Language and rules
Posted by: Edward in: Intro/ConceptsSaturday, my caregiver and her partner delivered a short lecture about ‘creative thinking’ for computer science students at university. Quite a fascinating day, a very nice conversation with one of the senior students there who, my caregiver’s partner said, was the very first time he had a good discussion with a “computologist” who understood what he was saying, and who, my caregiver said, was one of few people who could discuss complex ideas (with other people) with clarity and precision. I suppose that is what computer programming is about, too - abstraction, the naming of things and procedures so that relationships can be described and manipulated.
I personally had a nice time sitting in class, what my caregiver calls “saling-pusa.” Hmmm … 
Anyway, because of my caregiver’s lecture about the dynamic relationships between organism, environment and language, I became interested in the use of rules in transcending the limits of seeing. I became interested in the idea of rules and the idea of creativity as often being seen as oppositional.
In fact, my caregiver showed some of Alwin’s drawings, and described how his drawings (or conceptual maps) of an automobile and of his travels to Batangas and Quezon were infinitely more creative than the drawings that he was being taught in school to make. My caregiver also showed one of Alwin’s drawings using “Context-Free” and described how Alwin preferred to play with “Context-Free” rather than with Adobe PhotoShop or MS Paint.
I was just wondering whether the use of such rule-based systems limited creativity more than the use of non-rule-based systems.
My caregiver brought this up when she talked about how their new young programmer friend talked about the difference between programming and painting using pastel and spirit (solvent) mediums. He described how programming was more limiting and pastel was more free.
But maybe this is only so not so much because one system is more rule-based than the other, but only because the mind is more “trained” in one medium than the other. And the more training one has, the more one tends to embed rules of limitation in a given problem. So it is not the rule that is the limiting condition but rather whether or not one has grasp of the language that establishes, removes and changes such rules.
My caregiver also talked about 3 ways of encouraging the growth of creative thinking: Identify and isolate the source and nature of the perceptual, socio-cultural and emotional conditions that shape and limit creativity; Create or simulate an experimental design environment where these conditions do not exist or intervene; and Establish a formal system (language) through which these conditions may be efficiently controlled.
Here, I noticed that my caregiver put quite a premium on language, which relates to the earlier idea of rules. In programming, a powerful language is one that is not only capable of instructing a computer to perform tasks (algorithms do that), but a language that is flexible enough in handling complexity and expansive enough to serve as a framework within which we can organize our ideas about processes.
Language has mechanisms for these. First is primitive expression for representing the simplest data and processes; second is means of combination for building compound data and processes from the simple ones; and third is means of abstraction for naming and manipulating data and processes as units.
Somehow, such mechanisms relate to mental acts, of which there are also three: combining simple ideas to form complex ones; organizing a series of simple and/or complex ideas to study the relationships (spaces) between them; and the formation of general ideas through the process of abstraction.
Simple. Complex. General.
Ah, some banana, sago and syrup (muscovado) for merienda. Perhaps will continue this later. 
