Emerging Futures - Volume 192: Creativity – It’s Really Real

Good morning strange Ouroborian Loopings,

It has been an interesting week in terms of writing this newsletter. 

Last week, if you remember, we left you with a bit of a cliffhanger. We introduced the deleterious effects of the Heroic Model of Creativity, which is our current culture’s go-to approach to creativity that is hyper-individualizing, essentializing, dematerializing, and works via subjugation. Now it is certainly problematic in its effects, flawed in its approach to reality, and does a very poor job at catalyzing innovation, but the problem we wished to address was why do we take this as just how things are? Why do we experience ourselves in a totally real manner as independent individuals, who ideate, and shape matter to be the physical instantiation of our ideas? Why is this “just how it is”? And we get it – it does seem absurd even to ask these questions. For us, when we bring this up in workshops or discussions, we often get very quizzical looks and the response:

‍“What do you mean?... The reason we experience ourselves as independent individuals – is because that is what we are! – That is what we really really are!”

And we could not agree more. Yes. We do agree with this statement. 

This is what we experience at the deepest level. Our question is “why?” – why do we experience ourselves and reality this way? Why do we take the Heroic Model of Creativity to be reality? Now, of course, the obvious rejoinder is – “because it is reality” and we just are sovereign, independent individuals. But – we all should have some strong doubts about this – the enactive approach to cognition argues based on a growing body of research that we are far more distributed into others, our tools and environments that are all co-shaping us. We also know from the complexity sciences that matter has agency and works in self-organizing ways that affect us. And from Anthropology, we know that historically, most peoples of the world have very different experiences of themselves and their environments. 

Nonetheless, it is our reality. Is it just that we are wearing the wrong pair of glasses? Do we just need to get rid of the “Heroic Mode of Creativity” glasses and swap them out with a better pair? – Or better yet, with no glasses whatsoever? This is certainly a common sentiment and diagnosis – that we simply have the wrong glasses or “mindset” and we just need to replace it with a better or more correct “mindset” – then things would be much better.

Our reality, unfortunately, does not work this way. We are fully of a way of being alive such that our experience of reality is not something we can just pop off and switch out. So last week we ended with a promise:

‍“Next week, we will turn our attention from disclosing the effects to disclosing the ecology of the Heroic Mode of Creativity. For it is only then that we can effectively begin to experimentally co-emerge with novel embodied routines, feelings, hunches, intuitions, environments, tools and practices…”

And so we did write this newsletter this week – and we were about to put a bow on it, as Jason likes to say. But then two things happened: 

1. We have many new readers of the newsletter (very exciting) and have gotten a number of questions and had a couple of conversations with new readers this week on this very question. And…

2. In our WorldMakers online community of creative practice, we had many great discussions this week about this topic, and we were reminded by one of our colleagues how strongly we are of our environments and what they afford us. 

Both of which made us realize we should slow down and unpack what it is to have an experience…

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Creativity and the Self

Let’s take a moment to think about our selves and how we come to be who we are. Which is to say, how we are constructed. Perhaps our most common understanding of this is that we are some combination of nature and nurture. Nature forming the core – the given and culture being added to this. And like a boat with its barnacles – we can, at least hypothetically, scrape off nurture and get back to our natural essence. While in this approach, it is endlessly debated just how much weight to give to either side, both agree that nurture adds to what nature provides. And so here, the proverbial question of which comes first – the chicken or the egg, has a clear answer: nature. Nurture is an additive. We often use onion and pyramid models to describe this:

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The key to understanding this approach is that there is always something that acts as a given and something else that is added. What is given – is what is always already there and cannot be changed (nature – or what is natural). And what is added is not original and can be changed or even removed or replaced (nurture or culture). The two strong propensities of this approach is either the dream of getting back to nature, or that it is all essentially nurture. 

Thus, it is perfectly reasonable, from this approach, to speak of creativity as being something more or less innate. Some will argue that creativity lies on the nature side of things, and others that it is all on the nurture side of things. But in this game of pin the tail on the donkey, all the options lie on this one axis. Where we place creativity (or anything else) will have to be somewhere in or between nature and nurture.

