Creativity as a Computation

I took a class last year called Machines and Consciousness, a mix between computer science, brain and cognitive sciences and philosophy. With everyone in the thread talking about originality and creativity, I remembered a passage from a book we read called Mind and Mechanism by Drew McDermott.

I have included an image of the text that I included below. It's quite long and dense, but if you take the time to really understand it, I think it brings up some excellent points about creativity.

Add caption

To give you some background, we were trying to determine whether our brains are computers and whether we can recreate a human mind via computers...aka, artificial intelligence. What's most striking to me about this section in the book is how he talks about creativity as something that requires a random generator. He seems to say that creativity is not based on the originality of elements, but rather originality of combination. Thus, I agree with him that originality arises from the random and unexpected combinations of unoriginal elements. Creativity is something that we cannot reproduce or learn how to reproduce. The most interesting point is that even if we figure out how a creative mind works, we really can't create a new Mozart.

So going back to our discussion about remixing in art, and how we create our identity as artists in the ever lasting struggle for originality...we need not fret. Originality is generated through the random permutations of all our experiences, and given how diverse each and every person is, I would say that originality is a possibility for almost anyone, if given the chance to emerge.