Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity

"The mills of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine."

I agree with Roger. I think God tinkered quite a bit, messed up a bit with
Adam and Eve, and is still tinkering.  I remember reading an article that
asked a similar or related question to the one posed by Steven Dutch (read
the essay with considerable enjoyment): given the human brain and its
possibilities, why are there NOT more Mozarts in the world?  (Dutch offers
that this is the wrong model.)  I offer that procreation and prosperity are
the driving forces of the human race, despite our neocortices: reproducing
ourselves and providing for our offspring.  Also we submit to what I would
call our watery nature: most of us, hang it all, go after the path of least
resistance in these two areas unless pushed.  So, conservation of energy in
peacetime.

Creativity: not necessarily the Mozarts or the Einsteins.  In fact, they are
a little monstrous!  Dutch's question--why don't we see lack of curiosity as
retardation--has it backwards.  The great geniuses have a third eye.  They
see farther, but they are monstrous.  We marvel at them and are a little
afraid of them.  They make us think we're retards.  We forget that we are
part of a vast human machine in the making, and very quickly: a big hive
mind that draws from its individuals over time--so ravenous and wandering it
threatens to eat the planet that gave birth to it.

Imagine all the commonplace inventions of the ordinary world and how much
tinkering it took to come up with them.  That isn't creativity?  And just
because it took so long to come up with the crossbow--building upon model
after model after millennium?  The human race grinds slow, too, but
exceeding fine.  The Einsteins who see something in a flash do so because
there has been a weighty history of science and technology behind them.  The
theory of mass and celerity and even the mysterious importance of squaring
wasn't something that came out of the blue.  We build new and different
layers on old ones.

I feel that way about conlanging.  Especially a conlang that has changed
over the course of forty five years.  I feel that way, too, about painting.
Look how many tries it took Picasso to get out of his "blue period."

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Mills" <rfmilly@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity


> Mark J. Reed wrote:
>> Bah!   A pox on the notion that tinkering isn't creative!
>
> I second that emotion. In fact, tinkering is probably the very foundation
> of creativity. If you aren't interested in how something works, to begin
> with, why tinker with it?
>
> One of the answers (which he himself gives) to Prof. Dutch's questions is:
> Politics, money, and practicality-- the latter two also rule most of our
> lives, for better or worse.
> Another is: "Many are called, few are chosen"
> Corollary: Most people are concerned simply with staying alive, making a
> living, leaving progeny etc., and "if it was good enough for my father,
> it's good enough for me."
>
> (And I think Toynbee's "Study of History" has a lot more to say about
> this, sometimes just in passing, than Jared Diamond-- or Carl Sagan, much
> as I enjoyed him.)

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