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I was thinking about the discussion we had after the book presentations of Steven Strogatz’s ‘ Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order’ and the idea that nothing can be creative without consciousness. It really made me think about the two levels of thought processes- the conscious and the unconscious, and the definition of creativity. Personally, I strongly agree that one cannot call something creative, if it was formed unconsciously. I do think that something beautiful , fascinating and truly amazing can be formed without a conscious mind, and that it can have the power to strongly draw us to the phenomena (I think that nature and natural selection is an excellent example). However, I would not define the emergence of such things as being creative.

The discussion also made me think once again about a very old forum post and the discussion we had in class about music and how objectively speaking every music can have a pattern or not have one. I guess I hesitated to completely agree with the statement, because to me, if we define music having a pattern as something like repetition of sounds, that just is not creative, and to me, creativity is a requirement for music. For example, a siren is a repetition of sounds, and it definitely has a pattern, but it is not music. It isn’t creative. A group of people simultaneously making sounds may accidently form something amazing, but that isn’t creativity to me. That is, unless they consciously realize that have come up with something fascinating, and make a conscious effort to try to continue the beautiful music. From there, there is plenty of potential for creativity to emerge.