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.