“what occurs in egoless creation with pattern languages” (purplsoc2017)

Associate ProfessorFaculty of Policy Management, Keio UniversityPh.D in Media and Governance

What Occurs in Egoless Creation with Pattern Languages

Takashi Iba

Ayaka YoshikawaFaculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University

Christopher Alexander onEgoless Creation with a Pattern Language


Writers & Zen Master onEgoless Creation

Creative Systems Theory

“When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it. It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature.”

/

(p.36)Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building,

Oxford University Press, 1979

Christopher Alexander said

“the quality without a name cannot be made, but only generated by a process. It can flow from your actions; it can flow with the greatest ease; but it cannot be made. It cannot be contrived, thought out, designed. It happens when it flows out from the process of creation of its own accord.”

/




“When a thing is made, it has the will of the marker in it. But when it is generated, it is generated, freely, by the operation of egoless rules, acting on the reality of the situation, and giving birth, of their own accord. …”

/




“Get rid of the ideas which come into your mind. Get rid of pictures you have seen in magazines, friends’ houses … Insist on the pattern, and nothing else. The pattern, and the real situation, together, will create the proper form, within your mind, without your trying to do it, if you will allow it to happen. This is the power of the language, and the reason why the language is creative.”

/




“To do it, you must let go of your control and let the pattern do the work. You cannot do this, normally, because you are trying to make decisions without having confidence in the basis for them. But if the patterns you are using are familiar to you, if they make sense to you, if you are confident that they make sense, and that they are profound, then there is no reason to be afraid of giving up your control over the design. If the pattern makes sense, you do not need to control the design.”

/




“the order of the language is the order which the patterns need to operate on one another to create a whole. It is a morphological order, similar to the order which must be present in an evolving embryo.And it is this very same order which also allows each pattern to develop its full intensity. When we have the order of the language right, we can pay attention to one pattern at a time, with full intensity, because the interference between patterns, and the conflicts between patterns, are reduced to almost nothing by the order of the language.”

/




“We are ready, now, to see just how a sequence of patterns can create a building in our minds. It happens with surprising ease. The building almost “makes itself,” just as a sequence seems to when we speak.”

/




“Your mind is a medium within which the creative spark that jumps between the pattern and the world can happen. You yourself are only the medium for this creative spark, not its originator.”

/




“It is a fearsome thing, like diving into water. And yet it is exhilarating — because you aren’t controlling it. You are only the medium in which the patterns come to life, and of their own accord give birth to something new.”

/




“There is a kernel at the center of the timeless way, a central teaching, which I have not described till now.”

“The essence of this kernel is the fact that we can only make a building live when we are egoless.”

/




“To make a building egoless, like this, the builder must let go of all his willful images, and start with a void.”

“you must start with nothing in your mind”

“You are able to do this only when you no longer fear that nothing will happen, and you can therefore afford to let go of your images.”

/




“For a person who is unfree, the language seems like mere information, because he feels that he must be in control, that he must inject the creative impulse, that he must supply the image which controls the design.”

/




“Once you learn that the pattern language and the site together, will genuinely generate from inside your mind, from nothing, you can trust yourself to go of your images entirely.”

/




Egoless Creation

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Scribner, 2000 / 2010

“I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it’s something I never expected.”


Stephen King said

“For me, what happens to characters as a story progresses depends solely on what I discover about them as I go along — how they grow, in other words. Sometimes they grow a little. If they grow a lot, they begin to influence the course of the story instead of the other way around.”


Stephen King said

“The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and transcribe them, of course).”


Stephen King said

Haruki Murakami, Hayao Kawai, Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai, Daimon Verlag, Einsiedeln, 2016

“When I start writing, I don’t have a rough sketch of the story or anything like that. I just immerse myself in the act of writing and then, as they say, the ending kind of comes naturally. And since I’m supposed to be a professional write, there’s always an ending.”


(p.63)

Haruki Murakami said

“I feel like that novel has already moved on ahead and now I’m chasing after the images in it.”


(p.68)


“I think writing novels is similar to playing a role-playing video game. … But what’s decisively different from role-playing games at the game center is that in writing, the program that you are using is one that you yourself made. As you create the program, you are simultaneously acting as a player. And as you the game, your memory of programming is completely erased. Your left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing, and vice versa. For me, this is the ultimate game and also a form of self-healing. Actually doing it, though, is very difficult.”


(p.62)


“While we are fully aware of and observing deeply an object, the boundary between the subject who observes and the object being observed gradually dissolves, and the subject and object become one. This is the essence of meditation.”

“Only when we penetrate an object and become one with it can we understand. It is not enough to stand outside and observe an object.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, Transformation and Healing: Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness, Parallax Press, 2006

(p.10)

Thich Nhat Hanh said

“If you want to see and understand, we have to penetrate and become one with the object. If we stand outside of it in order to observe it, we cannot really see and understand it. The work of observation is the work of penetrating and transforming.”

“If we continue in our mindful observation, there will no longer be a duality between observer and observed.”


(p.121)


Ryodo Yamashita and Issho Fujita, Updating Buddism, in Japanese, Gentosha, 2013

Ryodo Yamashita said

After removing all “cloud” of thinking mind, there remains the “sky” that can observe the world.

