Creativity arrived on a crossroad. Possible directions: (1) individualism; (2) collectivism; (3)common sense or individualism balanced with collectivism. The Cartesian concept 'consciousness' makes it take take turn 'individualism'.

Before that time people didn’t worry about distinguishing oneself from others. Often the concept imagination is mentioned as the pre-Descartes equivalent of consciousness. The Catholic priest Rene Descartes formalizes in Enlightenment in the logic 'rationalism' the dual view on life of the ancient Macedonian Aristotle (revived by Luther), as written down in Nicomachean Ethics.

Imagination just like consciousness interprets sensory experiences, enabling us to make sense of it. Either from a conventional perspective or from a fresh, original one.
Ludwig Wittgenstein explained much later that our brains transform physical stimulations of sense organs by way of 'concepts' into workable methods (familiar behavior).

Let’s for a moment forget about the absolutely partly useful vast consciousness science and literature. Most  discussions there show that it’s possible to bite in one’s own tail, and that this is awfully complex (you can find all though here). There are hundreds of definitions and this creates a tremendous confusion.

Let’s instead use a simply to prove definition:

This method quite well works with gorillas (using sign language), so why not with humans?

Distinguishing oneself must have been a major step in evolution. Suddenly your world is not one heap of sensations anymore, but a pile that can be organized. . You might using this property realize that there is no necessary connection between leaves being brown and your mood. Without consciousness in the total situation you can’t distinguish between the leaves and yourself.

When you recognize yourself as being John of course you analyze. But that is NOT the essence. That is the creative act of creating the concept ‘myself’, necessary for analyzing. It creates the possibility to fragment experiences. Like for paradigm shifts for this act there is yet no explanation. There is however a striking resemblance with paradigm shifts. Both take the ability of realizing that there is a difference between the absolute all and the relative situation of ‘me and the rest’. How one suddenly gets this ability is yet a riddle  But is seems an essential phenomenon.

However a common cat clearly also remembers and recognizes others. BUT not because it is senses a being different from oneself and familiar, but because of properties (smell, taste, sound etc.). It recognizes situations.
Whhich functions should any android make 'more' than a cat?

Using this property of recognizing oneself in a mirror, one can distinguish all kind of consciousness. I.e. recognizing own thoughts and recognizing experiences (mind-body problem). Because it has not to be a consequence of the definition, but it must no make such a distinction impossible. Then evolution showed to be a magnificent wizard in creating the necessary properties.

IF one recognizes the self, THEN it is possible to create a link and this self and thoughts or experiences. Be sure that evolution found a way.

Today 4 functions are regularly linked with consciousness.

1. Analyzing (the property to SEE a state as some way of 'single')
2. Willpower (goal thinking)
3. Awareness (in fantasy dividing of dreaming and doing)
4. Logic

1 and 3 I already treated, let’s have a look at 2 and 3. Again a use the same method: researching if my used concept hinders the mentioned function.

Intention presumes that you can link actions and your thoughts. No problem IF you recognize yourself as a single subject.

Linking concepts (fantasies or thoughts) with experiences. That created the difference of opinion between empiricists and rationalists in the 17th century. What is necessary is distinguishing between thoughts and actions, AND between the one to who triggers these concepts and the group. Again no problem using my simple definition. You might mistake body and mind or experience and abstract thinking, but that's in no way compulsory. A machine with these 4 functions might still become Christian or Buddhist. The difference is in the logic.

Some scientists claim that before the word ‘consciousness’ got fashionable, these first 3 of the above four notions represented the same and were known as "common sense". Logic was implicit in the body, common sense is logic that became intuition. maybe even settled in our DNA.

What is more, these 4 properties are said by many scientists to be responsible for our awareness of passing time, for imagination, for memory, and for wakefulness and sleep

Cartesian rationalism is generally seen as a new scientific revolution in Western Europe, but lesser attention got  that it destroyed ‘imagination’ as only intuition. The new way of thinking ignored intuition, but intuition is the required basics for further abstract thinking.

Intuition proved to be enough for distinguishing oneself, but individualism is NOT necessary. Another possibility is to create a  group-imagination or group-consciousness. That could explain why individuality before end 17^th century was according to me not known or leading a weak existence. More important was strengthening your own clan, tribe, group or whatever.

Mathematical analysis offerde a new paradigm by way of fragmenting reality. It certainly was not the way to keep overview, as was much more obvious using ‘group-imagination’. Rationalism in French Enlightenment finally lead to capitalism (economic rationalism). This became until now the leading paradigm. Seen this way it seems a only partially succesful ‘choice’ in evolution. It needs balancing with other choices.

Individualism should be balanced with Collectivism. In the television series "Star Trek" there is a bee-like culture that cherishes only the community as a whole. They don't know individuality, and nevertheless are quite successful. In pure Pavlovian reactions beings like spiders, bees and ants are far superior to humans. That's why SF movies are crowded with such beings. If they are able to realize a kind of unpredictive group-intelligence, then such a culture is quite threatening.
And what about a mix between human intelligence and Pavlovian superbeings? Maybe some individual humans posses wisdom, but that doesn't automatically include their realization of a 'self'. But people believing in a way of absolute truth might think otherwise.

Black // White Absolut ism Relativ In the following part of this text I'll defend my view that absolutism and relativism are a undividable unity. Being absolute has no meaning without relativism. Relative values are only differences between absolute parameters. ONLY 'between' the absolute values black and darkblue is much more than only an n-dimensional line in shades of gray. There is a limitless space, in all the color of the rainbow. The more I think about it, and look at my experiences, the more I become convinced that EVERY system of thought ends in 'enlightened absolutism'. That means admitting that Relativism is only a temporary, but ESSENTIAL, state WITHIN absolutism. When focusing your thoughts on some concept everybody can be perfectly relativist, but when acting PURELY on intuition then ONLY traditionalist or absolute behavior is used. The word 'purely' exactly shows the problem. Acting purely on intuition is becoming more and more rare (that's just a fact, neither good nor bad). In daily life you find a continuous 'fight' between intuition and pure reason (both shapes of intelligence). Pure reason tends to be more progressive than possible, pure intuition tends to be to conservative. Power Thinking On a lot of places in society you find unecessary thinking in opposites: Left versus right, progressive versus conservative, authoritarian versus relativist, peace versus war, hunger versus wealth etc. This kind of thinking at maximum leads to several absolute camps living in peaceful coexistence by having destructive weapons. To get out of this draw in another way then by destroying all but one camps, you need relatives forces on aLL sides. As an example let me take the former Cold War: My view is that all of us want to go AHEAD, and not either left or right in a weapon race. Then progressives and conservatives should cooperate. Both sides of the political spectrum stress something that is necessary anyway. Conservatives stress continuity. They are right, without learning from past experience humanity every time risks making the same mistakes. Progressives are right in stressing change too, without change continuity risks being only a rigid and awfully slow way towards improvement. Evolution is a game of chance, and every now and then that takes playing another card. Absolutism Relativism Using this view I honestly don't see why being conservative should collide with being progressive, and vice versa. Instead both sides need each other. Conservatives need progressives to make real progress, and progressives to avoid risking really making a mess need to be watched with an eye for history. These sides present two essentially different ways of coping with chance. Taking risk and being careful. Both are necessary, risk can't be avoided but being careful doesn't hurt. It's the way in which companies get big. It's like playing a game of poker. Without knowing and remembering everything that can be learned from the card you're certainly gonna be surprised. And without one a while using your poker face you're not gonna win. But it takes both to be really successful. When conservative political parties start talking about making progress, and progressive ones about taking care of continuity than it is time to take care. Then they are not really fighting anymore for their main concern, and instead mainly trying to win votes. Then things have changed in bureaucracies fighting mainly for their life. Black and darkblue obviously need each other to make gray. It is confusing to produce gray mixing left-gray and right-gray. Without already starting from mixed gray views it is still possible to create every shade of gray. The gray background of this page was created using the picture above with the black and darkblue squares. It presents a view on black and darkblue thinking. Relativism Absolutism The extremes are clear and show no need for fighting. Then the fighting must be caused by becoming gray to win votes. But everybody wants to go ahead, who needs voting? The actual need for voting comes from political kings and queens, it is caused by disguised egoism. Being self-centered might be good in times of war, but in other times without doubt is very counterproductive. Such people act on the wrong stage, and would make perfect actors. We have to get rid of PREJUDICES like growth being rigid improvement in only one direction. Or it being jumping from one view to another, without getting any wiser. Growth is taking risk but also like cautiously blowing an ALMOST continuous sequence of absolute bubbles.

