Creativity - Margaret Boden

Human Creativity can often be viewed as a mystery

"Creativity is the ability to come up woth ideas or artifacts that are new, suprising and valuable"

"New" has two meanings P&H

Psychological Creativity

New to the person that comes up with it

Historical Creativity

No-one has had the idea before

Suprising - 3 Meanings

Unfamiliar/Unlikely

An unexpected idea that fits in to the original style of thinking.

Feeling of astonisment when an "impossible" idea is encountered

Exploring conceptual spaces

Ideas are already there

Normally from a persons culture/peer group

Any disciplined way of thinking that is familiar to a certain social group

Allows you to see the possiblilities that you havent seen before

Transforming the space

"Rerouting the motorway"

Tweaked or radically tranformed

Thlought to be impossible

Novel Combinations

Making an unfamiliar combination of familiar ideas

An intelligble pathway between ideas

Ideas "Make sense"

Using store of knowledge

Use different ways of moving within the mind

Artificial Inteligence - Conceptial spaces and ways of exploring and tranforming them

Enables ut to construct and test a hypthesis

A Conceptial approach to creativity gives us a way of coming up with scientific hypthesis about the rich subtlties of the human mind.

Putting two ideas alongside eachother

Combinational creativity requires:

A rich knowledge base

An ability to form and evaluate links between ideas

Example: JAPE computer programme

Made Punning Jokes

Random changes in rules to create new structures/ideas

AARON > Line Generator

Difference between parent and child image is difficult to see

Evolving ideas instead od designed ideas

Not Just relevent to computers

It is difficult to recognise a novel idea

There are many intiguing relations between creativity and computers

Computers cane come up with new ideas and help people to do so to.

Both Faliures and successe of computers help us to think about our creative powers

In the absence of magic or divine inspiration, the mind's creations must be produced by the mind's own recources

Combination theroies identify creative ideas as those which involve unusual or suprising combinations

Some may say "statistically suprising"

The concept of creativity is value-laden

Ideas must be illuminatin or challenging in some wayg

To be creative it is not enough for an idea to be unusual - not even if its valuable

Its not enough for the idea to be a novelty

H creativity can only be based on history known to us

P creativity is crucual tofor asessing the creativity of individual human beings and their ability to produce ideas

Creativity as a personal quality is judged primarily in terms of p creativity

H creativity is often understood in terms of extremely unusal as opposed to just unusual

Computive ideas help us to specify generative principles clearly

The Bath, The Bed and the Bus

Summerises what creative people have told us about how they came by their ideas

Creative ideas often come at a time when the person appears to be thinking about something else, or nothing at all

Reports of creativity mention no imagery but a sudden apperance of a solution to the problem

Creativity cannot be explained as a conscious process alone

It is calimed that creativity requires a hidden cobination of uncoscious ideas

4 Phases of creativity (Poincare)

Preparation

Incubation

Illumination

Varification

"Creativity is uncoscious work followed by conscious work"

Uncoscious work triggered by a coscious thoughts

Creativity requires no specific power but an element of intellegence in general

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

It is hard to phsychologically define creativity

Mystery

Beyond Science

If a puzzle is an unanswered question a mystery is a question that can barely be asked let alone answered

Computers and "AI"

Computers help us to see how people are creative

Computers cannot be creative because they can only do what they are programmed to do by us

Computers can only do what the programmer enables it to do

Computers can appear to be creative

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 are implemented rather than embodied

Are not irrelevent to us understanding creativity

Human Creativity

Not Just suprising but ofen umnpredictable

Dependent on the human brain

It is misleading to refer to creativity as a capacity

Creativity requires expertise through understanding a series of technical practices.