Низовцев Юрий Михайлович : другие произведения.

The origins of cunning and its main difference from creativity

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Школа кожевенного мастерства: сумки, ремни своими руками
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  • Аннотация:
    Cunning is often confused with ingenuity, while it is nothing more than a tactical machination, at the expense of which will not win the war, but you can deceive some people. Therefore, it makes sense to clarify the origins of cunning and creativity (ingenuity), and to identify on this basis their differences and the means that are used in both cases.
  
  Key words: consciousness, self-consciousness, cunning, deception, distortion, information, imagination, intuition, randomness, interest.
  
  
  All living beings are in the information flow, forming their own world from it, interspersed into their common beingness, consisting of things and organisms, that is, from the passive and the active.
  In beingness, each being must ensure survival by foraging food at the expense of the environment, devouring lower organisms and dodging enemies, and thus seeking to improve its own position for self-preservation, as well as to ensure the most intensive reproduction of oneself and regular nutrition.
  One of the ways to solve such problems is the instinctive distortion of information coming from some living beings to others through their senses.
  For example, flowers-predators are luring insects by a pleasant smell and opportunity to gather nectar inside the calyx of the flower, and then they close the petals and digest the insect, got there.
  The vulture turtle has a small process on its tongue, which wiggles, luring small fish who think that it is a worm.
  The South American Cantilea snake has a bright, thin and mobile tip of the tail, reminiscent of a worm, luring by it small animals.
  On the other hand, for example, cicadas and praying mantises, which normally have a protective coloration, at the moment of danger, reveal a bright color, frightening off a predator; chameleons take on a threatening pose and bright color.
  Such distortion of information, which manifests itself among living beings, helps them to solve the problems of survival and adaptation to the environment. In other words, in order to solve the problem of keeping the sensations entering the body, living beings instinctively try to deceive other creatures, who are solving similar problems in the competitive struggle for existence.
  Thus, deception is an instinctive form of information distortion, which manifests itself as an effective means of survival.
  Since a person is basically also a natural organism, he is not alien to instinctive deception, for example, in the form of pretense, which often allows him to improve his position in society, get rid of enemies and gain friends.
  With the acquisition of self-consciousness, a person has significantly expanded the sphere of action of all consciousness. In particular, he was able to use distortion of information to achieve his own goals, not purely instinctively, but also quite consciously. For example, by planting for an enemy of the false information in a war, you can lure an enemy into a trap and destroy.
  This kind of conscious actions based on natural (instinctive) deception began to be called cunning, which manifests itself in various forms depending on the goals being set.
  Fishermen trick fish with such a trick as a variety of spoons.
  Women fool men with skillfully applied makeup.
  Merchants mislead buyers with cunning tricks in the form of discounts on low-quality goods
  Philosophers deceive the simple-minded public with sophisms.
  Economists and financiers are always cunning with the people, offering them a sure way to improve their lives in the form of financial speculation that enriches only themselves.
  Politicians are disingenuous with the public, promising them a speedy improvement in life only in order to stay in power for as long as possible.
  Adventurers of all stripes insidiously promise quick enrichment due to participating in win-win lotteries and all sorts of pyramids.
  Ozhegov's dictionary does not provide a direct definition of cunning, but indicates that "to cunning means to act with cunning, insincerely" [1].
  The teacher's encyclopedic dictionary gives the following definition of cunning: "The moral and ethical quality of a person, manifested in dexterity, deceit, secret action. Cunning is a way to deceive the enemy's vigilance or a means to get any desired result" [2].
  While quite correctly noting the fundamental feature of cunning, which is deceit, these definitions do not indicate the original source of cunning, which, as we noted above, consists in the instinctive distortion of information that comes from a creature to its surrounding, caused by the need to keep this creature in existence thanks to tactical tricks not related to strategic intentions, which no creature, except a person, is capable of.
  All these trickeries, based on primitive deception, are only related to solving the same, in essence, primitive (natural) tasks, such as creating maximum comfort, the best nutrition for oneself and the most favorable conditions for reproduction, which is facilitated by enrichment; domination over others, which provides thanks to the acquisition of power, moreover, domination allows not only to use all the available goods, taken away from others, but also to humiliate rivals, while receiving pleasant, albeit primitive, sensations incompatible with human dignity.
  In other words, all means of crafty behavior to achieve the goals of enrichment and gaining power, consisting in various machinations, tricks, maneuvers, escapades, evasions, etc., are limited only to adaptation to own surrounding. Therefore, they are not associated with the achievement of high goals of the development of technology, science and culture, that is, progress in the form of raising a person's self-consciousness to a higher level in its development.
