Abstract
Who are “we,” then, as creative product? Hard to put boundaries around it/us, or to distinguish “who we are” as creative product, from creative process. Our dynamic of self and world makes more sense when we see self in touch with, and even intimately connected and intertwined with, our larger surrounds. We are also organically in a nonlinear dance of change and surprise. Meanwhile “outside” and “inside” are not so separate, and we ourselves are processes-in-motion. For many it is a new view of self-in-world, linked to a larger worldview based in a complex (and beautiful) interconnected dynamical picture. Our own influences are many, and also more evident, when we visualize ourselves as “open systems.”
The air finds its way in everywhere,
Water passes through everything.
Lieh-Tzu (The Yellow Emperor)
… Where order in variety we see,
And where, though all things differ, all agree.
Alexander Pope
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- 1.
Morowitz, Emergence of Everything, 13, more formally defined as involving, “…novelties that follow from the system rules but cannot be predicted from properties of the components that make up the system.”
- 2.
Briggs and Peat, Turbulent Mirror; or Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour, provide readable and colorful introductions. More formal treatments include Guastello , Pincus, and Koopmans’s edited, Chaos and Complexity in Psychology, or (short but full) Smith, Chaos or Holland, Complexity, each from the Oxford Very Short Introduction series.
- 3.
Mitchell, Complexity, 20.
- 4.
Mitchell, 20, 13.
- 5.
Singer, “Mental Processes and Brain Architecture.” see Guastello one of first, in 1995, Chaos, Catastrophe, and Human Affairs.
- 6.
Richards and Goslin-Jones, “Everyday Creativity.”
- 7.
Dreadful natural disasters, see Kluger and Haley, in Time, “A Perfect Storm.” times, recently. One journalist called this a “bifurcation.”
- 8.
Stewart, Does God Play Dice? 74.
- 9.
Guastello and Liebovitch, “Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics,” 1.
- 10.
Reuter, “Ten Domains That Have Explained Creativity”; notably, both everyday creativity and chaos theory were mentioned in two of the ten domains. A forthcoming book, Schuldberg, Richards, Guisinger, eds. Nonlinear Psychology, presents nonlinear principles of chaos and complexity theory in relatively user-friendly ways for the social scientist; a related 2018 APA symposium brought this focus to a wide range of psychologists.
- 11.
Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society, 286.
- 12.
Kolbert, Sixth Extinction.
- 13.
Holland, Complexity, 1–2.
- 14.
Gleick, Chaos, 16.
- 15.
Briggs and Peat, Turbulent Mirror, 97.
- 16.
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- 17.
Richards, “Creative Alchemy,” 130.
- 18.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings.
- 19.
Ricard and Thuan, Quantum and The Lotus.
- 20.
Thich Nhat Hanh, What the Buddha Taught, 154.
- 21.
Guastello, Koopmans, and Pincus, Chaos and Complexity in Psychology.
- 22.
Mitchell, Complexity, 298.
- 23.
Owen, Dietz, and Gohring, “Strategies for Creating the Learning Organization.”
- 24.
Richards, “Relational Creativity.”
- 25.
Kolb, in Zimbardo, Johnson, and McCann, Psychology Core Concepts, 271.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Simonton, Scientific Genius.
- 28.
Combs, “Consciousness: Chaotic and Strangely Attractive,” 401.
- 29.
Mitchell, Complexity, on new educational options including “K Forever”.
- 30.
Moran, Ethical Ripples of Creativity and Innovation.
- 31.
Allaby, The Environment (nicely illustrated book for young people).
- 32.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Sun My Heart.
- 33.
Eisler, “Our Great Creative Challenge: Rethinking Human Nature—and Recreating Society,” 267, 270–271.
- 34.
Tart, States of Consciousness.
- 35.
Kaufman and Gregoire, Wired to Create, 109. The average smartphone user checks the device every 6-1/2 minutes. Meanwhile, compare Schwantes, on “Steve Jobs’s Advice,” which was to do quite the opposite!
- 36.
Morowitz, Emergence of Everything. Homo sapiens cannot necessarily take full credit. For instance, conscious awareness seems to have been present in great apes.
- 37.
Siegel, Mindful Brain, 108.
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Richards, R. (2018). Change and Open Systems. In: Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55766-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55766-7_4
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