Chapter 4: Emergence, Creative Process, and Self-Transcending Constructions

I am proposing a new formalism to cover the varied processes involved in emergence in complex systems: self-transcending constructions (STC) offered as a replacement for the idea of self-organization. I show how an overcommitment to the latter has served to mislead rather than enlighten what actually goes on in emergence. Self-transcending constructions are many and varied, but the prototype I am using is derived from the anti-diagonal construction that was critical to the set theoretical investigations of Georg Cantor as well as the limitative theorems in mathematical logic achieved by Gödel and Turing. In fact, the anti-diagonal construction is implicated in several important approaches in the study of emergence, namely, Ian Stewart’s and Jack Cohen’s so-called Existence Theorem for Emergence, Charles Bennet’s construct of logical depth, John Holland’s call for a new mathematics for emergence, Walter Fontana’s and Leo Buss’s work on artificial life by way of proof theory and others. Self-transcending constructions will be interpreted along the lines of the special “logic” of creative processes. This logic follows a scheme of following and negating. Several examples of this creative logic are offered. Finally, a few suggestions are presented on the application of the idea of self-transcending constructions for workplace innovation.