REFER TO GREY by Robert Greigos © 2007-2026

The Many Flavors of Creation

Tue, 26 May 2026 11:39 -0400

Female Humanoid AI Bot. Very Public Human Fatality.
She Did It. I Know She Did. I Saw Her Do It.

So, if creativity is better than competition, mostly due to the vast amount of human emotional and physical waste left in the wake of competition, are we correct to assume creativity, any kind of creativity, is all good? I don’t think so.

Fabricating untruth is most certainly creativity. Yet, few would argue that creating and disseminating untruth is without dubious and, more often than not, deleterious consequence.

“Wait Wait Wait,” you might say. “What about ‘white lies’ and literary fiction? And what about theatre plays and movies and kids playing make believe?”

Personally, I wouldn’t claim literary fiction to be completely without merit, but my grandmother on my father’s side despised fiction. She never told me exactly why, but the considerably large library in her house contained only history, biography, philosophy, and oddly, self-help books. Given the historical period during which she collected all those self-help books, from the 1910s onward, I wouldn’t claim she was entirely true to her goal of excluding fiction. Though quite young, I read several of those supposed self-help tomes. Most seemed more like BS to me. But like I said, I was quite young at the time. Most young people are easily convinced they already have a pretty good idea about what’s what and what’s BS. I was no different.

Have you ever heard of the Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics? That was one of her non-fiction books. I tried to read it. It was a quite serious book written by a guy being held prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, one of the dubious creations of the self-proclaimed Third Reich. Trachtenberg had an interest in mathematics and wrote his book in an effort to keep his mind occupied with something other than the horrors being perpetrated around him. If you have an interest in number theory, you might know of that work. At the time, computers were being invented, and attempts were being made to put them to practical use. As I understand it now, he was looking for short-cut rules, algorithms, to help make solving basic math problems simpler for computers.

Do you remember in grade-school trying to learn long division or how to calculate a square-root? Apparently, Trachtenberg thought that if you could “teach” a computer a short-cut for doing something like that computers might actually prove useful, given their limited useful “bandwidth” back then. Alternatively, as my grandmother erroneously surmised, his methods might also prove easier for anyone, anyone like for instance me at age 7 or 8, to learn to do basic math. Of course, my conclusion at the time was that learning to do math the regular way would be far easier than via his short-cut BS. And actually, I think my grandmother also found his system to be rather useless relative to her interests in numerology, also something I wouldn’t strictly categorize as non-fiction.

The point here is that creation comes in a lot of different flavors. Depending on the interests and intellectual capabilities of audiences, some types of creation can be edifying and even inspiring. Other types of creation can help lead people down some rather dark and destructive paths. It would behoove all of us to become ever wiser in our ability to judge and appreciate human creative efforts. And, I’d certainly recommend within our own creative efforts, to avoid adding to the mindless and intentionally destructive noise currently being propagated widely within the many channels of creative dissemination we now employ across the globe.

As to the images above, they are fact. The caption beneath the above title is absolute fiction, but not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. With the advent of AI, we now have before us a new kind of creator and new types of creation for us to engage with and potentially learn from. Will we? Or, will we let those newer types of creation inspire us to shoot ourselves dead, dead like the fictionally described fate of that pink-shirted man in the image above?

Be creative, but be discerning. We’ve been given a host of gifts in this life, along with opportunity to learn from and make use of them. Let’s all try to more fully appreciate and more wisely deploy all the flavors of that reality.

Competition vs. Creation

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:02 -0400

Have you ever heard the term: “healthy competition”? Likely you have, but have you ever considered the meaning of that term relative to the kinds of competition you actually see around you? When you think about those various kinds of competition, do any of them seem “healthy” to you, for either those doing the competing or for the enveloping society and environment?

When I was very young, I remember waking up very early, earlier than either of my parents or my younger sister. It didn’t bother me in the least that I was totally alone with all my toys. I built things, roads: bridges, buildings, little towns. I peopled those towns with characters I invented that did things, things that contributed to the richness of life in those towns. Elaborate relationships between and amongst those characters filled my head with stories that animated those characters and those whole towns for me. I had absolutely no thought in my head that could possibly be construed as relating to competition. Instead, I was fully engrossed in an effort to create something.

