A (cybernetic) musing: variety and creativity.
Ranulph Glanville · 1998
In a previous issue, I promised to return to variety and what it offers us, especially vis-à-vis creativity. I will do that here.3 What I want to show is that, whereas Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is usually interpreted as placing a difficult condition on us, there is another way of looking at this law that treats it as (amongst other things) the source of creativity. Just how difficult it is to satisfy the Law is the first thing I show in exploring transcomputability limits and how we have traditionally overcome these (thus satisfying the Law). I then introduce this idea that we do not have to satisfy the Law, and indicate how it works in offering increased variety and, hence, a (potential) improvement in creativity, citing our interaction with the World Wide Web as an example. Transcomputability (Limits to Variety) Let us start with the limits to variety: that is, the limits to the number of possible states of a system (variety used in the sense of s-variety I identified in my earlier piece, that is, the number of states possible within a system). It might be possible to argue about whether there is any finite or, at least,