Lorraine Ford
Re creativity:
The underlying low-level world is not doing mathematics. Mathematics is a specialised high-level human recreational activity. Mathematics clearly doesn’t exist without mathematicians, with their conscious imaginations, their agency, and their special symbols.
However, the world clearly has underlying low-level relationships that can be represented by statements containing special symbols, i.e. mathematical equations (which include symbols for categories like momentum and energy), and symbols for numbers. And the world clearly is a system, where representing the necessary aspects of a viable system requires the use of statements containing the following types of symbols: IF, AND, OR, IS TRUE, and THEN, etc.
But what is creativity? Creativity is a leap, a jump, a non-logical, non-deterministic response to an on-the-spot situation. After the fact, creativity can be represented by IF…THEN… statements representing the before and after situation, with the understanding that there is no necessary, no logical, no deterministic connection between the IF and the THEN. After the fact, creativity is represented by the appearance of new relationships, which would usually be represented as the assignment of new numbers to categories. Creativity is the creation of new low-level relationships.