Then later, after I entered school, I was introduced to something called “games”. Within a school environment, so call “games” were meant to introduce students to the concept of rules and to etiquette that took into account other student’s, other people’s. rights and feelings. And later, we were all introduced to the concepts “cooperation” and “team work”, but mostly within the framework of games and competition. There were, of course, exceptions to the theme of competition within school curricula. One was in the realm of music, where there was largely no sense of competition, only of creation. True, even within the realm of music there was the occasional presence of competition: to be “first chair” or “soloist”, or when entire ensembles entered inter-school competitions. But mostly, within music, the prevailing intent was to discover and master the ability to create something beautiful, an experience that was both enjoyable and inspiring for both performer and listener.

As to the concept “healthy competition”, people will point to games as a way to hone socially useful skills and to re-channel feelings of isolation, anxiety, anger, hate, and desire for violent aggression. Well, maybe. But competition would seem to be an entirely inadequate remedy toward many of those ends. We still have death due to fearful panic in crowds, spousal abuse, rape, incompetent and abusive parenting, murder, self-justified crime and mass killings, and we still have war, lots of war. Competitive games haven’t shown a great deal of success stamping out any of those social atrocities. Neither have even the most brutal of financial, social, religious, and corporal punishments.

Leaving aside why most of us construe life itself as competition: for resources, for mates, for status, for power and influence, let us instead look at the basic dynamics of competition. Put very simply, the end result of playing a game is that there are winners and there are losers. If you add the winnings and the losses together, you invariably end up with a net of zero, a zero-sum game. Now, if society intended stagnation, burning off loneliness, fear, anxiety, anger, and greed to an overall net of zero, then competition would seem the ideal cultural policy for society to follow. But a society that stagnates dooms itself to dissolution and/or extinction. Why? Because nature, the environment within which it exist, doesn’t stay the same. Neither do our bodies. They change. They evolve. If society as a whole doesn’t have a mechanism by which it can change as needed, to adapt, it eventually fails, gets left in the dust. Same for each of us as individuals.

No doubt you’ve heard all that before. But even if you have, why are we still doing the same thing, competing with each other? Why haven’t we all totally abandoned most forms of competition for something that will help all of us to be winners, with absolutely no losers? Why haven’t all of us abandoned competition and turned toward discovery and creation as fuel and satisfaction for our lives?

The news over the last few weeks has been almost continuously filled with stories of war, financial manipulations on a global scale, political corruption and incompetence, and needless deaths by cutting people off from resources they need to survive and prosper, not by competition or even exploitation, but by creation. Think farmers and fisherman. Think scientists. Think students and migrants hoping for a more useful and inspiring education, and safe opportunity to work and create. Think cuts to research grants, limiting discovery. Think cutting off access to inspiring and useful information, replaced by propaganda, lies, improbable fantasies, and hucksterism.

Now consider something more concrete, consider plain old things. Most things have multiple uses. That’s good. That’s efficient. Take a ship, for instance. It can facilitate travel and trade, and even enlightening and edifying social intercourse. It can also be used as an instrument of war, and for corrupt and environmentally destructive commerce. The difference is within our individual perceptions and in the uses its owners put it to. If individually we have any wider-world power at all, it is in the choices we make.

Choice empowers us with agency. And that agency can prove quite consequential if once we are absolutely sure our apprehensions are valid, and we take a thoughtful and considered look at the choices before us. All we need do is consider whether we are choosing to compete in a zero-sum game that further locks us into a downward slide toward extinction, as the world around us changes and leaves us in its dust, or whether we are choosing to seek discovery and proof of new knowledge useful for the creation of a more adaptive, successful, and satisfying life for each and every one of us.

Should your interest still not be piqued by what I’m saying, try imaging a string of endless competitions involving every person on Earth. Eventually, there will be a small group of winners superbly adept at winning. But very likely, no one in their numbers will be adept at doing anything other than winning. They likely won’t know how to farm, or purify water, or make electricity or produce heat, build shelter or predict the weather. They won’t know how to form an effective equitable government or an effective education system. They likely won’t even know how to get along with each other or how to share knowledge and resources for mutual benefit, or even how to competently parent their children. All they will likely know is how to conduct competition and war, with the looming inevitability of their own deaths within those competitions. Is that the kind of world we want for ourselves and our children?

