/lit/ - Literature

>What is the Tao of Creativity?
A Pancreativist Odyssey
https://vimeo.com/265524091

Metaphors, analogies, and their doings is at the heart of our story. Some have imagined incredible involvements of them, such as Douglas Hofstadter. Hints of something remarkable to be discovered, and activities to be engaged in can be smelled in his story "Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica" which itself is a metaphor of the strange doings in the foundation of mathematics involving the Principia Mathematica. There is more than just poetry involved here: there is mathematics and science. Indeed, the terrain this story takes place is at the intersection of the poetic and literal.

Here is the full copy of "I am a Strange Loop": http://www.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/112327702-Am-a-Strange-Loop-Douglas-R-Hofstadter.pdf

Here is a condensed talk by Hofstadter of his "analogy as the core of cognition" theory, with some added elements: https://vimeo.com/129280982

The Philosophical Space Program

Imagine science, philosophy, and art all unified in a single theoretical framework that can only encapsulate them as a "theory of creativity." This is the engine of the creative rocketship that will avert our present trajectory towards omnibad and is infinitely sustainable. I dear reader am a half-mad scientists of creativity who has made what I believe some pretty detailed prototypical schematics of the engine. All of you even know some of the parts already, and in incredible detail!

The field of creativity is enormous, requiring a terrain (metaphysics) that can truly encompass it so as to represent the fundamental mechanics of creativity in their most concrete form. The ultimate domain of creativity is that of experience, including conscious experience but also the more concrete nature of experience. This terrain is well known by students of Deleuze and other process philosophers, but it is in the work of Alfred North Whitehead where this metaphysical terrain has been explored the most extensively via the lens of methodological analysis.

Most importantly the process-relational domain is *maximally expansive,* a map that corresponds to reality itself not as thing-ness but of "betweeness" between occurrences and events. There can be no greater terrain, as any "aboutness" of relationships is itself a relationship, and so is included within its domain itself. Here's a paper: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/2976/1/Heather_Process%20Categories.pdf that uses category theory mathematics to model this domain, proving that it has ultimate closure. Absolutely nothing is left out of the domain of relations, not even nothing because absence is itself a relationship. In short, it is impossible to talk about anything more generally and concretely.

Bertrand Russell was Whitehead's former pupil, and together they worked on the famous Principia Mathematica, which is a central subject of Douglas Hofstadter's book "I Am A Strange Loop" which examines the ramifications of the PM in the world of mathematics and how it relates to cognition. While the PM was a wonderfully productive "failure," Whitehead had anticipated the trajectory of thought not in the domain of mathematics, but metaphysics. The attached image is an excerpt that details why you will want to read this book and here's the full book as a PDF file: http://www.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/112327702-Am-a-Strange-Loop-Douglas-R-Hofstadter.pdf

Whitehead's magnum opus "Process and Reality" is famously one of the most difficult works of all time, and while studying it I found "The Metaphysics of Experience" by Elizabeth Kraus to be invaluable to understanding it. This is a long quote from the very beginning of the book, but should give enough of a background to show the relationship of being and becoming to specific domains: