“Creativity is our image of God.”–Nicholas Berdyaev
Much of what humans create is an extension of ourselves. Eyesight produced cameras. Brains produced computers. Voice produced radio. The question: can we create anything other than what we are? Can we even know anything other than what we are? It seems that we “know” what is outside our immediate consciousness when there is some level of identity between “this” and “that”. Is the sanscrit maxis “That art thou.” accurate?
Do we know only us?
There’s always an aspect of not-knowing in creation, in the sense that you don’t know what you’re going to get out of the creative process. Mentioned this in another thread, but creation is a “beautiful risk.” This would mean, yes, we can create something other than what we are. While something of the creator, e.g., their knowledge, genes, etc, are carried forward, there are also emergent phenomena in what is made, e.g., things that were unpredicted, mutations, etc. If not, there would be no such thing as creation. There would only be replication.
Maxis=maxim—typo. Can we create anything that is not us? Can we know anything that is not us? A critic of Marshall MacLuhan once noted that there is nothing in the human body that would suggest a bicycle. Do you agree. If so, why?
duplicate
I disagree, for the simple reason that although nothing suggests a bicycle, but there is plenty for arguing for a tricycle.
I do notknow why, but the reason suggests a metaphor:
Once there was a man who sought admission to the aftrlife. He want to the gate, rang the bell, and a serpent came to him and said,-no one is admitted here, except those who can solve a riddle.
What is it asked the man.
The seprent said: What is it that walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?
The man gave up, and said, i will leave, but i a, consumed by the desire to know what type of creature could that be, i wont go from the gate until i know the answer to this riddle.
The dragon answered, ‘it is Man.’
Man?
Yes, he crawls on all fours when little
Walks on two legs when in middle age, and on three when he is old, like both You and i, since both of us are kind of older.
The man then went away, dejectedly.
Ho hum, I smell the scent of a Human.
Sorry Irr, at first i thought this was kind of funny, but on second thought i felt it would be ok, since we both can look into the mirror, and third thought, thought that it’s worthy of the thought, that everything only gets worse. Happy New Year. (or better? who knows).
We relate, extend, incorporate, submit. The other and the I necessarily reinforce one another when one or the other is asserted. The other, distinct from what? I, apart from what? In the grand scheme of things, we came from what was other than us, and over time the elements of harmony and discord that bring us to life will disperse into new forms.
Knowledge is an artifact of cognition: “understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.”
“That art thou” is an exercise in identity, also an artifact of cognition.
Creativity is the God among gods that tempts you to eat it alive and recycle the elements for something altogether new, for sober purpose, or - for fun.
This is why I consider us part of the God-body. Not the Christian God, but, the living forces of reality, no matter how slow or how simple.
I believe that McLuhan proposed that these inventions became extensions of ourselves. This is just one way in which we can interpret these inventions. But I think that the question leads to other significant questions. We know more than us, but everything we know is filtered through us. Nothing we now is only pure “us”, but neither is it pure and unadultered “that”.
At the basic, humans can create thoughts.
Thought can be,
- made to be real - verifiable - empirical things.
- remain speculative - potential to be real and verifiable - aliens, strings, black holes, etc.
- Impossible to be made real
Except for contradictions, it is not a question of creating thing other than what we are. We can think of and clone a sheep and many other things which are not what we are.
The contentious question is can we create anything that can be thought and beyond possible experience.
Thus we can think of anything in the above categories of 1, 2 or 3.
In 3, there are things that can be thought by humans but cannot be made real at all.
These are God, Soul that survives physical death and the Whole of Reality.
Tat Tvam Asi =Thou art that, That art thou,
We can think of the above, but ‘That’ [aka God] cannot be real at all.
We can clone sheep because of the possibility of cloning ourselves, which we do not do because of current ethical considerations. And surely the personal experience of DNA operating in cycles of linearity could suggest a bicycle. Dispositions for geometry and grammar appear to be innate. If that is so, our speech and our constructions of creative ideas are experienced prior to being actualized. This is not to propose that all is subjective; it is just to acknowledge that we learn of that because of the that within us. This might well be a case for an argument for God. If the Kingdom is within, I can know of God on an experiential level.
Orb,
That was the riddle of the Sphynx (Sp.).
I agree.
My belief is that we are aware of structure via our experiences as structured beings. The structures of our creative endeavors, both physical and mental, are within us.
But without the that or other within us, we could not comprehend what it is outside us.
Back in the 60s, when poems flowed through me like water over a waterfall, I told my intellectual friend that there was something in the process that was more than I was. He said there wasn’t. But I knew that I wasn’t smart enough to come up with some of the lines that flowed through me, lines that awed my professors, won prizes and were published. I believed I was a channel for the poems.