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This brings us back to last week's question of how to understand the term “construction.” The problem with this approach is not the terms. Of course, in any situation of making some things are given and others come later to the party. The problem is how the two are imagined to interact in this construction of the self. This view has the logic of relations all wrong.

There is a helpful quote, of recent invention and ascribed to the twelfth-century Islamic poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī:

“You think because you understand 'one' you must also understand 'two', because one and one make two. But you must also understand 'and.'"

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Understanding “and”

The hard part of understanding any system of parts is to get the correct understanding of how the parts relate to each other. The status of the “and”. In the nature-nurture approach, they are considered to be additive and subtractive. We add and remove cultural artifacts – tools, practices, institutions, and environments from our unchanging essential self (however we understand this essential self, either minimally or maximally). And this leads us to think of technologies, habits, and practices as either supporting/augmenting, or undermining our essential nature. Everything is additive and linear. And has a fixed reference for judgement: the unchanging essential core.

Now in some simple situations – say, putting on clothes the relation is one that is linear and additive. When we are cold, we put on clothes, and when we are hot, we take off clothes. Adding causally equals hotter, and subtracting causally equals cooler. But our relation to others, practices, tools, institutions, and environments is not like this. The relation is of a qualitatively different kind – it is far more integrated and only minimally decomposable. The cognitive researchers Anthony Chemero and Michael Silberstein make this very explicit in relation to our selves and our environments:

“When the constituents of a system are highly coherent, integrated, and correlated such that their properties are nonlinear functions of one another, the system cannot be treated as just a collection of uncoupled parts. Thus, the activity of strongly non-linearly coupled brain, body, and environment cannot be ultimately explained by decomposing them into subsystems, or system and background. They are one extended system.” (Chemero & Silberstein, Extending Neutral Monism to the Hard Problem)

Our way of understanding this is that we live somewhere between an Ouroborian dragon eating its tail and Escher's hands drawing themselves into existence as the drawing draws the hands into existence:

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When we speak of construction and the strange looping in this case: we, collectively, are making things – habits, practices, tools, concepts, institutions, environments, etc. – that is the one hand drawing. And these things are in turn making us – this is the other hand drawing... 

…Then additionally – this process does not end – as changed beings we then change these things and the strange loop continues – the dragon eating its tail… 

… But this is still not the end of things! And this then is ongoing strange looping upon strange looping:

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These two strange loops replace all the chickens and eggs as false questions of “what came first”. There is no first to anything. It is misguided and irrelevant to talk about nature and nurture, not because we are blank slates – we clearly are not – but because the relation is of a different kind. If one makes the other and then the changed other remakes the first – what does it actually mean to keep these terms and this logic? In this context of complexity, relations are non-linear, emergent, and looping. Nothing can be traced back causally further than the extended system itself. There is no “origin” beyond this point. “The system cannot be treated as just a collection of uncoupled parts… – They are one extended system.” We are always in and of the middle.

He continues – and here is the key part in regards to this discussion: “…these processes are Look as we might for some origin – some more basic thing that is the linear source or cause of everything that follows – we won’t find – it is a fool's errand. There are no causal essences in complex systems. There is no unmoved mover. The philosopher and researcher of cognition, Evan Thompson, is very clear in this regard: “There is no bottom level of base particulars with intrinsic properties that upwardly determines everything else. Everything is process all the way “down” & all the way “up…”— they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations or webs… Phenomena at all scales are not entities or substances but relatively stable [relational] processes…” 

Then to make things even more explicitly clear he concludes: “...since processes achieve stability at different levels of complexity, while still interacting with processes at other levels, all are equally real and none has absolute ontological primacy.”…” (Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, p. 440)

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What is “Out There”?

But why, if everything is so connected, relational, holistic, emergent and of the middle – does it appear to us that the world is “out there” and very clearly distinct from us? We don’t experience our reality as one of emergence or cosmic oneness – we experience our individual selves distinct from and in an environment of discrete things. Why?

This is a great question – and the one that on exploration can make this unique relational logic most clear. 