Takashi Iba, "An Autopoietic Systems Theory for Creativity”, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol.2, Issue 4, 2010, pp.6610-6625

Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference 2009

Procedia

Social and

Behavioral

Sciences

www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

COINs2009: Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference

An Autopoietic Systems Theory for Creativity

Takashi Ibaab aMIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Cambridge MA, USA

bFaculty of Policy Management, Keio University, Japan

Abstract

In this paper, a new, non-psychological and non-sociological approach to understanding creativity is proposed. The approach is based on autopoietic system theory, where an autopoietic system is defined as a unity whose organization is defined by a particular network of production processes of elements. While the theory was originally proposed in biology and then applied to sociology, I have applied it to understand the nature of creation, and called it "Creative Systems Theory". A creative system is an autopoietic system whose element is "discovery", which emerges only when a synthesis of three selections has occurred: "idea", "association", and "consequence". With using these concepts, we open the way to understand creation itself separated from psychic and social aspects of creativity. On this basis, the coupling between creative, psychic, and social systems is discussed. I suggest, in this paper, the future of creativity studies, re-defining a discipline "Creatology" for inquiring creative systems and propose an interdisciplinary field as "Creative Sciences" for interdisciplinary connections among creatology, psychology, and so on.

Keywords; creativity; systems theory; autopoiesis; pattern language

1. Introduction

In this paper, a new, non-psychological and non-sociological approach to understanding creativity is proposed. The approach is based on autopoietic system theory, where an autopoietic system is defined as a unity whose organization is defined by a particular network of production processes of elements. While the theory was originally proposed in biology and then applied to sociology, I have applied it to understand the nature of creation, and called it "Creative Systems Theory". A creative system is an autopoietic system whose element is "discovery", which emerges only when a synthesis of three selections has occurred: "idea", "association", and "consequence". With using these concepts, we open the way to understand creation itself separated from psychic and social aspects of creativity. On this basis, the coupling between creative, psychic, and social systems is discussed. I suggest, in this paper, the future of creativity studies, re-defining a discipline "Creatology" for inquiring creative systems and propose an interdisciplinary field as "Creative Sciences" for interdisciplinary connections among creatology, psychology, and so on.

There are several reasons why study of creativity is pursued from so many angles today. First, against the backdrop of the shift from labor-intensive work to knowledge-intensive work, many people involved in business need to make full use of intelligence and creativity for obtaining

Creative Systems Theory based on the autopoietic systems theory

A creative process is defined as an autopoietic system whose elements are discoveries.

Creative process is a (re-) production network of discoveries.

Each discovery is emerged only when a synthesis of the following three selection occurs: idea, association, and finding.



Creative Process as Chain of Discoveries


Creative Process - Autopoietic System


“the distinction between action and experience resides in the application of the distinction between self-reference and hetero-reference”“Experience appears to be determined by the environment”“If, on the other hand, we are dealing with participation through action, then the system determines the environment.”

Action and Experience in Systems Theory

Niklas Lehmann Art as a Social System, Stanford University Press, 2000(p.78)

Action

Experience

AutopoieticSystem

AutopoieticSystem


Chain of discoveries

following the result

Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking

Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking

“the quality without a name cannot be made, but only generated by a process. It can flow from your actions; it can flow with the greatest ease; but it cannot be made. It cannot be contrived, thought out, designed. It happens when it flows out from the process of creation of its own accord.”

/




“Your mind is a medium within which the creative spark that jumps between the pattern and the world can happen. You yourself are only the medium for this creative spark, not its originator.”

/



Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking


“We are ready, now, to see just how a sequence of patterns can create a building in our minds. It happens with surprising ease. The building almost “makes itself,” just as a sequence seems to when we speak.”

/



Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking


“The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and transcribe them, of course).”


Stephen King said

Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking

“I feel like that novel has already moved on ahead and now I’m chasing after the images in it.”


(p.68)


Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking

“Within the sequence which the language defines, you can focus on each pattern by itself, one at a time, certain that those patterns which come later in the sequence will fit into the design which has evolved so far. You can pay full attention to each pattern; you can let it have its full intensity. Then you can give each pattern just that strange intensity which makes the pattern live.”

/




Creative Process - Autopoietic System

“should be”


Chain of discoveries

following the result

Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking

“In the same way, groups of people can conceive their larger public buildings, on the ground, by following a common pattern language, almost as if they had a single mind.”

/




“And in this sense, the language is the instrument which brings about the state of mind, which I call egoless.”

/

(Alexander, 1979, p.546)Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building,



“it is just your pattern language which helps you become egoless.”

/

(Alexander, 1979, p.543)Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building,



“We have seen earlier that when an activity is thoroughly engrossing, there is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli. One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper Perennial, 1990 / 2008 p.62

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking

“A third characteristic of flow experiences has been variously described as “loss of ego,” “self-forgetfulness,” “loss of self-consciousness,” and even “transcendence of individuality” and “fusion with the world” (Maslow, 1971, pp.65,70).”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play, Jossey-Bass, 1975 / 2000 p.42

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Action

Experience

Actionwritingmaking

“While we are fully aware of and observing deeply an object, the boundary between the subject who observes and the object being observed gradually dissolves, and the subject and object become one. This is the essence of meditation.”


(p.10)


“Writing novels is in large part an act of self-healing.”


(p.62)


Associate ProfessorFaculty of Policy Management, Keio UniversityPh.D in Media and Governance


Takashi Iba

Ayaka YoshikawaFaculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University

“what occurs in egoless creation with pattern languages” (purplsoc2017)

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