Epistemology of meaning generation in the multiverse of the known

Creative generation of meaning in the multiverse of contemporary culture

Abstract

A creative act is an extraordinary phenomenon both in epistemological and in cognitive-personal terms. In epistemological terms, it represents the quintessence of human mental potentials. In the personal aspect, it fundamentally differs from routine cognitive procedures and everyday formats of an individual’s addressing to the world and therefore imposes requirements that go beyond the usual, mostly semi-unconscious, automatic functioning of the mind. A person immersed in creative activities is capable of experiencing emotions and states significantly exceeding in their intensity those typically felt. This suggests that the apparatus of classical, binary-calibrated epistemology, which works well when a person is in a mode of superficial engagement with what is happening (sufficient for addressing most routine tasks), may prove ineffective in understanding the nature of creatively realizable ideas. In this regard, the question arises: what methodological resources are necessary to enable an adequate consideration of multidimensional stylistics, complex variability, and the principled openness of the living creative process in all the richness and diversity of the dynamics of emergent transformability of its elements? The problem becomes even more complicated if we analyze not only the stylistics of individual consciousness in the generation of innovativeness but interconnected functioning of the consciousness in the space of interpersonal communication among group participants aimed at creating new meanings in collaborative creative activity. In the context of Ikujiro Nonaka’s ideas about a special atmosphere that fosters fruitful knowledge exchange (the Ba concept), the paper demonstrates how the process of generating novelty is realized through the lens of non-dual worldview. The dynamics of meaning generation is presented here as the transformation of isolated individual systems of knowledge into a multiverse of collective knowledge. In this process, the corpuscular mode of individual consciousness is replaced by its wave status, as a result of which the mental limitations that initially isolated the bearers of knowledge dissolve. This makes it possible to achieve transgression as a leap of intellect across the boundary that initially separated the possible from the impossible in the individual system of meanings.