Imagination vs. Creativity

[A] distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.

I very much like this distinction. The full article makes the distinction through examples such as between Lego kits and a pile of Legos used to render something new.

Read the full post here.

Well done Venkatesh Rao, whose blog is here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/

A few more quotes to lure you to his post.

Imagination is an aptitude based on analysis, and is a variety of reasoning forwards from a current state marked by freedom from habituated patterns of seeing. Creativity is an aptitude is based on synthesis, and is a variety of reasoning backwards from desired outcomes marked by closing of realizability gaps.

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Creative behaviors require imagination, but also require more something more. Imagination is necessary but not sufficient for creativity.

Creative behaviors, I think, call for the equivalent of mutation or noise-injection into an evolutionary process. There is a non sequitur quality to creative leaps that strikes me as fundamentally non-analytical and serendipitous.