> On Oct 25, 2010, at 1:46 AM, Sal Armoniac wrote: > http://thefutureofthings.com/column/1003/creativity-the-last-human-stronghold.html
In the "Pay Attention to the Machine inside the Man" heading, Israel Beniaminy writes: > For some people, the fact that the creative spark vanishes when we examine > the machine more closely serves as the conclusive proof that the spark was > never really there. [Advocates of “strong AI” believe that] if we could > expose what happens in the mind while we’re being creative, we will again > fail to find the creative core, the place and time where the magic happens. I think finding the "creative spark" is the wrong path because there is none. It's a similar question to when someone asks, "how did you get started being an author?" They are asking, "at one point you were not an author and at a later point you were: what was the magical event that happened between?" As such, the apparent creativity of a mechanism, or the creativity of a person can be traced back literally ad infinitum with no hope of finding anything remotely similar to an answer to the question. In the same section, he goes on to say: > [Steven Johnson's] brain was monitored on fMRI while he was planning how to > express some ideas for a chapter in the book. This creative act was expressed > in the brain by increased activity in ... the medial frontal gyrus, whose > functions include the “orchestration” of other parts of the brain. ... > Johnson offers a possible explanation: maybe the act of creativity requires a > moment where all input reaches one location, while all else is quiet. This fits exactly with my own experience of working on collaborative creative projects, so I'm completely not surprised by this. But that leads to an interesting note that the goal of AI should be less about making a creative spark generator and more about making something that can aggregate a set of disparate, "smaller" ideas into a cohesive whole. Recurse this from tiny ideas to bigger and bigger ones and it might just work. It appears this is what mathematical proof algorithms do, albeit the aggregation process can also be represented algorithmically. ---Jason Olshefsky http://JayceLand.com/ http://JayceLand.com/blog/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
