
The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler - memexy
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-rDIHDXbS3uvtgXcr/The+Act+of+Creation%2C+Arthur+Koestler_djvu.txt
======
memexy
> 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.

