Chapter 2. Two world views

Being creative depends on our outlook on life. If we believe or frame our world as a continuous struggle for survival, old brain structures become dominant and offer us standard solutions proven by millions of years of evolution. They ultimately lead to rational types of problem solving, reasoning from the givens, resulting into an almost Classicist desire of a predictable, deterministic, ordered world. If we conceive of our world as a treasure chest of unexploited opportunities, the younger brain structures become operative and more associative types of problem solving are activated in which the fixed classifications of how the world ontologically is or should be are transgressed through epistemic appraisals of what the world might be or could be like. Disruptive ideas conjured up by bright individuals entice an almost Romantic culture that, when brought back to a survivalist form, worships genius, excellence, stardom, and ego. The postulation of a probabilistic universe also allows the incidence of sheer luck or serendipity; the circumstance that in physical as well as in organic nature creations surface from accidental collisions or from sudden patterns coincidentally emerging from randomness. In closure, it seems that creativity balances between probability and determinism with neither state being perfectly freed from the other. In this sense, chaos incrementally grows into evolution, which then is disrupted, triggering chaos again, which in its turn progresses towards evolution, etc.