The Creative Mind by Margaret Boden was a revelatory book which has certainly helped to understand what creativity is as well as its origin
- All creatives arguably borrowed / inspired by others
- A puzzle is an unanswered question and a mystery is a question that can barely be ask, let alone answered
- Mysteries beyond the reach of science
- Creativity is a mystery
- Creativity: ‘To bring into being or form out of nothing’
- Creativity appears to be intrinsically unpredictable (a scientific psychology of creativity is a contradiction in terms)
- A new insight: Koestler: “likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and end are visible above the surface of conciousness. The diver vanishes at one end and comes up at the other, guided by the invisible chain’
- Invisible links underlying intuition and how they can be tempered and forged
- Computer science and artificial intelligence is pertinent
- Creative ideas happen often when the person isn’t thinking, or thinking about something else (lowered boundaries)
- ‘Je ne cherche pas, je trouve’ Picasso
- Poincaré: creativity requires the hidden combination of unconscious ideas. Four phases: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification (oscillating b/w conscious and unconcious)
- Although the artist may have no clear goal in mind, he does have a problem or a project (link to the non-objective search)
- Koestler: “The most fertile region (in the mind’s inner landscape) seems to be the marshy shore, the borderline between sleep and full awakening – where the matrices of disciplined thought are already operating but have not yet sufficiently hardened to obstruct the dreamlike fluidity of imagination”
- Bisociation: two conceptual matrices which are not normally associated – the more unusual the biscoiation the more scope there is for truly creative ideas
- Carl Grauss: ‘I had found by chance a solution, and knew it was correct, without being able to prove it’
- How is it possible for an idea to strike someone as promising before they have checked it? (Link to relevance realisation / novelty / interestingness)
- “What happens? Great numbers of of combinations formed by the subliminal self, almost all without interest … only certain ones are harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful’ – link to mathematical elegance
- In general: combination theories identify creative ideas as those which involve unusual or surprising combinations – or ‘statistically surprising’ (perhaps: enjoying surprise to break paradigms?)
- Unusual ideas are surprising, what’s crucial is the surprise (link to free energy principle)
- Differentiate between first time novelty from radical originality. Novel idea can be described and produced by the same set of generative rules as the other familiar ideas – genuinely original cannot. (Breakthrough!)
- Poincaré: Like much play, creativity is often open-ended, with no particular goal or aim
- Or the goal is general exploration (link to non-objective search)
- Explorers usually make a map which guides the traveller in various ways. Like the search space and mapping strategy.
- A map suggests a number of pathways to reach a given place. A human mind allows for many different routes to generate a certain structure, or idea.
- A heuristic is a form of productive laziness. A way of thinking about a problem which follows paths most likely to lead to the goal, leaving less promising paths unexplored
- Some heuristics guide the explorer, others help to change the maps so new paths can be opened up.
- ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind’
- A hunch, as if by a flash of lightening, was based on prior experience
- Generative system. In music, tonalitywas a type of generative model to explore music and create new music. The conceptual space defined by tonality (as a generative system) was so rich that mapping would inevitably take a long time. In fact, it took several centuries
- With the help of language (incl technical languages like musical notation) many domain specific structures can become accessible to conciousness.
- Heuristics allow one to move through the generative system and even change it
- Search space maps the location and the search tree ups the pathways which can be visited
- Heuristics prune the search tree
- Constraints on thinking are what make creativity possible
- Strength map out a territory of structural possibilities, which can then be explored, and perhaps transformed to give another one.
- English grammar allows for certain structures, but not others
- Chess players get their ideas about promising moves intuitively by perceiving familiar board patterns, but every move no matter how it was suggested, must fit the rules.
- The subconscious wonders blindly.
- “Day science employs reasoning that meshes like gears…One admires its majestic arrangement as that of a da Vinci painting or a Bach fugue. One walks about it as in a French formal garden…Night science, on the other hand, wanders blindly. It hesitates, stumbles, falls back, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything…It is a workshop of the possible…where thought proceeds along sensuous paths, tortuous streets, most often blind alleys” Jacob
- John von Neuman was well aware of the logic of the brain and said it could not be like a computer program. He suggested that it might be something like thermodynamics – an idea that is causing much excitement today.
- The origin of creativity is the unconscious mind