And what of those who will say to themselves, “I create. I create jobs.”? Or, “I create. I create wealth, and opportunity for others to create wealth.”? The answer to those questions lies in the net accounting of wins and loses. Activities that create wins for some but increased losses for others and the environment is still a zero-sum game, a competition attempting to keep winners out above others, at loser’s expense. It isn’t a prescription for universal human health, wellbeing, and sustainability in a changing environment. When that kind of self-serving mindset takes hold of political elections and hiring in government, industry, education, and the military, we are headed toward fascism and away from equitable democracy. When that kind of mindset seriously infests economic markets, corruption rises and the quality of market offerings both deteriorates and thins out. By contrast, truly equitable markets minimize incentive for corruption and are open to and encouraging of all socially useful and healthful creativity and innovation, giving each of us more empowering choice.

To my mind, the future is quite literally in all of our thoughts and hands to create. Enjoy creating, not mindless and pointless competition that will eventually doom all of us.

Obstacles

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:13 -0400

Had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. He’d never heard the term “empiricism”. We’d been talking about differences in point of view, whether one understanding of how the world works is intrinsically “better” than all others.

Likely you’ve heard that argument before. It isn’t new. All fundamentalists and authoritarians take that position, from Trump to the Taliban to the Nazis to the Inquisition. They begin with a set of ideas and nothing shakes their faith in instituting those ideas within everything they do and touch. This is good. That isn’t. Down with the bad. Up with the good. I’d call that position “Simple Think” because it discounts and ignores interrelationships and subtleties of process, and quite often consequence.

“Tell me something,” I said to my friend. “Do you believe that chair over their actually exists? Or, is it a delusion we both share?”

He, of course, was immediately confused. “No,” he finally said. “It actually exists.”

To which I said, “Then you are an empiricist?”

“A what?” he said.

I tried to explain that an empiricist accepts that a world of things exists outside of our own thoughts and beliefs and that knowledge about who we are and how the world works can be gained from exploring that world. He then looked the word up on his phone to find that what I explained was correct. And then he got to thinking about what that meant relative to his own beliefs, which tended toward a Christian fundamentalist point of view wherein his overwhelming concern was to religiously follow all biblically born “rules” so that he might find his way to an afterlife in “heaven”.

It wasn’t my intent, but our discussion may have totally disrupted his feelings of wellbeing for the day. Rather, it was more my intent to offer a bit of what amounted to my point of view on how the world works and what our place in it is.

I added to my explanation of “empiricism” that “rationalism” is often considered to be its opposite. But, at that point, my attempted elaboration as to what constituted “rationalism” sort of got both of us into a bit of a fluster. Always good to be crystal clear in your own mind what you know and think before attempting to explain that supposed knowledge and thinking to others. And then, of course, there are always other considerations to take into account, like how best to formulate an explanation and whether or not the other person is even open to hearing and trying to understand your thoughts. To the case in point, my friend was not ready to accept the possibility that what was written in the Bible was in any way different from knowledge the phenomenal world could offer. And so, with that bit of impasse, our discussion came to a halt.

But continuing here, by dictionary definition, “rationalism” is to be thought of as a “reasoned source of knowledge superior to and independent of sense perceptions.” That “independent of sense perceptions” part was what I was getting at by asking him if he believed that chair actually existed. And for me, reasoned understandings of what a chair is and isn’t are certainly “useful”, but are never actually comprehensively complete, especially across different person’s minds. We all have sometimes slight and sometimes major differences in our understandings of even what is right in front of us and how those things actually work. Hence, both the value and frustration of recognizing and acknowledging that points of view can differ.

Hard science and some serious thinkers consider reasoned “theory” to be a good starting point for discovery of what is and isn’t actually true. But they do not consider the matter closed just because “theory” seems emotionally satisfying or even apparently lends itself to powerful practical use. For them, “theory” must be tested against the actual unadulterated workings of the phenomenal world of things. And unfortunately for dedicated rationalists, those who rigorously adhere to a fixed set of notions or beliefs, what hard scientists consistently find when testing their theories is that nearly always they are either completely false or only partially valid. There is always always always more to learn, from both each other and from the actual workings of the phenomenal world of things. Not the imagined, nor even the hoped for workings of the world, but the actual workings.

The above images offer a view of external “things” to consider, including the adage, if you look closely, that “obstacles are a part of the journey.” Annoying they may be, but obstacles and how we think about them are always opportunities to improve our understandings of how the world works and what our place within its processes currently is and perhaps could be. And that includes comparing and discussing differences in point of view.

May you always always take advantage of opportunities to learn, and may you more often than not thoughtfully and intentionally contribute to the general wellbeing of everyone and everything everywhere.