Apophenalogic

The name of this blog, Apophenalogic, is a word that I created to convey the core concepts that seem to underly the creative process. I came up with this name by splicing together three distinct words that are basic ingredients of creativity:

apophenia + analogy + logic

Apophenia is essentially the propensity for humans to see patterns in the world, but taken to a neurotic extreme. I believe it plays a central role in creativity. It's what allows us to see arbitrary meaningful shapes in cloud formations, for example. Analogy also plays a key role in creativity: the ability to see connections between two disparate concepts (aka making metaphors). Logic is the opposite extreme of apophenia, and is necessary to provide an anchor or balance. It also conjures up the sense of mathematics and computation, which leads to a key driving question for me: can creativity be quantified?

Put another way, apophenia, when tamed by logic, leads to fruitful analogy building.

It also conveys another key ingredient of creativity: the blending together of distinct concepts to form something wholly new, which is at the heart of biological evolution and evolutionary algorithms.

In the coming weeks and months I will be exploring these ideas further.

I have been contemplating starting a blog for quite some time, to be a central repository of my thoughts and ideas on a multitude of topics. There are several reasons I never pursued it until now, but the main reason is that I lacked any sort of focus or central purpose for the site. Gradually over time, however, that unifying focus became clear to me: creativity.

That might seem like a very nebulous foundation upon which to base this blog, especially since I am not a cognitive scientist, psychologist or the like. But the quest to create and to understand the creative process (on both a human level and from a computational perspective) has been the dominant driving force in my life and is at the core of my identity. In the coming weeks and month, I will share some of my experiences with the creative process and try to convey my qualitative intuition about this enigmatic and often elusive quality. At the same time, this site hopefully will evolve into an active workspace for future projects and help to foster creative discoveries.

Over the next few weeks, most of my posts will likely be focussed on my motivations and plans for the site, in particular as I solidify its design and content structure. In the longer term, you can expect to find entries on topics like: