On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Mike Tintner <tint...@blueyonder.co.uk>wrote:
> Ben:I don't think there's any lack of creativity in the AGI world ... and > I think it's pretty clear that rationality and creativity work together in > all really good scientific work.Creativity is about coming up with new > ideas. Rationality is about validating ideas, and deriving their natural > consequences. They're complementary, not contradictory, within a healthy > scientific thought process. > > Ben, > > I radically disagree. Human intelligence involves both creativity and > rationality, certainly. But rationality - and the rational systems of > logic/maths and formal languages, [on which current AGI depends] - are > fundamentally *opposed* to creativity and the generation of new ideas. What > I intend to demonstrate in a while is that just about everything that is bad > thinking from a rational POV is *good [or potentially good] thinking* from a > creative POV (and vice versa). To take a small example, logical fallacies > are indeed illogical and irrational - an example of rationally bad thinking. > But they are potentially good thinking from a creative POV - useful > skills, for example, in a political spinmeister's art. (And you and Pei use > them a lot in arguing for your AGI's :) ). > > As someone once said: > > "Creativity is the great mystery at the center of Western culture. We > preach order, science, logic and reason. But none of the great > accomplishments of science, logic and reason was actually achieved in a > scientific, logical, reasonable manner. Every single one must, instead, be > attributed to the strange, obscure and definitively irrational process of > creative inspiration. Logic and reason are indispensible in the working out > ideas, once they have arisen -- but the actual conception of bold, original > ideas is something else entirely." > > Who did say that? Oh yes, it was you :) in your book . > That quote summarizes my current views too. Coming up with new ideas is creative and nonrational. working out implications of ideas, and validating them, and getting the details right, is generally a rational process. Leonardo used reason to work out the rules of perspective and apply them to make paintings. he used wild creative leaping to intuit how to make Mona Lisa's smile "just right." The two worked together excellently in his work, as in so much other creative work. Einstein used creative, nonrational intuition to figure out the basic idea of the implications of the speed of light being constant. Then he used reasoning to work out the corresponding math... So in both painting and physics, we see a happy marriage of wild-ass creative inspiration, and sober, step-by-step reasoning... > > As I indicated, it would be better to continue this when I am ready to set > out a detailed argument. But for now, it wouldn't hurt to take away the > central idea that everything which is good for rationality and specialist > intelligence is in fact bad for, or at any rate the inverse of, creativity > and general intelligence, (and AGI). It's generally true. [Finding structure > and patterns, for example, which you and others make so much of, > are normally good only for rational, narrow AI - and *bad* for,,or the > inverse of, creativity]. > The idea that finding patterns is antithetical to creativity is VERY VERY odd to me, as a musician.. For instance, a common compositional practice I use is to improvise wildly for a while, but then when something seems to randomly sound good, I try to grok what is the pattern that made it sound good, and learn to repeat and improve that pattern... Finding patterns is a basic cognitive function that is part of creativity as well as logical inferencing... ben g ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
