Personal experience as an ontological basis of creative sense-making

Individual creativity is viewed as a process of the emergence of new meaningful structures in human consciousness from separate components of subjective experience. The mental basis of this process is personal experience as a specific subjective reality possessing an independent status in relation to other types of reality with which it interacts. The reality of individual experience can be described as a multiverse of countless potential worlds, each of which can be realized under a certain set of circumstances. All potential worlds contain inexhaustible wealth of implicit personal meanings, which are the tacit background of creative cognitive activity. The multiplicity of personal experience worlds suggests the existence of alternative scenarios at every moment of an individual’s life. This determines contingent character of any life situation in which the subject finds himself/herself. The contingency of personal experience is inextricably linked with human creative activity, which implies a free choice of further actions in the conditions of unpredictable reality. Depending on various ontological, cultural and religious premises, the process of interaction between individuals, each of whom has a unique personal experience, can be understood differently. Intersubjective knowledge is possible due to the existence of a common mental reality as a multiverse of individuals’ subjective multiverses. Internalization of cultural cognitive models in subjective reality occurs through analogical schematization, which is associated with contingency of an individual’s life events.