  So, the opinion that cunning is similar to ingenuity, more precisely, creativity, is a misconception since cunning, referring only to tactical tricks, does not look far, solving only momentary problems of improving the quality of life, and thereby is not able to serve as an effective means of developing self-consciousness, acting purely for solving adaptation task, that is, within the natural consciousness of man, although with knowledge of the matter.
  Thus. if the initial source of cunning in a person's consciousness is the instinctive deception of others as an adaptive-protective means of survival and improvement of position in one's own niche of existence, which only contributes to retention in existence, then the initial source of creativity - the desire for new sources of information as a means of development, since the reluctance to seek and consume new information leads to the displacement of any organism from the niche occupied by it, degradation, and, in the end, death.
  Indeed, in a community of living beings, the loss of the aspiration to change oneself, albeit instinctive, in accordance with a changing environment, that is, the loss of a timely response to continuous changes, means imminent death.
  As a result, the survival of any organism no longer tactically, but as if strategically is facilitated only by the attraction to new sensations, reflecting a changing reality. It is they provoke its development in accordance with the inevitable resistance of the environment.
  However, the development of all living beings, except for humans, proceeds relatively slowly, since their striving for the new is limited only by instincts and reflexes.
  Therefore, all these creatures are forced to act by trial and error, where random plays the main role. This is what caused such a slow evolutionary development of living beings in comparison with the accelerated movement of the human population in the direction technical and cultural progress.
  What contributes to the most intensive and rapid development, which manifests itself only in human communities?
  In essence, the only significant difference between a person and all other liviing beings is his awareness of oneself in time, which, in part, pulls him out of a state of constant adaptability.
  This new state of superiority over the environment, which he can already manage independently in accordance with certain plans and projects, setting himself more and more new goals, and not only utilitarian ones, can be explained by the appearance in his genome of another program, additional to the existing program of growth, development and the functioning of the body. This new program is designed not only for adaptability to the environment, and for the most part - on the design-target activity of the organism, which led it from the time of the hominids to awareness of oneself. That is, a new program in the genome presupposes not only a purely adaptive activity in the environment, but also a systematic change in the environment for their own purposes, which are gradually moving away from the pragmatic towards the development of science and culture, which contributes to the accelerated development of human self-consciousness even more [3. Part 3, ј5].
  If in human self-consciousness, cunning is based on an instinctive (natural) distortion of information (deception) for the sake of survival currently, then the basis of creativity is laid in the aspiration of a living being to respond as quickly as possible to changes in the environment, which is facilitated by other forms of reflection of reality, to a greater extent corresponding to the ongoing changes. Therefore, any living being is forced breaking away from the existing and look for something new.
  In the self-consciousness of a person, this desire for new information in its extreme and most effective form can be expressed in an attraction to fundamentally new solutions that maximally accelerate the development of human communities, and the main characteristic of this desire - creativity - is the non-obviousness of finds, that is, they appear not as a result of formal logical approaches, but outside of them, since the latter are within the limits of existing knowledge and methods, and creativity only uses existing knowledge as a support, trying to solve problems outside the framework of the known, anticipating changes in the environment and outpacing them with their own findings, which can even change reality itself in unexpected way.
  The most typical example of such going beyond traditional knowledge into the sphere of the non-obvious are the epoch-making inventions and discoveries that gave the world electricity, atomic energy, computers, and in art - opera, harmonious symphonies that introduce a person into a state of self-deepening and enchantment; paintings that revive the past; magnificent examples of poetry that make readers shed tears with delight.
  Self-consciousness allows each person to turn to new means for the manifestation of creativity in comparison with the means of natural consciousness based on the method of trial and error, albeit with varying degrees of success.
  The most important means of displaying creativity is imagination.
  An additional program of self-consciousness represents the upper information circuit - the circuit of creative imagination. It appeared in time immemorial among several species of primates, having shifting, them into the category of hominids, that is, enough self-active (initiative) creatures, capable thanks to this program, which is configured to artificially transform the environment, to use own imagination without adaptive restrictions, giving scope to emerge the productive considerations of the future in the form of planning and modeling of their own actions, presenting them mentally, as well as in the type of fantasies, which for the most part are fruitless in relation to their implementation, but nevertheless occasionally having turned into new inventions, scientific discoveries, unusual, but impressive forms of art [4].
  Such fantasies, built not on sand, but on a solid foundation of accumulated knowledge under certain properties and actions of an individual fall into the category of insights (intuition), being the most productive road to the finds in the form of non-obvious knowledge, that is, knowledge, that does not follow from known rules and interrelation directly.
