Creativity

Many creative processes seem to rely on two key factors: randomness and selection. An obvious example is evolution: (semi-)random variation is generated by mutation and then selected based on what leads to persistence of those variations.

The same seems to be true, albeit at a different level, in human creative processes. Many random ideas are trialed and slowly pruned, compared, recombined to generate final quality ideas. Selection can be:

• Testing in the real world and removing those that don’t work out (e.g. scientific method)
• Selecting via debate, iteration with yourself or others in a purely verbal or representational space
• Empowerment: following ideas that themselves lead to more ideas or capacity for more ideas, as frequently occurs with mathematical theorems. Important theorems are often the major “crossroads” where many other deductions in an axiomatic system lead to or diverge from.