Insight Axis explores connections between practical philosophy, technology, and books. I’m Zan and you can follow me on Substack.
Dear I.Axers,
Here is your valuable insight for the week:
Creativity is the same across domains. It's not restricted to art, music or other “traditionally creative” fields. It's inherent to being human.
Simply put, the creative process is (1) daring to make stuff, and then (2) refining it.
This definition of creativity manifests itself across domains ranging from science, art, writing and programming.
Creativity in Science and Knowledge
David Deutsch is a philosopher and physicist who's written two of my favourite books: The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. He says:
"Through creative conjecture and criticism we try to find and remove errors and so progress, tentatively, from problems to better problems." - X.
“…objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism.” - The Beginning of Infinity.
Being some sort of scientist myself, I never thought of myself as a "creative". But after reading The Beginning of Infinity, I changed my mind.
Deutsch explains that gaining knowledge is a creative process. In his framework, knowledge is not something that exists "out there" and needs to be "uncovered". Instead, it's something to be created within our minds. By creating good explanations, we embody more knowledge about how the world works. But it's not just about creatively conjecturing this knowledge - that's only the first step. You need to then go out, test your conjecture and present it for criticism. If it fails, then the conjecture was probably wrong. Whatever stands up against the criticism is more likely to be a better explanation.
This process of creative conjecture, followed by constructive criticism is what defines the scientific method, and what drives our knowledge of the world forward.
Creativity in Art
Christoph Niemann is an artist who's illustrated more than 20 covers of The New Yorker. Here's how he describes his process:
"Be a much more ruthless editor and a much more careless artist."
If you haven't watched Abstract: The Art of Design on Netflix, you should watch at least the first episode, which features Niemann. The series uncovers the creative process of artists, and as Niemann's quote suggests, it's not too different to Deutsch's act of creating knowledge.
When we see Niemann's New Yorker covers, it would be easy to think that his creativity just spilled on the page. But that's not what happens. The episode takes you through his reams and reams of drafts, built on decades of illustration which prop up his talent. We see his dedication in the hours he spends creating multiple cover drafts, only to then criticise, edit and refine each one until the final piece is made.
This process of continuous drafting and subsequent refining is not new in art. Just look at the time and effort that renaissance artist Rafael took in painting his cartoons (rough draft paintings). These paintings were only commissioned as rough drafts for final works to be featured in the Sistine Chapel, but they are still magnificent enough to be displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Creativity in Writing
Stephen King is one of the best selling authors of all time. He's written over 65 books and sold over 350 million copies. Only one of those books reveals his process of writing, and right in the foreword, he says:
"… to write is human, to edit is divine."
This idea perfectly encapsulates the idea of creativity as starting with conjecture, and being followed by criticism. This idea of writing and then editing is not new, but we should see it for what it is: the entirety of the creative process.
King isn't the only one to leverage this idea of creativity. David Perell is responsible for designing one of the most popular online writing courses, Write of Passage. In one of his free essays, he promotes the idea writing from conversation. The value, as you can probably guess by now, comes from being creative but also getting real-time feedback and constructive criticism from someone else:
“Conversations let us identify high-potential ideas and tweak their delivery until they represent our best thinking on a subject.”
Creativity in Programming and Software Engineering
John Byrd is a veteran software engineer and programmer who's been credited for coming up with these golden nuggets of wisdom:
"Programming is an art, not a religion."
"Good programmers write good code.
Great programmers write no code.
Zen programmers delete code."
Together, these quotes encapsulate the creative process that happens in programming. It's the same process described by Deutsch in science, Neumann in art and King in literature - no surprises there. The main idea that Byrd captures is that creativity in programming is not just about writing code to solve problems. It's also equally important to remove and refine - through debugging, testing and deleting. That's how creativity works.
Final thoughts
To really hammer the point home, I'll leave you with these two quotes:
“Obviously, perfection is not attained when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
and,
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” - Michelangelo
Until next time,
-Zan
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Creativity is any function that thinks of how to make something better that resonates with an audience. I'll double down and say that a person can create something unique, but if it doesn't resonate then it is noise (the state of much modern art)
Our education system is designed to subdue our creativity. I love watching children who are free to think endless thoughts. They have no boundaries. Thank you for the post!