On creativity

What Hacker News says

1. zeptianSep 2024
   guilty as charged !

   But Bohm's "On Creativity", to me presents a much deeper "philosophical" take on a) what is creativity and b) how to foster it. And I dont see it referenced in this text at all.

   Again, since this is about persuation, it is what the reader wants to believe.

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2. harshbhasinDec 2014
   These three works have influenced me. These are writings of very creative people and I read them to understand their creative process.

   1. Nikola Tesla's autobiography:

   http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/35/nikola-tesla%27s-autobi...

   2. Swami Vivekananda's complete works: http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/45/swami-vivakananda

   3. David Bohm on creativity: http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Routledge-Classics-David-Bo...

   I have been reading these three authors for many years, over and over again. In his autobiography, Tesla brings forth many exciting things about his creative process. He could prototype complete machines in his mind before building them. In his mind he could run tests, even see scars and blemishes on his machines. In my coding, I (feebly) try to emulate his method by trying to visualize my coding prototype in my mind. His short autobiography reads like that of a mystic. In there he describes how the idea of AC current came to him, while taking a walk and looking into the Sun. Philosophically, everything in life alternates: the pairs of opposites, ebb and flow-- its seems to be the code of life; and AC current does the same, it alternates. His writings on Electricity are against the established grain: for him electricity (his only love) is the current of life. There cannot be two electricities(positive and negative,) he says, these are only terms for the state of having more or less of the same thing.

   David Bohm has important things to say about the creative process. He talks about completeness (wholeness) of thought. He talks about "mental models" that we create to understand reality and how we keep growing out of older models... newtonian physics gives way to relativity etc.

   Swami Vivekananda was a contemporary of Tesla and they did actually meet. He was a scholar of the Indian philosophy system called Advaita and Sankhya. As Jung has said about archetypes -- same thoughts occur to people of all ages, the Sankhya philosophy system believed in the equivalence of matter and energy. Vivekananda introduced these ideas to Tesla and expected him to prove them. But the proof came ten years later with Einstein. I have written about this here: http://www.mystacki.com/#!/post/132/vivakanand's-meeting-wit...

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3. dzucJan 2011
   Might I recommend: David Bohm wrote a very accessible book on creativity--what it is, how it works, etc.

   http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Routledge-Classics-David-Bo...

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4. dr_dshivAug 2019
   “The artist, the musical composer, the architect, the scientist all feel a fundamental need to discover and create something new that is whole and total, harmonious and beautiful.”

   “Having seen that the perception of harmony and totality need not be a purely private kind of judgement, one can now understand in a new light the fact that the really great scientists have, without exception, all seen in the structural process of nature a vast harmony of order of indescribable beauty… Indeed, every great scientific theory was in reality founded on such perception of some very general and fundamental feature of the harmony of nature’s order. Such perceptions, when expressed systematically and formally, are called “laws of nature.”

   -- David Bohm, On Creativity

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