[Creativity] is like driving a car at night.
You never see further than your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow [1] 

 

Introduction

Whatever else they seek, most artists, scientists, and humanities scholars share a common goal: the moment of discovery or insight, the flash of recognition that two (or more) seemingly independent systems actually share some common features or organizing principles. Such moments open up possibilities for new interpretations, better predictions, and deeper understanding. A classic example in science was James Clerk Maxwell's famous insight that electricity, magnetism and light are not merely related, but are expressions or properties of a single force. In the arts, Arthur Miller's play The Crucible offers a nice illustration. Written in 1953, and set amidst the 17th century Salem witch trials, the play poignantly mirrored the deepening madness of the McCarthy communist witch hunt of 1950s America, and the reader is aware of (at least) two instances of persecution that are driven by fear, sanctioned by fundamentalist ideology, and allowed to continue because of a failure to doubt on the part of those in authority.

In literature, such comparisons, illustrations, or relationships are usually referred to as metaphors or analogies, while in science and mathematics a correspondence between apparently disparate phenomena is called an isomorphism. Recognizing and comparing isomorphic structures are the meat and drink of scientific enquiry and literary criticism alike, but it remains unclear as to whether or not the generation of novel structures—either in evolutionary terms or in what we intuitively regard as "real" human creativity—are necessarily "creative" or isomorphic.

Nature, it might be argued, is generative, not creative. True creativity surely requires more than just production; it also requires imagination, as well as the desire for (and recognition of) novelty. Above all, it depends upon the ability to recognize quality. Synthetic agents, if we are to call them creative, must also meet these criteria. Harold Cohen's "cybernetic artist" Aaron, for example, is generative, and skillful, but it is not very imaginative—the constraints on what it may produce are very tight. Nor can we say there is any desire in the system. Curiously though, Aaron does seem to have a rudimentary sense of quality, albeit in a very narrow domain. It seems entirely possible that a synthetic agent could be every bit as creative as a human, but this has not yet been achieved.

 

Definitions

Isomorphism

The word isomorphism comes from the Greek iso - meaning same, and morphos - meaning shape. Most commonly used in mathematics, the term refers to a correspondence or relationship between two (or more) discrete patterns. To say that A and B are isomorphic is to say that there are elements or features of A that map onto B, even though A and B may appear quite different in many respects. In his seminal work Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter closely examines isomorphic relationships—what he calls "information-preserving transformations"—and says:

The word "isomorphism" applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where "corresponding" means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures. (Hofstadter 1979, p 49)

To take an example from nature, the skeletons of bats and badgers look quite dissimilar (and have very different sizes, shapes, and in some respects functions), but they are nevertheless isomorphic because every bone in one skeleton has a direct evolutionary analogue in the other.

The psychologist and literary scholar Julian Jaynes (1976, 1986) claimed that linguistic metaphor is similarly isomorphic. He strongly argued that language is in essence metaphorical (a theme George Lakoff and Mark Johnson [1999] also explore), and that this feature of language is essential for what we regard as human creativity. His ideas mesh closely with those of other writers I shall draw on, such as Margaret Boden, Jacob Bronowski and Douglas Hofstadter.

Evolution

The word evolution comes from the Latin verb evolvere (to unroll), and simply means gradual change, although "change in the direction of perfection" is usually (and mistakenly) implied or inferred. In the Darwinian sense, large numbers of tiny heritable alterations accumulate over extended periods of time—typically measured in millions of years—during which novel features slowly emerge, some of which are honed by natural selection into precise, efficient adaptations. Such adaptations—which are products of the "Darwinian Algorithm" (Dennett 1995, p48)—either persist in a lineage due to the survival or reproductive advantages they confer, or, more commonly, die out because of adverse pressures such as loss of habitat, or better competition.

But many evolved features are not physical or structural in the same way that mountains, feathers and enzymes are. Various behaviours clearly have a genetic basis too (i.e. they are instinctual), and are often highly specific and confined within species. These are instances of what Richard Dawkins calls the extended phenotype, (Dawkins 1982) and following Geoffrey Miller (2000) and others I support the view that much human inventiveness and creativity also falls into this category—which suggests that the role of sexual selection—Darwin's "other" theory—has also been central in driving much of the behavioural complexity of the animal kingdom, including the phenomenon of aesthetics.

 

Creativity

Although we casually use the term "Creativity" in a variety of senses, strictly speaking it is an activity confined to deities (as Plato argued). And while it may be possible to arbitrarily call things into existence in the realm of magic and the supernatural, to "make something out of nothing" here on Earth violates our most basic principles of physics and philosophy. But leaving aside mythical accounts of natural history, there is still plenty of opportunity to explore, discover, devise, imagine and invent—even for mortals like us. The instinctive business of generating interesting, useful, moving and beautiful novelty seems to be a central component of human nature, and culture.

