Creativity - Margaret Boden
7. Mystery of creativity
Creativity requires expertise through understanding a series of technical practices.
It is misleading to refer to creativity as a capacity
Human Creativity
Dependent on the human brain
Not Just suprising but ofen umnpredictable
Computers and "AI"
Are not irrelevent to us understanding creativity
Computers are implemented rather than embodied
Claim: " If the source ofg creativity is superhuman/divine, or if it springs inexplicably from some special hman geneius, computers must be utterly irrelevant."
Computers can appear to be creative
Computers can only do what the programmer enables it to do
Computers cannot be creative because they can only do what they are programmed to do by us
Computers help us to see how people are creative
Mystery
If a puzzle is an unanswered question a mystery is a question that can barely be asked let alone answered
Beyond Science
It is hard to phsychologically define creativity
8. The Story So Far
Obscessive ideas are sometimes so outlandish and disorganised as they are judged to be mad
The dividing line between madness and creativity is hard to define
Creativity requires no specific power but an element of intellegence in general
Uncoscious work triggered by a coscious thoughts
"Creativity is uncoscious work followed by conscious work"
It is calimed that creativity requires a hidden cobination of uncoscious ideas
4 Phases of creativity (Poincare)
Varification
Illumination
Incubation
Preparation
Creativity cannot be explained as a conscious process alone
Reports of creativity mention no imagery but a sudden apperance of a solution to the problem
Creative ideas often come at a time when the person appears to be thinking about something else, or nothing at all
The Bath, The Bed and the Bus
Summerises what creative people have told us about how they came by their ideas
9. Thinking the impossible
Computive ideas help us to specify generative principles clearly
H creativity is often understood in terms of extremely unusal as opposed to just unusual
Creativity as a personal quality is judged primarily in terms of p creativity
P creativity is crucual tofor asessing the creativity of individual human beings and their ability to produce ideas
H creativity can only be based on history known to us
Its not enough for the idea to be a novelty
To be creative it is not enough for an idea to be unusual - not even if its valuable
The concept of creativity is value-laden
Ideas must be illuminatin or challenging in some wayg
Some may say "statistically suprising"
Combination theroies identify creative ideas as those which involve unusual or suprising combinations
In the absence of magic or divine inspiration, the mind's creations must be produced by the mind's own recources
6. Values and Creativity
There are many intiguing relations between creativity and computers
Both Faliures and successe of computers help us to think about our creative powers
Computers cane come up with new ideas and help people to do so to.
It is difficult to recognise a novel idea
Not Just relevent to computers
5. Exploratory Combinations
Evolving ideas instead od designed ideas
AARON > Line Generator
Difference between parent and child image is difficult to see
Random changes in rules to create new structures/ideas
4. Computer Combinations
Example: JAPE computer programme
Made Punning Jokes
Combinational creativity requires:
An ability to form and evaluate links between ideas
A rich knowledge base
Putting two ideas alongside eachother
3. Machine Maps Of The Mind
A Conceptial approach to creativity gives us a way of coming up with scientific hypthesis about the rich subtlties of the human mind.
Artificial Inteligence - Conceptial spaces and ways of exploring and tranforming them
Enables ut to construct and test a hypthesis
2. Three Forms of Creativity
Novel Combinations
Use different ways of moving within the mind
Using store of knowledge
Sampling
Ideas "Make sense"
An intelligble pathway between ideas
Making an unfamiliar combination of familiar ideas
Transforming the space
C Programming
Thlought to be impossible
Tweaked or radically tranformed
"Rerouting the motorway"
Exploring conceptual spaces
Allows you to see the possiblilities that you havent seen before
Any disciplined way of thinking that is familiar to a certain social group
Normally from a persons culture/peer group
Ideas are already there
1. What is creativity?
Suprising - 3 Meanings
Feeling of astonisment when an "impossible" idea is encountered
An unexpected idea that fits in to the original style of thinking.
Unfamiliar/Unlikely
"New" has two meanings P&H
Historical Creativity
No-one has had the idea before
Psychological Creativity
New to the person that comes up with it
chew
"Creativity is the ability to come up woth ideas or artifacts that are new, suprising and valuable"
Human Creativity can often be viewed as a mystery
