Creativity: The Zeroth Kopimist K

Click to read the earlier parts of Kopimism: The Creation

(This sermon is part 6 of Kopimism: The Creation. It has previously been published in Swedish.)

In the Kopimist creation myth so far, we have identified three Fundamental Principles that are part of the creation:

1. Copying

2. Cooperation

3. Quality

These are three Kopimist K’s.

But there is still something missing. The principles of Copying and Cooperation explain how life could develop, and the principle of Quality gives a direction and answers the question ”towards what?”. But we have no principle that explains why life emerged in the first place.

We have Copying as a principle, but we have nothing to copy. We have Cooperation, but we have no projects to cooperate over. We have Quality, but no myriad of projects to evaluate and choose between.

If Kopimism was a car, we would have steering and brakes in the form of Quality, and wheels and transmission in the form of Copying and Cooperation. But no engine to move it all forward.

We have omitted to include something that explains the most obvious observation you can make about life, the universe and everything: That it exists, even though it wouldn’t have to.

Earth itself (the rock) had no need for developing life on its surface. It would have kept spinning whether somebody lived on it or not.

And once there was life on Earth in the shape of lots of unicellular blue-green plankton in the oceans, it could have stopped there. No space traveler passing by would have said ”Oh, a primordial ocean with blue-grenn plankton, what an obviously unsustainable position for an ecosystem, they neither have peacocks nor parsley”.

But yet life did appear on Earth, and the pretty boring soup of plankton did transform itself into the infinitely rich diversity that we see around us in nature, including both peacocks and parsley. There must have been other, much simpler, sustainable positions than this, if sustainability was all nature was after.

So evidently nature isn’t looking for sustainability, at least not only. Nature wants to have some fun as well, that’s obvious. This explains all the strange creatures on Earth, including the very silliest that Douglas Adams wrote about and the BBC filmed.

We add one more Fundamental Principle, and put it before all the other:

0. Creativity

Why before the other?

Creativity must have come first, maybe even before the universe itself. If, despite everything, it was in fact a divine being that created the world, then he/she must first have come up with the idea of doing it. Definitely creative, and before it actually happened.

And if the universe emerged by itself when a point of nothing somewhere in the void got bored with being nothing, and became a Big Bang instead, then the impulse to do something wild and crazy, something creative, must have appeared at the very latest in the same instant the universe was created.

And when we look at the world around us, we see that Creativity did not just exist at the moment the universe, or life, was born. It’s everywhere all around us all the time, and it has been throughout history.

The peacock and the parsley were refined in their respective shapes by Quality, and live on through sexual reproduction, that is: a combination of Cooperation and Copying. But when a primordial ocean of plankton had the impulse to start developing in the direction of peacock and parsley, this was because our universe is brimming with Creativity as a fundamental principle.

Universes want to have fun.

This is the zeroth Kopimist K, and the most fundamental of them all.

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