3 ms·

I see little justification in the article for the assertion that creativity/imagination^ is something unique and distinct from other aspects of intelligence. A

by Crito 13y ago

I see little justification in the article for the assertion that creativity/imagination^ is something unique and distinct from other aspects of intelligence. Any system that explores solutions will need to speculate on which branch of decisions will have the greatest chances of yielding a desirable outcome. Any system with enough power to fully explore all possibilities will have enough power to discover other possibilities that it lacks the power to fully explore within it's SLAs. Different intelligent systems that employ different pruning techniques or heuristics will have different "creativities". The more sophisticated the intelligent system, the greater the range of 'creative' thought. I've seen little reason to think that creativity is some sort of "special sauce" that would not become commoditized as the rest of intelligence is commoditized. Why shouldn't it? ^ Imagination without creativity is merely simulation, something that nobody doubts is mechanical. I therefore conclude that the author is actually identifying creativity as special.

briantakita 13y ago
There's a couple of ways I see to go with this discussion. I'll explore both... 1. We are in a temporal frame. The evolution of intelligence has gotten us to this point. Right now, high creativity is unique to humans. I agree that the possibility exists for humans to create creative beings. 2. The definition of creativity is broad at the moment. Pursuits that are defined as "creative" are also changing. As we learn more about creativity (zoom into the definition), we will identify more nuances of creativity. Indeed, it may loop back to a fundamental notion of cognition which itself may be related to a fundamental notion of self-perpetuating systems creating the best possible outcome for it's lineage. I suspect that creativity is akin to a driving force. So in a fractal system, "creativity" or "emotional drive" is the equation which creates/generates the fractal over time.
- Crito 13y ago
  I think that it is easiest (and therefore best ;) to define creativity by what we can observe about it, without any internal knowledge about it. So basically "creativity" is some sort of black-box that generates novel outcomes (for a broad sense of outcomes). On the face of it, I think that for this definition of creativity, I think you could do by simply logically exploring problem spaces that have not been explored before, or by exploring branches in problem spaces that have not been explored before. Maybe throw in a source of randomness when deciding what to explore, to explore possibilities that may not otherwise make sense but could nevertheless lead to interesting outcomes. (The equivalent of a chemist randomly fucking around in his backyard shed). Some of my friends and I practice a sort of very limited mechanical creativity in the form of a drinking game. We invent new "startup ideas" by ad libbing into the phrase "The ____ of ____", where both blanks are existing companies. We then explore that idea and speculate on what such a company would actually entail. "The Twitter of Githubs", maybe that's a company build around the idea of sharing code snippets, like gists? Not a very interesting idea, but I'm sober at the moment. ;)

by Crito 13y ago

briantakita 13y ago

There's a couple of ways I see to go with this discussion. I'll explore both... 1. We are in a temporal frame. The evolution of intelligence has gotten us to this point. Right now, high creativity is unique to humans. I agree that the possibility exists for humans to create creative beings. 2. The definition of creativity is broad at the moment. Pursuits that are defined as "creative" are also changing. As we learn more about creativity (zoom into the definition), we will identify more nuances of creativity. Indeed, it may loop back to a fundamental notion of cognition which itself may be related to a fundamental notion of self-perpetuating systems creating the best possible outcome for it's lineage. I suspect that creativity is akin to a driving force. So in a fractal system, "creativity" or "emotional drive" is the equation which creates/generates the fractal over time.

Crito 13y ago
I think that it is easiest (and therefore best ;) to define creativity by what we can observe about it, without any internal knowledge about it. So basically "creativity" is some sort of black-box that generates novel outcomes (for a broad sense of outcomes). On the face of it, I think that for this definition of creativity, I think you could do by simply logically exploring problem spaces that have not been explored before, or by exploring branches in problem spaces that have not been explored before. Maybe throw in a source of randomness when deciding what to explore, to explore possibilities that may not otherwise make sense but could nevertheless lead to interesting outcomes. (The equivalent of a chemist randomly fucking around in his backyard shed). Some of my friends and I practice a sort of very limited mechanical creativity in the form of a drinking game. We invent new "startup ideas" by ad libbing into the phrase "The ____ of ____", where both blanks are existing companies. We then explore that idea and speculate on what such a company would actually entail. "The Twitter of Githubs", maybe that's a company build around the idea of sharing code snippets, like gists? Not a very interesting idea, but I'm sober at the moment. ;)