This already captures a lot, but I would just add to it something about where the babbling or natural generative stuff comes from that gets pruned by social forces.
My experience of thinking is very much one of random stuff coming up from the deep, and during meditation or other periods where I’m relaxed and letting rather than controlling, more of that stuff is free to come up. We could model this as a kind of suppression that’s normally going on that gets removed by creating conditions where it turns off. Under those conditions, I can sometimes also get something like more creativity by changing something in my mind that causes it to pull “deeper cuts”, or ideas less obviously related to what’s happening right now. It’s sort of like entering a waking dream state where random stuff fires, even more random than what is normally possible, and then while getting there means I can’t process it all that well, if I’m very careful I can catch it, come back from the dream-like state, and examine it more closely to see if there’s anything there.
None of this is a thorough explanation of what’s going on, but it’s worth saying that in a model that’s about how creativity is suppressed, we can still ask where is the creativity coming from in the first place. Removing suppression is an important first step to increasing generativity, but then once we’ve done that we are still left wondering where the core process of generating ideas comes from and how to work with it.
This already captures a lot, but I would just add to it something about where the babbling or natural generative stuff comes from that gets pruned by social forces.
My experience of thinking is very much one of random stuff coming up from the deep, and during meditation or other periods where I’m relaxed and letting rather than controlling, more of that stuff is free to come up. We could model this as a kind of suppression that’s normally going on that gets removed by creating conditions where it turns off. Under those conditions, I can sometimes also get something like more creativity by changing something in my mind that causes it to pull “deeper cuts”, or ideas less obviously related to what’s happening right now. It’s sort of like entering a waking dream state where random stuff fires, even more random than what is normally possible, and then while getting there means I can’t process it all that well, if I’m very careful I can catch it, come back from the dream-like state, and examine it more closely to see if there’s anything there.
None of this is a thorough explanation of what’s going on, but it’s worth saying that in a model that’s about how creativity is suppressed, we can still ask where is the creativity coming from in the first place. Removing suppression is an important first step to increasing generativity, but then once we’ve done that we are still left wondering where the core process of generating ideas comes from and how to work with it.