While I sometimes feel as if I speak a different language than many of you, I believe that my initial notes for a book on creativity may shed some light on the ongoing current discussion. Simply put, information is what a machine has the capacity to produce. However, a machine cannot produce meaning -- which is essentially the interpretation of this information.
For what it's worth, here are my notes on creativity: The Creative Process Meaning does not exist on its own in the world. Nor does it exist within the interiority of human consciousness. Rather it is something we actively create when we engage with the world around us. We create meaning — we don’t merely find it or discover it. Creativity, then, is an essential part of the process of meaning apprehension. This means that it is not merely a personality trait or a personality state; nor is it something special that some lucky people have more of than others. (While talent on the other hand is special, it’s not the same thing as creativity.) Our relationship to our surroundings is, then, necessarily creative. This means that we are constantly adjusting our understanding of our environment in a creative way at all times. We never merely engage with it in a passive way, but are always and actively either accepting or denying the apparent truth of our perceptions. This is we maintain our memory — and with the help of this memory we engage in the process of maintaining our identity, our sense of self. In this context we can see how a painter never paints the objective truth of his subject. He paints what he sees — and depicting the truth of his perception of what he sees is his essential challenge. This is true even for “realist” painters and for photographers as well. They arrange and organize what they have seen until they are satisfied that their art has captured the unique characteristics of their own perceptual acts. Their “art” consists in trying to make the viewer’s experience of this object seem “real” to them, too — whatever this term might mean. Creativity, then, is a process. It is an ongoing engagement by human consciousness with the gradual depiction, over time, of a particular object. As Bergson put it, “reality is that (which) creates itself gradually… that is, absolute duration” (Creative Evolution, 385). This means that for Bergson we cannot separate reality from temporality. Humanity for Bergson was essentially homo faber — tool-making, pragmatic, analytic. Yet life itself is essentially qualitative, and therefore only accessible otherwise — meaning, not through mere pragmatic analysis. “We see that the intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use” (Selections from Bergson, 88). Throughout Creative Evolution, Bergson insisted that life must be equated with creation, because only creativity can adequately account for both the continuity of life and the discontinuity of thought. But if humans only possess analytic intelligence, then how are we ever to know the essence of life (which Bergson called the “élan vital”)? Bergson's answer was that at the periphery of intelligence a fringe of instinct survives, namely intuition, and because of it we are able to have access to the essence of life. In his view, instinct and intelligence are not simply self-contained and mutually exclusive states. They are both rooted in, and hence inseparable from, the duration that informs all life, all change, all becoming. Thanks to intuition, humanity can turn intelligence against itself in order to seize life itself. >From this point of view, creativity is not just something that only artists >can do; it is not their unique province. Even if we include mathematicians and >scientists and recognize the important place that creativity plays in their >work too, we miss the point if we try to delimit the extent that creativity >plays in our lives. Bergson is arguing here, then, that whenever we relate to >the world around us in a meaningful way, then we are engaged in a creative >act. For Bergson, though, poets and other artists start from a fuller view of reality than the rest of us. They plumb the depths in such a way that they can lay hold of the potential in the real, taking up with what nature has left, namely a mere outline or sketch of something, something which remains incompletely lodged in the memory, in order to make of it a finished work of art. The result enables us to discover, in the things which surround us, more qualities and more shades than we would otherwise naturally perceive. Our view of reality is thereafter altered, and we begin to realize that it is possible to move beyond the limits of our own perceptions. While art in this way does important work, its scope is, however, limited. As Bergson notes, art “dilates our perception, but on the surface rather than in depth. It enriches our present, but it scarcely enables us to go beyond it” (The Creative Mind, 157). In order to go beyond art we need philosophy, he argues, through which “all things acquire depth —more than depth, something like a fourth dimension which permits anterior perceptions to remain bound up with present perceptions, and the immediate future itself to become partly outlined in the present” (The Creative Mind,157). The gap between the continuity of life and the discontinuity of thought is framed in a different way by Deleuze, as is evidenced by the titles of his two books on the theory of cinema: Cinema I: The Movement Image, and Cinema II: The Time Image. Because the cinema can express its narration using non-linguistic images, it is able to transcend the limits of Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, or between language and speech. With his work on the theory of cinema, Deleuze creates a new logic of signs, a new semiotics, based on images and not words. Accordingly, he distinguishes between movement-images based on movement in space, and time images based on becoming over time. This distinction can also be characterized as being between the thought of spatiality and the thought of temporality, or between signs as representations and signs as encounters. Deleuze’s equation Universe = Brain = Cinema illustrates the curious but related idea that the perception and consciousness of the camera are equal to that of the human being. The equation rests on Deleuze’s belief that human thought can be produced by the montage of images — without concepts altogether. In this view, thought does not require a human thinker. The signifying power of machines to constitute and manipulate thought and knowledge is introduced as an example of a positive (and positivist) machine unconsciousness, to be contrasted with the essentially negative psychoanalytic of human unconsciousness. Machines create things while we humans end up first using and then ultimately destroying them. Steve Bindeman
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