The Creative Mind

Myths and Mechanisms

Margaret A. Boden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134379576
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

How is it possible to think new thoughts? What is creativity and can science explain it? And just how did Coleridge dream up the creatures of The Ancient Mariner? When The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms was first published, Margaret A. Boden's bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. Boden uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart, together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the nature of human creativity in the arts. The second edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author. It is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind.

1
THE MYSTERY OF CREATIVITY

Shakespeare, Bach, Picasso; Newton, Darwin, Babbage; Chanel, the Saatchis, Groucho Marx, the Beatles . . . take your pick. From poets and scientists to advertisers and fashion designers, creativity abounds.

Think of friends or relatives: very likely, you can recall creativeness there, too. Perhaps no jokes up to Groucho’s standards, but surely some spontaneous wit or sarcasm? Maybe they can hum their own descants to hymn-tunes, or improvize jazz on the living-room piano? And what about their ingenuity in running-up a fancy-dress costume, or fixing a faulty car?

Certainly, there can be disagreement about whether some idea, or person, is creative. You may draw the line at your boss’s jokes, or your flatmate’s cooking. You may baulk at the brothers Marx or Saatchi. You may murmur that Darwin’s own grandfather, among others, had the idea of evolution long before he did. You may even grumble that Shakespeare borrowed plots from Plutarch, that Bach used themes from Vivaldi, or that Picasso adapted pictures by Velasquez. But you would be hard put to deny that creativity does, sometimes, happen.

How it happens is a puzzle. This need not imply any fundamental difficulty about explaining creativity in scientific terms: scientists take puzzles in their stride.

Mysteries, however, are different. If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.

If we take seriously the dictionary-definition of creation, ‘to bring into being or form out of nothing’, creativity seems to be not only unintelligible but strictly impossible. No craftsman or engineer ever made an artefact from nothing. And sorcerers (or their apprentices) who conjure brooms and buckets out of thin air do so not by any intelligible means, but by occult wizardry. The ‘explanation’ of creativity thus reduces either to denial or to magic.

Nor does the problem concern only material creation. To define creativity psychologically, as ‘the production of new ideas’, hardly helps. For how can novelty possibly be explained? Either what preceded it was similar, in which case there is no real novelty. Or it was not, in which case one cannot possibly understand how the novelty could arise from it. Again, we face either denial or magic.

A psychological explanation of creativity, it seems, is in principle unachievable. It is not even clear that there can possibly be anything for it to explain. And yet, undeniably, there is.

PHILOSOPHERS AND THEOLOGIANS noticed the paradoxical flavour of the concept of creation long ago. Two thousand years before us, they argued that creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) is impossible even for God. They claimed that the universe was created not only by God but also, necessarily, out of God.

This conclusion, however, does not solve the mystery. The universe apparently has (‘new’) properties which God does not have. So the mediaeval theologians of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – and their successors in and after the Renaissance – painstakingly debated how it might be metaphysically possible for an immaterial God to create a material universe.

Some philosophers, today as in the past, have concluded that it is not possible at all: either there is no creator-God (and no creation), or the creator of nature somehow shares nature’s properties.

But if the creator shares the creation’s properties, can we really speak of creation? With no essential distinction between creator and created, there is nothing new, so there can be no creation. This is why Christian doctrine insists that Christ, being identical with God, was ‘begotten, not created’ (a phrase that occurs in a popular Christmas carol).

In short, the paradox persists.

THE CREATION of the universe, problematic as it is, can be left to the attentions of theologians and cosmologists.

What of human creativeness, whether occasional (the boss’s one witty remark) or sustained (Mozart’s life-long repertoire)? Nothing could be more familiar. Psychology, surely, ought to be able to explain this?

But human creativity is problematic, too. For instance, it is not just surprising: it appears to be intrinsically unpredictable. If – as many people believe – science conveys the ability to predict, a scientific psychology of creativity is a contradiction in terms. Someone who claims that creativity can be scientifically understood must therefore show in just what sense it is unpredictable, and why this unpredictability does not anchor it firmly in the depths of mystery.

Many related problems concern just how novel a novelty has to be, to count as creative. There is novelty (and unpredictability) in randomness: so is chaos as such creative? There is novelty in madness too; what is the distinction between creativity and madness?

Individuals can think things which are novel with respect to their own previous thoughts. So is every banality newly-recognized by an adult – and a great deal of what a young child does – to count as creative?

