Philosophical Musings on Creativity

Disclaimer: This page contains potentially meaningless ramblings about human cognition, event branching, and statistical determinism infused with free will.

But it sure is interesting to think about.

Postulate 1

Human thought is inherently random, because unpredictability, variance, and irrationality exists in the human mind.

When you chose to buy the black shirt over the white one, there was a chance that you would’ve decided to go with the white one. Decisions and thoughts are not set in stone until they happen.

Postulate 2

Thought Probability Distribution Function (TPDF): a model that represents the likelihood of thinking things. Every person has their own TPDF, and TPDFs change every moment.

A hyper-simplified example of a TPDF for a reader at the exact moment they read this sentence would be something like: Confusion: 50%, Curiosity: 25%, Happiness: 10%, I should go to sleep: 1%, I should retire tomorrow: .005%, My pet alligator needs feeding: .000001%, etc. Obviously there are an infinite number of possible thoughts and most of them have a probability close to 0. The basic idea of a TPDF is that it is a probability distribution that encompasses all possible thoughts of a person at a given moment.

Postulate 3

Everyone is born with a completely unique TPDF due to genetics.

For example, a person that is 7 feet tall would be more likely to think about becoming a basketball player than the average person.

Postulate 4

Your TPDF is constantly changing due to external influences.

Everything that happens in the world around you alters your future. Reading this sentence unlocks new thoughts in your mind which could develop into breakthroughs.

Postulate 5

The scope of a human being’s thoughts is limited at all times.

Some thoughts are physically out of your reach, and some thoughts fall in and out of probabilistic range. For example, a baby could never think about Mark Twain if there was no past experience that allowed those thoughts to exist.

Theory

A creative idea is the culmination of a lifetime of experience that has shaped your TPDF from what it started out as at birth, into a function that allowed you to think of the idea at a specific time.

The TPDF constantly affects itself from moment to moment as current thoughts influence future thoughts. If you decided to buy a black shirt instead of a white one 4 years ago, you might not even be reading this story today.

Addendum

Creative people ride the probabilistic edge between “out of reach” (0) and “within reach” (>0) to unlock insight no one has ever thought of before.

99% circumstance, 1% luck.