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Imagine for a moment you are swimming in an open-air pool on a nice warm afternoon. Water surrounds most of our body. It is a dense liquid, and when you stop swimming, you are just floating there on your back looking up at the sky. This is something pretty objective – for if you were not floating, you would be drowning, and that would be very serious. Now this experience will be accompanied by all sorts of feelings – perhaps you are remembering joyful moments in your childhood when swimming. Or fearful moments when you did not really know how to swim as a child. Your experience of the fluid nature of the water is very real and very consequential. And it is an experience filled with sensations and feelings.

Now consider a different creature in the very same water as you – a very very very small single-cell bacteria – perhaps it drifted off from your body where it lived a happy life as part of the microbiome between your toes. What does it experience in this body of water? The very same water body would not be a dense fluid buoying them up and carrying them along, rather, they would be bounced around by the molecules of water, something akin to marbles bouncing off each other. They live in the same environment but have a totally different experience.

So what is happening? Do we and our bacteria just have differing mindsets? Different glasses? How can water be two very contradictatory real things – a supportive fluid for us and a jarring environment of bouncing molecules for another living creature? Both are real and have very real consequences but entirely different consequences. 

Now we can come back to our original question: What is the source of the water’s fluid and buoyant “nature” – is it something, some essence in the water? No – buoyancy is a relational effect. It requires bodies that have a certain size and physical makeup, and that the water be composed in a certain manner (for example: ocean water with more salt is more buoyant for us) – then you have this effect. Now this relational water assemblage and its very real effects affords us floating, fluidity, swimming, etc. 

And what are we seeing? What is “out there” when we look around us? We see in an unfiltered manner this effect – this affordance. It is not a subjective experience. It is not a “lens”, a pair of glasses, or a mindset. Rather, it is a perspectival experience. And there is an infinite distance between these approaches. This relational perspectival experience is given to us reality – it is our reality. It is “out there” and very real – but it is nonetheless totally relational and emergent. And then our subjective feelings build upon this foundational experience. 

In both cases – that of the bacteria and us – the experiences are real and totally qualitatively different. So, in one case, water is a dense fluid, and in another, the very same water will be bouncing molecules. Both are true, and both seemingly contradict each other. How can water be these two things? And this is the crux of the matter – it is not that water is either of these two things. That is the wrong question. It is never about anything alone. To ask that question is to not understand the “and”. Water affords us the effect of liquidness relationally. These are not two perspectives on one underlying reality (the blind person's touching differing parts of the elephant) but two constructive achievements that have produced qualitatively different worlds.

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Constructive Achievements

Let's not stop here – water does not always afford us this effect. If we jump into water from five hundred feet, the effect afforded us will be of a very, very hard solid. Bones will shatter… (nothing in our mindset will change that!) 

Now we could add things to our bodies and develop new techniques and then try the jump again and it will have potentially different results – “water” will become something else. The situations emergent effects will afford new realities – new paths of world-making.

It is an astonishing achievement to live in a world that actively affords all the propensities of liquidness. It takes great care and work. While most of the creative work in this case is happening non-intentionally at evolutionary scales, not all of it. We are, and always have been, actively co-shaping environments, bodies, techniques, habits, tools, and institutions that can extend, transform, and transduce these affordances in all sorts of manners to both extend worlds and qualitatively change worlds.

We do this every day all day. We are always actively asking “what else can this do?” And for us, in these experiments with new tools, practices, and environments we are co-creating new effects that afford us new realities. It is not a subjective thing, it is not a mindset thing, it is not about switching glasses – it is our world and it is about the strange ongoing active looping of our lived experience of collaborative relational world-making.

Our individualism is not a mindset – it is a relational reality – it is our ongoing practice of world-making – it is our achievement. Our heroic mode of creativity is not a lens we look at the world through. The reason we experience it as “just how it is” – is because, for us, it is just how it is.

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Why? Because of the strange loops of relations that we are entangled with – the extended system that is irreducibly relational and irreducibly emergent. It is a looping that we can change, but we cannot get out of the looping. We live in and of this strange “and” – this strange middle – this ongoing emergent relational collaborative looping.

We are created this way, and we are creative this way. Hacking the loops as we live in and of their effects and what they afford us as reality – as a world…

Next week – we promise, we will loop back into – and hopefully out of our Heroic Mode of Creativity. Till then, remember that the “and” is not an additive one. Keep co-making worlds and keep difference alive.

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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