all eggs in the presence of heat. And if we dig deeper these proteins are folding into shapes based on the complex meeting of environmental forces and material properties.
3. All of this “form-taking” and “form-changing” (morphogenesis) is because of the self-organizing properties of the system -- there is no need for form to be imposed and in nature it never is (this is still true even when genes are involved).
4. This process of self-organizing of form or pattern taking in the environment is not only happening with inert matter -- it is also happening with living beings and complex systems. Our brains are the outcome of complex self-organizing processes and so too are our social behaviors and events in our social environments.

3. Our Embodied actions arise in a direct connection and continuum with the environment's self-organizing activity. How?

1. Novelty begins in the world and is sensed/felt as a rupture
2. This leads to embodied shifts to gain a new attunement (non-cognitive)
3. Some of these shifts and differences move into a vague space of awareness
4. Most are discounted (we are getting on with life not noticing everything micro oddness).
5. Sometimes we provoke these disturbances-- when something goes wrong (something breaks or we don’t have the right tool ready to hand) we use what we got. Occasionally this new tool use opens up a momentary space of difference that we follow
6. Some of the shifts in difference that provoke vague hunches and responses open up new actions that cross or come near a critical threshold of where difference-in-degree becomes difference-in-kind
7. When we follow these, new qualitatively different spaces of possibility become latent and available to our explorations.
8. And new hunches are provoked
9. As we follow these, new habits, tools, techniques and environments slowly co-emerge and alongside these concepts (ideas) begin to develop.

4. Ideas come late:

1. Novel concepts (“ideas”, “ideation”) are emerging out of the process, they began their journey in the world, then became embodied as know-how and finally stabilized as “know-what”.
2. Concepts being discussed in boardrooms, dinner discussions, community meetings, interviews and ideation sessions -- that is so late in the emergent-creative process. All that is left at that point is well established concepts and if you’re really lucky faint memories of hunches.
3. Concepts are great, important and necessary if they are part of a loop -- arising out of emergent creativity and feeding back (and even forward) into and inflecting the next iteration of the total process
4. The problem is that we do not even recognize that there is an emergent creative process. We only seem to believe that creativity is an ideation-realization process...

5. We can hack the emergence-creativity process:

1. Manufacture blockages and exaptations
2. Force change-in-degree into change-in-kind
3. And in each of these fold ourselves back into the vast ocean of chaotic and spontaneously arising novelty.

Three Useful Concepts:

To shift from our classical notions of concept driven, and human centered creativity it’s helpful to do a rigorous and deep-dive into Complexity Theory (it is often also referred to as “Complex Adaptive Systems.”)  

A good starting point is to take a look at the article we posted this week on Linkedin: Reality is Creative – then dive deeply into the topic. At the end of this newsletter we suggest a number of sources. A great source that connects both the Enactive Approach and Complexity Science is Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life. However you dig in, these terms are the best places to start:

1. Self-organizing Systems
2. Emergence
3. Complexity Theory

If you have resources and developing concepts on these topics – please share with us!

A Practice: Attunement for Sensing Novelty Emerging

1. Begin by being aware of yourself in action. Feel how you are a body in a world doing something. Extend yourself outward: first through your body, and then follow your senses to where they land in the world: consider this the edge of your being. You are a self-environment thing. Really feel this.  
2. Push your focus of attention out of your head. Sense your “thinking” happening out just past where your hands grasp tools. Notice how you equate the site of “thinking” because it is the site of speaking. You are equating your silent speaking with “thinking” and feeling it to be in your head. So slowly work to push it back out into your distributed self (your self-environment being). * NOTE: These first two steps take some time and require that you turn-off, and put away all media: radios, podcasts, phones, and silence phone notifications. The media tools are wonderful but they pull us into high level concept driven realms and away from the massive but very subtle changes and weirdnesses all around us.
3. As you do things notice when things go wrong or oddly. This happens all the time but we are task and future oriented so we ignore them, correct them, or simply never notice them.
4. Swerve with the odd, expand the oddity/mistake and make it a path of orientation. Make notes, and keep coming back to this path. Expand and stabilize it. Keep its difference alive. Give it a name, and give the process and tools names.

Resources:

This week we shared a couple of helpful videos. The first is short and gives you a great sense of the spontaneous self-organizing powers all around us (if you only have one minute go to minute 2:30) - Phase Transition & Creativity.

The second is a full lecture laying out Deleuze’s vision of a more-than-human creativity. It is quite inspiring and easy to listen to as a podcast (If you only have five minutes start at 33:10) - Deleuze & Creativity.

If the lecture on the french philosopher of creativity Gilles Deleuze gets you intrigued -- we recommend starting with the book he co-authored with Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus (here you will find the answer to why god is a lobster). It is by far one of our favorite books (our copies are mangled and patched back together).

Manuel DeLanda, who is giving the lectures, is a really interesting thinker. We would suggest starting with his recent book: Assemblage Theory.

Other useful books to think about self-organization:

• Self-Organizing Systems in Biology
• Endless Forms Most Beautiful

If you are interested in how all of this plays out in terms of the emergence of life and evolution, we would recommend watching this lecture by Terrance Deacon.

See them more clearly:

• Hi-Res images from Volume 8: Creativity at Work (last week)
• Hi-Res images from Volume 9: Creativity Unmasked (this week)

Another wonderful week with you! A special thanks to Steven Greenstein and Tim Giordano for prompting the evolution of these concepts and pushing us to be better.

Enjoy the weekend, and please, be in touch -- we remain inspired by all of you!

Till next week we stand alongside,
Iain and Jason
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate

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📚 P.S.: Want to go deeper down the rabbit hole? Check out our book Innovating Emergent Futures

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