Mike,
Exercising rational thinking need not force exposure of oneself into being sequestered as a rationalist. And utilizing creativity effectively requires a context in some domain. The domain context typically involves application of rationality. A temporary absence of creativity does not mean it is not valued it just means that you have to instantiate creativity. AGIers may seem like strict rationalists and many are, but many are just instantiating their creativity or putting pure creativity on the backburner. And the dying culture that you are talking about is not true. There is a mass synthesis going on... Simplexity is an interesting concept related to this... Creativity and rationality are not opposed, they typically are out of balance and each has its own deadfalls. This subject is an old argument. And when you split up the two, creativity and rationality, your are over rationalizing them and need to be more creative. John From: Mike Tintner [mailto:tint...@blueyonder.co.uk] Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 4:47 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] Should I get a PhD? 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 . 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]. _____ agi | <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/> | <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Modify Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> ------------------------------------------- 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
