When I started looking for solutions to systems in which variables have multiple relations, I found that there had been several thinkers who looked at these types of problems using diverse mathematical perspectives. Most of these perspectives were based on statistics and stochastic analysis. Some tried to fit complex models to differential equations. Others, looked at fractals. All the approaches were interesting, but none seemed right.
For a while, I was one of the first members of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences, but soon I felt disappointed at the approach taken by the mainstream academicians and theorists in the field. First, I felt that most of the literature in dynamic systems was focused on creating mathematical terms that were useless outside of mathematics. For instance, attractors are pieces of space that when an object enters, a substantial force is needed to make the object leave. Bifurcations are defined as patterns of instability. Fractals are just seen as geometrical forms. Second, the dynamic systems theorists have attempted to use statistics and stochastic analysis as a tool for analysis of dynamic systems. However, statistics are not really tools to determine causality, or even sequentiality. Statistics tell us if different samples share the same variance, giving a high probability that they belong to the same sample or population.
Dynamic systems describe complex processes. Therefore, the mathematical elements I use as tools for dynamic system analysis are: systems, sets, functions, loops, groups of loops, and fractals. Since I believe dynamic systems is the form of mathematics best describes thinking processes, I have created my own concepts that relate directly to human development and to the thinking process. I define frameworks, functions, and operators as they apply to human development, developmental psychology, organic systems, and the way mental processes are structured.
Creativity is a defining point of who artists are. It is a defining point of their personality, a defining point of how they view the world, how they act within it, how they respond to it, and their importance to it. Unsurprisingly then, artists contemplate creativity. They wonder what exactly it is, and they come to an answer of that question because being without an answer is to have no knowledge of self. For artists, creativity is Self, and many if not most artists feel that to have no knowledge of self at all would be harmful to their art for one’s art is the expression of one’s Self. Each time an artist engages in her or his art they are engaging in self understanding. Artists can and do consider their art as defining expressions of themselves, of things they want to “say,” of things they have felt to be important and what to share through the expression of art. Artists speak of their art as actions. The fine artist will say “I do oil and acrylic” or “I do watercolor”; or “I do cityscapes”; “I do flowers.” Actors when imitating someone for an audience say they are “doing” a certain president; or “doing the butterfly at rest”; or “doing a transition between” one emotional state and another. Musicians, too, tend to say “I do…” and then list and describe their music. Artists might change the verb do for another action verb: “I photograph babies”; “I paint flowers”; “I play sax,” but there is no mistaking the doing of the art. Artists feel that they not only do their art they live it as well. Their art, their creativity, is completely bound up with who they are. Why do fine artists paint, dancers dance, writers write? For artists the ultimate and unarguable answer is because they must.
