Liane Gabora, conversations, creativity, religion - Written by ulrike on Sunday, March 8, 2009 20:17 - 2 Comments
Creativity and Human Culture
Liane Gabora is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. In 2009 she is Associate Director of the PACE Center at Tufts University. She has over 70 publications and has given lectures worldwide on creativity and in what sense culture constitutes an evolutionary process. She has held research grants from Foundation for the Future, the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Flemish Government of Belgium. She is working on a book titled “Dawn of the Creative Mind: The Origin and Evolution of Human Culture”.
Parts of her theory are influenced by Stuart’s work – you can easily see in the video how familiar Liane is with his ideas. Richard and I liked very much her interpretation of the “adjacent possible”.
Liane has also written a “metaphysical comedy” about her own vision of a naturalistic God. Nice piece!
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Liane, I find your ideas about cultural evolution very rich, particularly compared to the relatively impoverished ideas of “memes” and their mutatations advocated by Richard Dawkins and Marc Feldman. These images are overly genetic. We create novel ideas by your associations, mixing old and new components, and by genuine discoveries, the non-algorithmic analogues of Darwinian exaptations. We need a theory of the partially lawless, non-prestatable, yet non-random becoming of the biosphere, economy, culture, and do not have these ideas in science yet in any clear way.
I also think your vision of the “generosity” of God as the natural creativity of nature, our capacity to find even better solutions if we fail on first try, is very worth thinking about. We need our sense of the sacred and of God to orient us to face living into Gordon Kaufman’s Mystery, a Mystery which we cannot fully know, with hope and courage. The Abrahamic God who loves us provides that hope. Your vision enlarges the hope that we can find in a creative nature. I would add that I suspect that as the diversity of species and complexity of features per species increases, the ease of finding mutualistic positive sum games increases, so “collaboration” emerges more readily in the biosphere, economics and culture.
I’m so glad to have your thoughts included in the discussion(s) we must have. Stu
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[...] Leong Ying Liane Gabora [...]
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