Abstract
How did one Nobel Prize winning scientist, Barbara McClintock, intuit—working as much artistically as scientifically—truths about genetic processes, studying corn? Why are so many outstanding scientists also artists? What is the “intimation” in Wallas’s stages of creativity that draws one in? Are there links to the “nuance” that has engaged many creative processes, including Einstein’s. We actually meet the infinite most everywhere, through the beautiful fractal forms of nature, and their self-similar patterns, at large/small scales, throughout our lifeworld (and in mathematics), from rivers and trees to brains and blood vessels. The life force reveals itself in “fingerprints of chaos” through “chaotic attractors” in complexity theory, also perhaps explaining new depths of mind and memory, and the pull of nuance. Is part of this even epigenetic?
All beings are flowers
Blooming
In a blooming universe.
Soen Nakagawa
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Notes
- 1.
Richards, New Aesthetic, 72.
- 2.
Richards, ibid.
- 3.
Richards, “Subtle Attraction,” also Richards, “New Aesthetic,” 73.
- 4.
Briggs and Peat, Turbulent Mirror___.
- 5.
Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry of Nature; Schroeder, Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws.
- 6.
Falconer, Fractals; Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry of Nature.
- 7.
Briggs and Peat, Turbulent Mirror; Mitchell, Complexity.
- 8.
Juarrero and Rubino, Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: Precursors and Prototypes.
- 9.
Falconer, Fractals, 4–6.
- 10.
Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry of Nature, 42; Schroeder, Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws, 8.
- 11.
Schroeder, Fractals, Chaos, and Power Laws, 33.
- 12.
Peitgen, Jurgens, and Saupe, Chaos and Fractals; centerplates in Gleick, Chaos: Peitgen and Richter, Beauty of Fractals; for visual representations of principles, Frederick Abraham, Visual Introduction to Dynamical Systems Theory for Psychology; Ralph Abraham and Christopher Shaw, Dynamics, Part Two, Chaotic Behavior.
- 13.
Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry of Nature, see colorplates incl. mountains, valleys, a planet, that never were.
- 14.
Richards and Kerr, “The Fractal Forms of Nature”; also Richards, “New Aesthetic,” 83.
- 15.
Richards, “New Aesthetic,” 86.
- 16.
Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, 25.
- 17.
Richards, “New Aesthetic”; Guastello and Liebovitch, “Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and Complexity.”
- 18.
Nahon and Hemsley, Going Viral; Mehta, www.servicespace.org, personal communication.
- 19.
Charyton et al., “Historical and Fractal Perspective on the Life and Saxophone Solos of John Coltrane.”
- 20.
Bejan, Design in Nature.
- 21.
Skarda and Freeman, “How Brains Make Chaos in Order to Make Sense of the World.”
- 22.
Kitzbichler et al., “Broadband criticality of human brain network synchronization”; Goertzel, “Belief Systems as Attractors”: Goertzel, “A Cognitive Law of Motion”; Pincus, “Fractal Brains: Fractal Thoughts.”
- 23.
Richards, “Creativity, Chaos, Complexity, and Healthy Change” (in press).
- 24.
Marks-Tarlow, “A Fractal Epistemology for Transpersonal Psychology.”
- 25.
Briggs and Peat, Turbulent Mirror, 194.
- 26.
Briggs, Fire in the Crucible.
- 27.
Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process, 20, 97.
- 28.
Wilber, “The Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”
- 29.
Maslow, Farther Reaches of Human Nature.
- 30.
Richards, “New Aesthetic”; Schneider, Awe. In a humanistic and dynamic context we stand humbled and amazed.
- 31.
Briggs and Peat, Turbulent Mirror, 97.
- 32.
Pincus, “Fractal Brain, Fractal Thoughts.”
- 33.
Baruss and Mossbridge, Transcendent Mind.
- 34.
Rao, Consciousness Studies, 144.
- 35.
Kaufman and Singer, “The Creativity of Dual Process ‘System 1’ Thinking,” para 1.
- 36.
L’Engle, author of Wrinkle in Time, Wind in the Door. With mind in holomovement, asking “where” might not be a good question, although it is not fully clear why L’Engle kept admonishing, “not where”!
- 37.
Also note that women then in science had gender-based disadvantages. See Spender, Women of Ideas.
- 38.
Keller, Feeling for the Organism.
- 39.
Leavy, Method Meets Art.
- 40.
Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein, “Artistic Scientists and Scientific Artists.”
- 41.
Keller, Feel for the Organism, 117.
- 42.
Briggs, “Reflectaphors.”
- 43.
Wachowski and Wachowski, directors, “The Matrix,” DVD.
- 44.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Call Me By My True Names.” Astonishing poetry, divided remarkably into two parts, one on The Absolute, and the other on our Relative Reality.
- 45.
Briggs, “Reflectaphors,” 414.
- 46.
Briggs, Fire in the Crucible.
- 47.
Siegel, Mindful Brain, 99. Ipseity: experience of life without our constructed self, minimal sense of ‘I-ness.’
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Richards, R. (2018). Fingerprints of Chaos, Nuance, and Creativity. In: Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55766-7_16
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