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One way to look at human civilizational history is to see it as a story of human creations – how we have created more and more complex artefacts over time. Even though basic tools and some forms of language have existed since we appeared on the evolutionary landscape, creation intensity really took off as we started settling down in larger numbers in villages and towns. Our languages got more formalised and developed faster as these settlements grew larger. We built buildings, sculptures and art. From these initial civilisations grew religion, philosophy and psychology, which mark the first major epoch of human creativity.
This first epoch was concerned with creating artefacts such as stories, arts, and philosophies that describe the various facets of the human experience. India was at the forefront of this phase starting with the composition of the Rigveda, the rise of Sanskrit, and then over time Upanishads, epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata, schools of Yoga, role of Dharma, among many things. Indian civilisation described experiences ranging from material to the oneness with the all-pervading consciousness. We could imagine zero and also infinity. Ancient Indians were masters of the abstract and finding underlying connections in the seemingly diverse chaos, unparalleled by any other civilisation. However, as these creative energies weakened in India, we have to move to post-Renaissance era Europe to see the rise of the next epoch of human creativity.
This second epoch needed the pursuit of record keeping, measurements and experimentation with increased vigour to drive the development of science and axiomatic mathematics. The conditions of Europe at that time provided the right environment for that vigour — centuries of Christian rule had created enough social capital needed to collaborat,e but it was not so powerful as to completely suppress new knowledge/ideas facilitated by increased trade activities. In this era, continuing to the beginning of the 21st century, we built theories and models to describe measurable phenomena, eventually leading to the rise of the scientific method. We further used these theories in building various practical tools – the development of which led to the world as we see today. This brings us to the question of what is going to be the next epoch of human creativity.
Signs of what the third epoch will look like are already there. We can see that the biggest unanswered and challenging questions of our time often involve studying complex systems and tackling subjectivity with rigour – What is intelligence? What makes a flourishing society? What is holistic well-being? What makes a quality artefact like art, software design or a model? Such questions are hard to easily and replicably measure; thus, we struggle with the vanilla application of the scientific method to answering these questions, which usually excels when we have relatively easily measurable objective stuff. We need new methods and abstractions that could help us rigorously characterise the complexity and subjectivity, while still allowing the use of existing methods for the remaining aspects.
It is at these crossroads that India can take the lead in this next epoch in the human civilizational journey of creation. We should take inspiration from the ancient Indian ambition of engaging with the subjective and the abstract – but, without going into siloes or taking a fossilised approach to studying them. The new challenging questions facing humanity will require inspiration from both the previous epochs of human creativity to solve them. We require thinkers and innovators who can bridge the gap between the complex and subjective and the measurable, instead of approaching them through separate, incompatible systems of study. For example, we could develop methods and abstractions for studying the holisticness of a cure, the flourishing of a societal system, the aesthetics of an art form, the quality of a software or a model, the nature of intelligence exhibited by an artificial system, and so on. The civilisation that gets this networking among people and across approaches right would be at the forefront of this next epoch of human creativity. I hope we are the ones to do that.
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