People can have ideas which, so far as is known, no person has ever had before. So if I remark (what no one else has ever been daft enough to say) that there are thirty-three blind purple-spotted giant hedgehogs living in the Tower of London, does that make me creative?

Suppose a chemist or mathematician has an idea that wins a coveted international award, and it later turns out that a self-educated crossing-sweeper had it first. Is this even possible, and if so does it destroy the prize-winner’s creativity?

What about the recognition of novelty: if an idea is novel, why cannot everyone realize its novelty, and why is this realization sometimes long-delayed? And what of social acceptance: is this relevant to creativity, and if so does it follow that psychology alone (helped by neither the sociology of knowledge nor the history of ideas) cannot explain it?

These queries have a philosophical air, for they concern not merely the ‘facts’ about creativity but the very concept itself. There are many intriguing factual questions about creativity – above all, just how it happens. But many recalcitrant problems arise, at least in part, because of conceptual difficulties in saying what creativity is, what counts as creative. And the factual questions cannot be answered while the conceptual paradox is raging.

One aim of this book is to arrive at a definition of creativity which tames the paradox. Once we have tamed the paradox and eliminated the mystery, creativity can sensibly be regarded as a mental capacity to be understood in psychological terms, as other mental capacities are.

This leads to my second aim: to outline the sorts of thought-processes and mental structures in which our creativity is grounded, so suggesting a solution to the puzzle of how creativity happens.

POPULAR BELIEFS ABOUT human creativity are implicitly influenced by the paradoxical nature of the concept, and are highly pessimistic about science’s ability to explain it.

Indeed, ‘pessimistic’ is perhaps the wrong word here. For many people revel in the supposed inaccessibility of creativity to science. Two widespread views – I call them the inspirational and the romantic – assume that creativity, being humanity’s crowning glory, is not to be sullied by the reductionist tentacles of scientific explanation. In its unintelligibility is its splendour.

These views are believed by many to be literally true. But they are rarely critically examined. They are not theories, so much as myths: imaginative constructions, whose function is to express the values, assuage the fears, and endorse the practices of the community that celebrates them.

The inspirational approach sees creativity as essentially mysterious, even superhuman or divine. Plato put it like this: ‘A poet is holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself and reason is no longer in him . . . for not by art does he utter these, but by power divine.’

Over twenty centuries later, the play Amadeus drew a similar contrast between Mozart and his contemporary, Salieri. Mozart was shown as coarse, vulgar, lazy, and undisciplined in almost every aspect of his life, but apparently informed by a divine spark when composing. Salieri was the socially well-behaved and conscientious expert, well-equipped with ‘reason’ and ‘art’ (that is, skill), who – for all his success as the leading court-composer (until Mozart came along) – achieved a merely human competence in his music. The London critic Bernard Levin, in his column in The Times, explicitly drew the conclusion that Mozart (like other great artists) was, literally, divinely inspired. If this view is correct, all hope of explaining creativity scientifically must be dismissed as absurd.

The romantic view is less extreme, claiming that creativity – while not actually divine – is at least exceptional. Creative artists (and scientists) are said to be people gifted with a specific talent which others lack: insight, or intuition.

As for how intuitive insight actually functions, romantics offer only the vaguest suggestions. They see creativity as fundamentally unanalysable, and are deeply unsympathetic to the notion that a scientific account of it might one day be achieved.

According to the romantic, intuitive talent is innate, a gift that can be squandered but cannot be acquired – or taught. This romanticism has a defeatist air, for it implies that the most we can do to encourage creativity is to identify the people with this special talent, and give them room to work. Any more active fostering of creativity is inconceivable.

But hymns to insight, or to intuition, are not enough. From the psychological point of view, ‘insight’ is the name not of an answer but of a question – and a very unclearly expressed question, at that.

Romanticism provides no understanding of creativity. This was recognized by Arthur Koestler, who was genuinely interested in how creativity happens, and whose account of creativity in terms of ‘the bisociation of matrices’ (the juxtaposition of formerly unrelated ideas) is also a popular view. As he put it,

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flashes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.¹

However, Koestler’s own account of how this happens – although an advance over the pseudo-mysticism propounded by romantics and inspirationists – is no more than suggestive. He described creativity in general terms, but did not explain it in any detail.

THIS BOOK TAKES up the question of creativity from where Koestler left it. It tries to identify some of the ‘invisible links’ underlying intuition, and to specify how they can be tempered and forged.

My main concern, then, is with the human mind, and h...