However, as I noted in From Complexity to Creativity, in some human minds
a personality subcomponent that may be called a "creative subself" may
emerge, which may utilize these basic cognitive processes in a manner
systematically oriented toward creative generation.
http://www.goertzel.org/books/complex/ch14.html
So, I see the difference btw "higher creativity" as you describe, and
workaday adaptive intelligence, as being a matter of overall high-level
personality structure, more so than being a difference of the fundamental
underlying cognitive processes.
Recall Nietzsche's description of his own experience of creative inspiration
while writing Also Sprach Zarathustra:
****
Has anyone at the end of the eighteenth century a clear idea of what
poets of strong ages have called * inspiration*? If not, I will describe it.
-- If one has the slightest residue of superstition left in one's system,
one could hardly resist altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation,
merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of
revelation -- in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and
subtlety, something becomes * visible*, audible, something that shakes one
to the last depths and throws one down -- that merely describes the facts.
One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like
lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation
regarding its form -- I never had any choice.
A rapture whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in
a flood of tears -- now the pace quickens involuntarily, now it becomes
slow; one is altogether beside onself, with the distinct consciousness of
subtle shudders and one's skin creeping down to one's toes; a depth of
happiness in which evern what is painful and gloomy does not seem something
opposite but rather conditioned, provoked, a * necessary* color in such a
superabundance of light....
Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a
gale a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. -- The
involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has
any notion of what is an image or metaphor: everything offers itself as the
nearest, most obvious, simplest expression....
****
Yet is this kind of dramatic and productive creative experience really
rooted in different low-level cognitive operations than ordinary everyday
thinking? I don't think so. It seems dramatic because when there is a
whole "subself" of the mind devoted to creative idea and form generation,
one's emotions and physiology get caught up in the rhythm of creation, just
as in other contexts they get caught up in the rhythm of everyday life.
But, at a lower level, I think the creative inspirations of Nietzsche and
all of us are rooted in the same familiar low-level operations: analogy,
blending, deduction, association and so forth. What happens is that a
complex, autopoietic system of ideas, patterns and processes is gathered
together, which systematically uses these basic low-level processes to
augment and sculpt and transform itself. The uniqueness of dramatic
creativity is on the emergent self-organization level, not on the level of
elementary operations. The analogies that are most critical to dramatic
creativity are analogies between concepts that are represented in the mind
by complex emergent patterns....
But from an AGI engineering perspective, we naturally must focus on the
lower level basic operations, because those are what we can and should
program. The critical aspects of intelligence and creativity are the ones
that must emerge, but they can only emerge if the lower levels are done
right.
My biggest disagreement with Loosemore seems to be that I think I know how
to build the lower levels so as to make the emergent level come out right
... whereas he thinks that this is way harder to figure out so that some
special software-experimentation framework will be needed to figure out
which lower-level mechanisms will be adequate for this purpose...
-- Ben G
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