  It is the intuition that leads to new images, first vague and then acquiring more distinct forms, that provides the most significant shifts both in the process of cognition and in art, producing the initially sought object (phenomenon, regularity, art object) in its figurative integrity, although and without details. But these details can be cleared up analytically and experimentally later, while non-obvious knowledge has already appeared in a mental form, which over time can be translated into drawings, paintings or sculptures.
  Apparently, a principal components of intuition (for this state more precise is the term "insight") is, first, experience, i.e. a set of the developed models, ready to immediate application. Knowledge and skills without experience will not help instantly or is even stretched in time to solve the arisen problem in the particular sphere. Secondly, an equivalent component of intuition (insight) is the insertion by the person of itself in state of insight that often occurs automatically in a stressful situation of danger or, on the contrary, at the relaxation moments, and even in a dream, but more often in the moments of awakening (by the way, emergence of insight in minutes of awakening in no small measure is defined by connection to work of a brain of some other centers processing information, such as: motor centers; centers that control the visual functions), third, insight comes only at a particular goal-setting to which have to correspond certain "technological" practices.
  Along with that, insight can be caused artificially when keeping of the specified three positions, exemplified by the actions of shamans and sorcerers.
  The ordinary person also, happens, enters in similar state unexpected for himself, receiving sometimes answers to questions, which are not resolved by the known methods. This as if automatic entrance to state of insight means also automatic exit from it that in itself retains identity of the person.
  Similar state, which is not controlled by human reason, is called as inspiration. It has various forms and is reached, as a rule, irrespective of the person at the moments of a stress, relaxation, half-asleep state and other unusual states.
  The mechanism of intuition consists in such combination of the highest (self-consciousness) and lowest (natural) forms of consciousness, at which consciousness begins to work automatically (without long reflections and logical constructions), as it occurs at animals for their survival, and along with that into this automatic scheme relatively short-term are involved all practices of the person in the form of the gained experience in this sphere, the available knowledge and abilities with certain target orientation.
  Similar rather short-term harmonious merge of target programs of a self-consciousness and the ideal programs of the lowest consciousness for a survival which do not counteract each other, as usual, and work in unison, for example, helping the person to escape from a misfortune, reflects their reciprocal interest to search for an exit from an extreme situation whereas in routine circumstances their interests and aspirations, as a rule, diverge that clearly is looked through in contradictory actions of each person.
  If voluntary or involuntary address of the person with a definite purpose to own lowest consciousness does not contradict aspirations of the last, related mainly to the survival of the organism, then the person receives necessary to him if, of course, he will understand the answer.
  To do this, and relevant experience is required.
  A person in the self-consciousness pushed back the lowest consciousness on the background and by that considerably came off from the environment, having become the subject into temporary process. In other words, he has understood that he is in temporary process with all advantages of this comprehension, but along with that he has lost former unity with the environment.
  However, the lowest consciousness did not disappear in him. It means, in principle, he is capable to shift of it into the forefront temporarily, that is to enter into it, but without loss of the highest consciousness, without forgetting who is he actually, and, thanks to this, at some point to get out of the lowest consciousness, more precisely, to shift it again to the background [5. Part 2].
  Another way to be creative is to use randomness more or less consciously, since it is akin to surprise, and therefore non-obviousness.
  However, it is impossible to directly use randomness both for creation and destruction, even consciously, because when setting goals in the current time, it is not present in the human mind, and cannot be taken into account by it. Actually, therefore, occasions or phenomena that are interfered in specific actions of a person about which he did not know or simply extraneous factors that he could notice but did not attach importance to them, qualified by him as something spontaneous. That is, to use randomness, at least time is required to understand its nature and possible application.
  How important this is for the expansion of information flows is clear from the arbitrary nature of randomness: if a random phenomenon is akin to surprise, then randomness falls out of a known series of current events and, possibly, - available knowledge. In other words, randomness may well be non-obvious and extraneous phenomenon, to the database of mankind, being out of a known order.
  Consequently, randomness is the direct neighbor of unobvious new knowledge, and through it can be achieved new knowledge, and not through logic or combinatorics. Therefore, randomness and non-obvious new can quite naturally converge, if you move away from traditional research methods and use some methods of using randomness for your own purposes, which are described in the article "How can one attract randomness and take advantage of it in the process of creativity?" [5. Part 9].
  Fundamentally randomness is something external, more precisely, extraneous, closer to chaos than to order. Its independence from the established one can redraw the order in a completely unimaginable way and thereby denote the unknown, and therefore also fundamentally new knowledge.
