Complexity and creativity: emergence, stability, and collective dynamic
Relying on a formal model of the structure and evolution of a complex socio-cognitive network of individual actors, this article analyzes the conditions for the emergence, stabilization, and disappearance of collectives, meaning organized groups with stable individual actors, which behave like subjects with intentionality, like plural subjects. As the cognitive basis of each subject is formed by the shared representations of all the members, the emergence of such collectives implies the appearance of such shared representations. This appearance represents a first creative phenomenon, collective from the start and linked to an extensive dimension of individual learning during social communication. The progressive stabilization of such collectives results thus from the intensive dimension of this learning, realized simultaneously with the extensive dimension, leading to the appearance of cognitive routines. The latter may disappear from the conscious level of individual subjects, and, once perfectly rooted in the individual, they become invisible for the relevant thought collectives, which now attain full stabilization. Each state of the network contains a constellation of such collectives of various sizes and vocations, some of which may pursue the same aim. They thus enter in competition as they are focused on a common object which each collective wishes to handle alone after eliminating another or the other collectives. The analysis of competitive dynamics specifies the conditions of the supremacy of one of the collectives over another or the other collectives. At the (provisional) end of a dynamic process, the landscape of all collectives has undergone a modification, leading to a second creative phenomenon, located this time on the global level of the network.