Thinking about Thought and Creativity

Creativity is one of those things that we don't really have a good framework for understanding. 

Is it a unique perspective in looking at different things that arises due to the difference in the affirmative deleuzian sense of your experiences from the moment you were born? 

Is it an active process that requires effort? 

Is it a natural outcome of whatever comes from being in the flow state, a creative state of being?

These are things I have been thinking about recently.  

Thought can be Trained. 

I came upon this line of thought (ironically) when I was analyzing the process of how one of my friends thought about certain math problems. They are the type of person who most people consider a 'genius' but as I analyzed their thinking(while we were solving math problems together), I realised that there is not that much difference in the movements of our thought. 

Their thought was more analytical or careful in a sense at some places, examining the assumptions and the logical validity of the next step from the previous step a bit more. It was also more nimble and playful at some places, finding a path through the problem where I would get stuck. There was also more comfort and intution in their thought in some places, which could lead to more speed and only comes through repetition.

 As I carefully analysed these skills, I realised that they are probably metaskills that are features of their thought that they picked up somewhere from the type of stuff they'd been reading or the types of problems that they were solving, and were not even aware of it. 

Even though it was consciously difficult for me to try and force my thought to be more nimble, I realised as I did more problems, my own thought was becoming imbibed to such qualities in some aspects. So, though I may be unable to immediately change my structure of thought at this instant, I realised that I can choose my conditioning in some senses, and in that way I can kind of create the circumstances for structuring my thought how I want. 

examples

So, naturally I realised that me analysing and picking apart how a certain process of thought might work is also a metaskill that I myself have acquired (probably by reading an unhealthy amount of psychoanalysis and learning psychology). 

Another interesting skill that has become a feature of my thought is the ability to in some senses intuit the meaning that is trying to be conveyed. This is probably a heuristic, as I have attempted to read a lot of continental philosophy. Often in such texts if you do not have all the background knowledge (which becomes increasingly impossible with the ever expanding cannon), there is a sense in which you need to jump along with the author, and follow along their movement instead of analytically follow along each sign denoting that movement. I have seen this with hegel mostly and also Heidegger (though I haven't read nearly as much as I want to). 

From coding and CS, there is a great self-reliance that is built into our thoughts, and also with doing the grindy engineering kind of math and physics, which does not require too much creativity as such but still gives you the feeling/illusion of competence. You feel that you can search up and find or figure out the solution for almost anything and by stringing together a sufficiently long list of solutions and patterns that have already been figured out you can build almost anything too. 

Thought is not as Concrete as you think. 

All these domains, have multiple general frameworks for looking at problems etc. They are all very territorialized in the Deleuzian sense of the word. As I observed the different patterns of thought in different people around me and figure out the conditions under which they probably came to be, I realised that almost all of these could be imbibed. This realisation itself deterritorializes and decenters a lot of my thought, as it instantly becomes aware of the fact that the primacy afforded to its mode of thinking is merely a result of its specific conditioning and not a feature of reality as it would like to present to itself. 

The illusion of the self is one of the most energy saving cognitive heuristics thought employees as Bohm would probably talk about. But again, as soon as your own thought is deterritorialized and the more general metaskill of analysing different paradigms of different disciplines and identifying the metaskills that aid in operating inside those paradigms is unlocked, it opens the way for a much more nomadic process of thought; You can simply take from each discipline whatever skill you require, train the specifics of the skill and design your conditioning in a way to imbibe the metaskills and synthesize these from different disciplines. 

But then some fear naturally arises, if you are doing this selective nomadic process from different structures of thought, you could do the same to your 'self'. i.e. even the centering from which your original process of thought started is not a concrete base. In the last movement, this line of thought pulls away its own base from itself. I don't know if it is possible to describe what is left after this merely through language. The question really is, why would you do this?

Creativity 

As described above, there's really no rational justification for why someone would be creative (but again the line of thought that asks for rational justification is itself grounded in quite a stagnated process). 

Again I am not talking about the prescription poisoned '16 ways to find more innovative solutions to a corporate problem' type of creativity, but rather the creativity that produces art that is admired for centuries to come. (interesting aside, I read this article about a 'creativity of sameness' which might be interesting). 

One question I'm interested in asking here is about 'authenticity'. if everything about your thought structure itself can be trained, then is there any authenticity in thought at all? and if there is no authenticity anyway, then what is wrong with choosing what is advantageous to you? If we realise that there are certain lines of thinking, paradigms, skillsets that are incentivised in society, then why not go there. But I think the question here answers itself, creativity with a motive is really no creativity at all. 

There is no use thinking about the fact that your present mindset, framework and life circumstances were not shaped by your agency. Creativity is a mode of being in this moment itself, and the depth of your experience of life is determined by the sincerity with which you approach it. Creativity is about how deep one can go and still bring something back.