God and Mystery
Religion and Absolutism / Religion and Relativism

The notion 'God' is closely tied to both Absolutism and Relativism. Further in this text I'll dive into it.

For the moment I tend to believe the statement: "God hates religion" (or "God has no religion"-Mahatma Gandhi); and to think that not more than any other belief-system the believing in a God (or Allah, or Buddha, or whoever) leads to absolutism or authoritarianism.

The English word "religion" probably comes from the Latin word religo, meaning to "bind up." This former meaning speaks for itself.
I don’t know enough about the history of Christianity to say if it was or was not meant to be a religion. I don't think so. I see that in quite rational western 'church' authority the greek belief-system of split mind and body is still honored and in the rest of society since the Enlightenment came a dominance of rationalism. I'm no specialist in this subject but think that humanitarian feelings were already found in the bible.
I’m no ‘believer’, but I know that believing in a God might be quite different from being imprisoned in worshipping gods (dogmatism or absolutism). Humanism is promoting freedom.

Authority and Knowldge

Mind that there is nothing wrong with absolute knowledge or authority. Any learning process starts with an authoritarian absolute phase. Because first you respectfully try to drain your professors from knowledge. Their knowledge resembles dogma, but is only used as training. There comes the time to go your own way, and use your own creativity. Only if that phase is forgotten THEN you end up with absolutism (teachers or teachings being worshipped as little gods). Religion is an example of believing in a God, shaped into an absolute belief-system (or fundamentalist belief).

The bulk of mankind consists of followers, who will follow any strong leader. So don’t underestimate religions and any shape of dogmatic belief.

The inevitable partner of absolute knowledge is relative knowledge. It provides the flexibility to question old truths and to change into new truths. It is the creative spark that prevents tradition from becoming ceremony. Ceremony in itself is not bad (in evolution humans even developed a liking for it), but when only used to worship tradition its function gets to keep thing as they were (or to halt evolution).

The word ‘relativism’ as used by me indicates a belief in truth dependant of the used knowledge system. This was very well described by  Wittgenstein in his Closed Circle Theory. The opposite is believing in general truth whatever the used system of thought.

Popper Kuhn

Related to the described phenomenon philosophy got two camps: enlightened absolutists (followers of the elder Popper) and relativists (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kuhn). See Popper-Kuhn debate. More than necessary these camps became adversaries. Nietzsche for instance was only fighting religion (the church) and not against believing or teaching. In fact he choose to be a teacher himself. But many Christians learned to hate him as a devil.

The Enlightenment end 17^th century started with an energy slurping and superfluous border between learning from experience (empiricism) and learning by pure reasoning (rationalism).The early 17th century could be called Age of Absolutism (with guys like the French king Louis XIV). It is thus no surprise that when Enlightenment end 17th century started, the belief in absolute truth was still dominating. Let’s not make the same mistake twice. At present absolutism as found in capitalism is getting dangerously strong, because of creating an unnecessary border between absolute knowledge and relative wisdom (capitalism = economic rationalism a peculiar mix of old fashioned rationalism with empiricism, a doctrine easily changing in dogma).

Capitalism has brilliant sides. Don’t let it die in dogma. Get rid of bureaucracy and  monopoly of knowledge, this is only serving accumulation of wealth.  In essence this is discrimination, and should not be protected by law.

You learn about Fire by Curiosity

Differences in creativity and authority should be expressed in something else than material wealth and egoism. In ancient times (until Julius Caesar) for this reason in Western culture there was respect, and that paid out in many ways. Caesar seemed to respect common sense values.

God was invented to explain mystery.
God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.
Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore.
But you need him for the other mysteries.
So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time--life and death--stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
Richard Feynman


The Fire-God Yahura Mazda offers Fire wisdom.
Yahura Mazda offers insight in Fire-tricks that you still can't make sense of.
When you finally can make sense of some trick of Fire,you make Fire Instructions which MIGHT take you away from Yahura Mazda (away from common sense);
For accepted common sense about Fire you don't need Ahura Mazda anymore.
But being Fire-men you need the struggle between Yahura Mazda and Ahriman (hot and hotter) for making sense of other mysteries of Fire.
So therefore leave very hot Fire (without yet Fire Instructions) to Yahura Mazda and Ahriman;
you need their exploring struggle for making sense of those scoarching sides of Fire which your laws Fire Instructions are still ignorant about.
Zoroastrianism

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