Creativity and Boundary Layers - its all fun until somebody loses an eye

MikeL

I was watching Star Wars the other day, and there was a scene I can't exactly remember, so I'll make it up and tell you anyway. They Rebels were fighting it out with the Empire on some moon town. The heroine was shooting the Storm Troopers and ducking for cover, then popping up again and loosening a few more zaps of her laser gun. Then a grenade goes off near her and she is on death's door step. Her boyfriend rushes over to her, drops his gun and says something like "Don't go, my sweet beloved."

Meanwhile all around him the fireworks are still going off, and I think to myself. What about the battle? Why isn't he (or she for that matter - her firing arm was still working) interested in the battle anymore? I was a bit miffed with their lack of conviction and focus.

It occurred to me that she (and he) had been doing something superfluous. Fighting the Empire was something they chose to do for a bit of fun. When things got serious though and lives were really in danger, that degree of ~~superflouisity~~ was dialed back.

This got me thinking about boundaries. Fighting the Empire was a higher level project beyond their immediate homelife, which represented a boundary layer. The ability to take on the Empire had arisen because within the boundary in which they lived there was room for the superfluous. And the superfluous allowed them to turn their attentions to higher ideals beyond their immediate boundary. The Empire and Rebels are concepts - ideals of a much greater scale.

*You could also argue that their boundary had been demolished - they were forced to find solutions - but I'd prefer to ignore that for this OP although you can go there if you wish.

Thinking of boundaries and layers upon layers, it then occurred to me that wanting to break boundaries was an act of Creativity, and perhaps a definition of it.

It might be helpful to visualise Creativity as laying under a boundary layer and tearing away it like many prying tentacles. And it can only come about through having a superfluous component to the underlying system. Where we have creativity we will eventually have boundary layer breaches.

When the US were tying to break the speed of sound in 1947, WWII was over and there was a glut of good pilots. Resources were superfluous and creative minds focused on breaking through this barrier.

When a boxer wants to go up a weight division he is trying to break boundaries, when scientists strive to make discoveries they are trying to break boundaries. When we on the site try to find new truths we are trying to break boundaries. In all examples it is our creative drive, our desire to break through boundaries that is driving us.

We are all creative although creativity comes out of the superfluous. If I am tired from work I have no superfluous energy to write good posts on this site. Its only as the weekend nears I grow in superfluous energy and I get fired up.

So too with the genome, for evolution to work at any level we need to have a conservative area and a superfluous area that allows it to break new boundaries of existence. Redundancy in the system allows Creativity to break Boundaries. Without redundancy, there would be no Creativity.

What do you think?

Nils Loc

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know? — Notes from The Underground, F. Dostoevsky

"Your suns and worlds are not within my ken,
I merely watch the plaguey state of men.
The little god of earth remains the same queer sprite
As on the first day, or in primal light.
His life would be less difficult, poor thing,
Without your gift of heavenly glimmering;
He calls it Reason, using light celestial
Just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.
To me he seems, with deference to Your Grace,
One of those crickets, jumping round the place,
Who takes his flying leaps, with legs so long,
Then falls to grass and chants the same old song;
But, not content with grasses to repose in,
This one will hunt for muck to stick his nose in.” — Faust by Goethe

MikeL

↪Nils Loc

Thanks Nils Loc, these are enjoyable poems.

My OP is suggesting a conceptual location for Creativity as eminating from just beneath a boundary layer, and that it can only arise if the underlying system has a superfluous 'energy' to power it.

Here is the best image of it that I can find on the net.

In this image the secondary wavelets would represent creativity hitting against the boundary layer of the new wave front, and the distance between the wavefront at time t and the new wavefront would represent the superfluous component required for Creativity to function.

MikeL

I'm assuming that the lack of response is because I have, at first attempt to convince you, met with overwhelming success. Perhaps even stated the obvious.

Therefore I will make the next creative step in this conceptual model.

For simplicity's sake, let's say that on the inner edge of every boundary, little creative entities are scurrying around eroding its integrity.

Using this model of boundary breaching entities on the inner surface of every boundary layer, we can consider our own universe as a series of cascading boundary breaches, be it the Big Bang or the rise of the quanta (or quantum field) that created the world and its living entities. Each time the boundary is being breached from within by forces within that boundary.

The implications for this type of thinking might be that if the Big Bang was a boundary breach, it would mean a pre-existing universe was breached and we would expect to find an entanglement of both universes inside this one.

Of course there is nothing to suggest that boundary breaches can't go the other way as well, but much of nature seems bottom up.

MikeL

From this conclusion we can actually formulate an anti-entropic equation of sorts:

That any system cannot be truly closed or balanced, but will always generate a net force greater than the sum of its parts (or less than the sum of its parts). Over time when the net sum is positive it will cause boundary breaches where before there was restraint. This will create a sudden surge in the system.

When the net sum is negative, the system will collapse.

Life is a series of positive net sum boundary breaches that can be traced from the quanta to the society we create. As society grows, what will the next boundary breach be into? And from what breach did the quanta arise?

Sir2u

It seems as though you are going along the line of Maslow.

MikeL

↪Sir2u

Thanks for responding to the post and taking the time to find the image. I don't really think these represent the boundary breaches I had in mind although the triangular shape is appropriate.

I would call a boundary breach when a containment field suddenly starts permitting things that didn't happen before. When atoms suddenly start aligning into molecules, molecules into cycles and so on. Atoms, molecules, cycles etc all have their own level of containment that should be self-fulfilling.

Atoms spilt out everywhere until after a while they formed molecules. The atoms are forming molecules all over the place until suddenly they were making cycles. We didn't go from atoms to skyscrapers. We can see sequential steps along the way. Each step would represent a boundary breach of the step before.

Sir2u

I don't really think these represent the boundary breaches I had in mind although the triangular shape is appropriate. — MikeL

If you look at this as a step up sort of process then it is as if you are breaking a boundary. You cannot do anything in the level above you if you have not completed the level below and the one you are on.

Sir2u

Each step would represent a boundary breach of the step before. — MikeL

Each level represents a boundary that has to be breached. The top level is where you get to be creative.

Nils Loc

Now synthesize from Huygens wave theory and Maslow's hiearchy of needs the newly preferred abstract metaprosthetic.

Huygen and Maslow's wave theory of needful boundary breaching.

MikeL

Yes, thank you both. I can see the similarity in concept now that you have pointed it out.

Creativity and Boundary Layers - its all fun until somebody loses an eye

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