  However, randomness can manifest itself in this way only through a self-conscious being who is consciously being not satisfied with what is available, and therefore is capable to choice only what interests him, setting goals for himself, unlike all other living organisms, which only instinctively strive to the better conditions of existence.
  A higher degree of creativity is already connected with obtaining fundamentally new knowledge, which is not obvious, that is, no combination of known knowledge, no conclusions in the form of formal logic can give it, as and experiments aimed at improving the known.
  It turns out. that non-obvious knowledge is really connected with randomness, and the explanation for this lies in the fact that both non-obvious new knowledge and randomness are beyond the known, that is, they manifest as the unforeseen [ibid.].
  In addition, for a person, the constant means for displaying creativity is interest, which, in essence, is an inescapable attraction to new forms of reality, which he can not only note, but also construct independently.
  In particular, his significance was also noted by K. A. Helvetius: "If the physical world is subject to the law of motion, then the spiritual world is no less subject to the law of the interest. On earth, the interest is an omnipotent wizard, changing in the eyes of all creatures the appearance of every object" [6, p. 34].
  The dissatisfaction of a person in his self-consciousness requires more than the efficiency of actions, a comfortable existence, a high position, it pushes him to something beyond, unreal, illogical, that is, what would show him to himself and everyone around him his non-triviality, having caused first of all respect for oneself.
  Hence a conscious interest arises in the form of striving for everything unusual, surprising, disturbing, or even frightening, such as lightning in a thunderstorm, or to such seemingly senseless exercise as mountaineering, which is reflected in the concept of "interesting", which gets close with utilitarian aspirations only for the most limited individuals, but even they are capable and willing of the extraordinary, finding own interest, for example, in the otherworldly, which is reflected in their belief in the unknown, which attracts them with heavenly bliss after death, and in life gives them a sense of superiority over unbelievers who are not aware of the ecstasy of faith and touch to the miraculous and, therefore, the highest.
  Persons opposite to them - intellectually developed and rather educated to understand many things and really understand something in their chosen field of activity, - prefer to look for the interest in some singularity which they do not understand, but would like to solve, for example, having made a discovery or an invention.
  So, Leonardo da Vinci built a helicopter prototype, wrote a still unsolved image of Mona Lisa, Franklin invented a lightning rod, Foucault - a pendulum, Leo Tolstoy wrote "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."
  If the abilities and interests coincide, the resulting effect, similar to resonance, leads a person to creative discoveries (creativity), since in this case he sometimes succeeds in finding a truly new one both in technology and in art.
  Between these extremes all the other people of the world are located, the interest of the overwhelming majority of which lies not so much in the unusual, but in the sphere surprising or perturbing them, as a rule, within the limits of consumption of a certain mass product.
  This may be fashion, politics, sports, spectacles and other areas of impact on the person, far from high aspirations, but bringing this type of pleasure to people, which is always associated with the influx in one way or another of new information.
  Along with that, in such interests and in connection with them, these ordinary people (philistines) reduce themselves mostly not to the subjects of activity, but to objects of influence, serving, in fact, alien and, very often, mercenary interests, allowing to earn on themselves to every kind of rogues.
  Thereby one more category of the subjects of action is revealed, who are trying to force the others to serve own interests comes to light and they can be designated as parasites as their only interest is the aspiration to satisfaction of the most primitive (animal) needs - the best food, beautiful females, domination over tribespeople. By these they replace cultural values and ethics of general behavior, hypocritically preaching to others the execution of rules and norms that are beneficial only for them, and also distracting the masses from destroying them as typical and conscious parasites by providing new items of consumption [3. Part 1, ј4].
  Thus, interest is not only an attraction to the new, the unusual, but the objects of this attraction divide society into certain strata - some are attracted to the seductively-primitive, where they can find a place for using cunning to achieve similar utilitarian goals, others - to high technologies or spiritual values, and the achievement of these goals will inevitably require the use of creative approaches.
  And if the animal-primitive, but naturally pleasant, such as power or comfort, can be achieved in many cases with the help of cunning, then to come up with a phone, the Internet, win the war through a well-chosen strategy, discover America or the law of gravity no way with one cunning.
  
  Bibliography
  
  1.S.I. Ozhegov and N. Yu. Shvedova. Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. Moscow. 2003.
  2. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Teacher. dic.academic.ru.
  3. Nizovtsev Yu. It's the other way around. Answers to tricky questions about interesting things (collection). 2018. [Electronic resource]. Access mode: Amazon
  4. Nizovtsev Yu. What is the mechanism of imagination not revealed by science so far? 2020. [Electronic resource]. Access mode: Amazon
  5. Nizovtsev Yu. Open eyes yours-own (collection). 2019. [Electronic resource]. Access mode: Amazon.
  6. Гельвеций К.А. Об уме. Москва., 1938.
  
  
  
  
  
  
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