Is Creativity Fractal?
Monday, December 15th, 2008
I won’t be around much today — we got about a foot of snow in the past 24 hours, so I’ll be spending several of my next hours digging out.
But as I was thinking about the snow, I was thinking about the billions of different combinations of snowflakes there are out there on my driveway. As many of you know, snowflakes are fractals, which Wikipedia defines as: “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.”
When you look at a snowflake, you see a definite design to it. Except that there is no “designer”. So can this be called creative?
I don’t think so, since I agree with the definition I gave in my first post on creativity. It is the act of turning ideas into reality. But since there is no “thinking” involved, there can be no creativity.
But take that one step further. Nature created humans, just as it (she, He) created snowflakes. So although we can think, and admittedly we are a few steps advanced from a snowflake, we were still spontaneously (and unthinkingly) created by nature.
We developed creativity through nature, or as a result of nature, or because it was instilled by nature.
So is our creativity just a fractal of some other aspect of nature?
That might be heavy for a Monday morning, but it will give me something to think about while I spend the next six hours snowblowing the 1.7 quadrillion individuals out there lying about on my driveway…
~Graham
