The act of creation

What Hacker News says

1. ModernMechDec 2025
   Alan Kay said something similar back in the 90s, framing it as ants living on the "pink plane" and the "blue plane". What he said at the time was an ant crawling on the pink plane can do a lot of pink plane things, but he won't think about the kinds of things he can do on the orthogonal blue plane, because he's never been there so he doesn't have those thoughts. Innovation in PLs comes when someone from the pink plane travels to the blue plane and brings back all they have seen, which causes people in the pink plane to start thinking new (bluer) thoughts.

     I'm going to use a metaphor for this talk which is drawn from a wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. One of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be.—Learning.—He realized that learning, of course, is an act of creation itself, because something happens in you that wasn't there before. He used a metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane. In this case it's a pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals. You can choose directions. You can move along. But you're basically in the pink context. It means that progress, in a fixed context, is almost always a form of optimization, because if you're actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about. Creative acts, generally, are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. He says, every once in a while, even though you have been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea. Maybe when you're taking a shower. Maybe when you're out jogging. Maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment, suddenly, that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at, appears to you in a completely different light, as though it were something else.
   

   https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Alan_Kay_at_OOPSLA_1997:_...
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2. seanhunterOct 2024
   The theory presented in this article was articulated in Arthur Koestler's "The Act of Creation", where he goes on to speculate that all creativity works in this way. It's well worth a read.
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3. seanhunterMay 2024
   I would recommend that anyone who is interested in exploring these ideas read "The Act of Creation" by Arthur Koestler. He explores how things we think of as creativitity are fundamentally similar to how humour works in that they discover connections between things we previously thought of as being seperate.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Creation

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4. seanhunterOct 2022
   There is a great framework for understanding this process in "The Act of Creation" by Arthur Koestler. His thesis is that creativity is essentially about finding previously undiscovered/underappreciated connections between "diassociative matrices" (which is his terminology for frames of reference or contexts essentially if I remember correctly). If that is true then it sort of stands to reason that people who have many and broad frames of reference because they have a diverse or unusual set of things in their background stand to have more of the raw material for creativity. Or to put it another way, foxes are more creative than hedgehogs.
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5. memexyJun 2020
   > In this major and long-awaited study Arthur Koestler advances the theory that all creative activities — the conscious and unconscious processes underlying artistic originality, scientific discovery, and comic inspiration—have a basic pattern in common, which he attempts to define.

   This is mentioned in Alan Kay's OOPSLA97 talk.

   > So I'm going to use a metaphor here for this talk which is drawn from wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. And one of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be. Learning, he realized that learning of course is an act of creation itself because something happens in you that wasn't there before and using the metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane, in this case, it's a pink, pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals, you can choose directions, you can move along, but you're basically always in the pink context. And if you think about that, that means that progress in a fixed context is almost always a form of optimization because if you were actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about.

   > So creative acts generally are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. So he says every once in a while, even though you've been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea, maybe when you were taking a shower, maybe when you're out jogging, maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment.

   > Suddenly that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at appears to you in a completely different light as though it were something else. And Koestler said the emotional reaction to this comes basically in three forms, which is if you're telling a joke it's "haha", if you're doing science it's "aha", and if you're doing art it's "ah". He says, because in each case, something very similar as having a joke takes you down the garden path and then suddenly reveals it's about something else.

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6. Top19Nov 2017
   Hey you had a really good post that was remarkably unpretentious and straightforward. Ugh I think of all the questions on Quora like “What books should I read to become a huge success / be the best digital marketer!”.

   So first I would look at anything by Henry Petroski. The “Invention of Design” and “Pushing The Limits” are pretty inspiring.

   A trend I notice is that a lot of great books are published before 1990, specifically in the years 1950-1990. I think this was because there was enough knowledge to make great material, but the bloodsucking consultants hadn’t descended on the publishing industry yet to fashion themselves into a “thought leader” by writing a book of extremely questionable value.

   Some more titles are (only 1 published after 1990):

   - A Clockwork Muse by Martindale - The Art of a Scientific Investigation by Beveridge - Consilience by Wilson - The Act of Creation by Koestler

   Finally I would recommend “Notebooks of the Mind”. Don’t know why I just thought of it but it’s the best book of the bunch I recommended.

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