Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity

My last post, I think, for this group today (I'm a five):

More musings.  This is the problem, for me at least, with Dutch's reasoning.
He writes:  "if humans are really as creative and curious as we like to
believe, why didn't they develop an ability to record abstract ideas simply
for its own sake, instead of starting off with a very narrow and utilitarian
approach to writing?"

He begs the question in two ways: 1) he assumes we all agree that creativity
and curiosity can only reside in the instantaneous flash of insight that
changes things completely--like an earthquake--hence the binary opposition:
tinkering OR creating; and 2) that memory of abstractions can only be
preserved in writing when any educated person knows of the long history of
oral culture. Plato himself said that Thoth would bring destruction to
memory with writing, and Thoth did.  The great inventions upon which a lot
of technology rests--the wheel, the mill, the road, the keystone and the
tower--were all produced before writing.  Humans obviously felt that
reasoning, memory, and oral skills were sufficient for instruction and
abstract thinking.

I'm also slightly annoyed by his demand that we ask "what evidence it would
take to prove our beliefs wrong."  I come from a school of thought that
prefers the dialectic to the binary--thesis, antithesis, synthesis, rather
than off, on, zero one, right, wrong.  I guess I run on analog.

The Teonim speak of "towards, away, and up."  Such is called the third
thing.  They call it an "elinad."

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 10:47 PM


> 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.

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