Margaret Boden describes creativity generally as "the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable." (Boden 1990, p1) She is particularly concerned with conceptual creativity, both human and machine (and whether such a thing as "machine creativity" is possible), but we can see that products and artefacts such as bones, shells, milk and nests have also come into being as a result of a creative mechanism (albeit the unconscious one of evolution), and this applies to countless processes and behaviours too, such as metamorphosis, swarming, courtship, songs, prayers, poetry and even the scientific method. And thanks to the exponential development of technological evolution over the last fifty-thousand years or so (Kurzweil 1999, p14; Mithen 2002; see also here), human ingenuity has reached a remarkable level of subtlety and sophistication. As a result, we often seek to distinguish ourselves from the rest of nature by this single criterion. I think this is a mistake; our abilities spring from the same ground as those of other creatures. As I put it elsewhere with respect to the equally slippery concept of "intelligence":

.the astonishing feats routinely performed by insects, birds, and other animals with modest brain mass are often discounted on the grounds that "real" intelligence involves language, technology, explicit reasoning and so on—in other words what humans do. Specialized or "modular" intelligence, such as the ability to accurately navigate across miles of desert or ocean, or the capacity for indoor horticulture, somehow isn't quite the real thing.[2]

To be sure, humans have gained knowledge, skills and powers that no other Earthly creatures have ever possessed, but we shouldn't let our "speciesism"[3] prevent us from appreciating the creative richness that has accumulated in nature over the eons, much less the opportunities for understanding this surely affords us. Such egoism, as George Eliot strenuously reminded us, is the source of most of our unhappiness.[4]

 

Discussion

Nature & Creativity

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.
This is why science has succeeded where magic failed:
because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
Jacob Bronowski [5]

As I write, there is renewed speculation that life may exist on Mars. Methane has been detected in the Martian atmosphere and it is possible that it has a biological origin.[6] Not that H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is in danger of becoming a reality; merely that Martian microbes, if they prove to be the source of the methane, are going about the remarkable business of their everyday life miles beneath the Martian surface.

I mention this not only because creativity in any meaningful sense seems to be dependent on (or at least a consequence of) life (including so-called Artificial Life), but also because, as Richard Dawkins suggests, if there is replicating life elsewhere in the cosmos, it will almost certainly be subject to the same principle of Natural Selection as life on Earth. (Dawkins 2003, p79) Moreover, the discovery of life on Mars would give us an opportunity to learn much about the environmental pressures that constrain evolutionary novelty and adaptability, and would strongly suggest that life (albeit simple life) is a relatively common feature of the cosmos—making the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence more urgent than it already is. Even more tantalizingly, it may be that we are all Martians! The cosmologist Paul Davies (1998) has persuasively argued that life was more likely to have originated on Mars than Earth four billion years ago; Mars was much more equable at the time. Davies has shown that Martian microbes could easily have been carried to Earth within rocks ejected off the Martian surface by asteroid impacts. Should his hypothesis turn out to be true, H.G. Wells' famous story would have a new and bitter irony. It would also be a nice example of a an imaginative idea leading to a scientific discovery. Creativity, lest we forget, isn't the preserve of the arts.

However life started on Earth, it had already established a firm foothold here more than three and a half billion years ago (e.g. Schopf 1993). And as the first microbes proliferated, filling the Archean oceans in such numbers that they started to deplete their resources, tiny differences in phenotype started to play a role in differential survival as some lineages were better able to cope with the changing environment than others. Specialization and diversification began to appear—what we variously call "adaptation", "evolution", or "the generation of advantageous novelty"—while the least successful, least adaptive lineages continually died out. This powerful but incredibly slow process is what Darwin famously called "descent with modification", and it crawled along for more than two billion years until it was given a couple of enormous boosts. [7] The first was the radical development of sexual reproduction around a billion years ago. This evolutionary catapult not only accelerated genetic diversity, it also led to the introduction of "the individual"—because as well as being genetically distinct from their parents, sexual organisms are also mortal—with sex comes pre-programmed death. The second boost was the genetic revolution that led to the so-called Cambrian Explosion about five hundred and fifty million years ago, during which bones, teeth, and other hard phenotypic structures first started to appear, along with a variety of new and complex body-plans. But even at this 'breakneck' speed (which continues today—biologically), a hundred thousand years is barely measurable in the fossil record—a mere blink of the geological eye—and in any case the rate of biological change is almost imperceptible compared with the speed of technological and cultural evolution.

The creativity displayed by nature in generating the sheer variety of life on Earth may have been slow and haphazard, not to mention utterly unconscious, but it is also breathtaking in scope and scale, and according to many it is genuinely creative (e.g., Perkins 1994, p120; and Carruthers 2002). They argue that if we accept that the evolution of say, music or technology are the consequences of various creative acts (performed by humans), then nature must be accorded the same accolade, for not only is human creativity continuous with the rest of nature, it is also isomorphic with respect to "natural" creativity. In both cases an existing plan is modified and tested; if the test works out, the plan is adopted (and becomes popular for a while); if not, the plan is scrapped (death). And in both cases novel features are invariably superseded, sooner or later, by new designs. The differences are primarily those of speed and the fact that we prefer to attribute creativity to a conscious entity.

Human creativity does have some distinct features however—features which to my mind uniquely distinguish our kind: we have the indubitable advantage of being able to imagine desirable (or undesirable) futures—something natural selection obviously cannot do. This means effort can be directed towards a particular end (and crucially, an end which may seem to conflict with other, "natural" desires); pitfalls can sometimes be avoided by the use of reason; and imagination allows successful and directed innovation much more often than mindless DNA can manage. All of which means culture evolves much, much faster than nature. 

Isomorphism & Metaphor

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
José Ortega y Gasset [8]

David Perkins (1994) suggests that all creative systems—human, Darwinian or otherwise—are faced with essentially the same problem: how to locate the best solution/new idea in the available search space. To elucidate this problem he offers the metaphor of searching through "Klondike space." As he puts it:

Imagine that you are searching for gold in the Klondike. You look from this stream bed to that, in this deposit of gravel and the next. You are guided by a fundamental principle: gold is where you find it. (1994, p121)

He chose his analogy carefully. New ideas that are good, and solutions that work, are typically unpredictable and rare within a problem space. We will return to his image after a short detour into linguistic metaphor.

In linguistic or literary terms, isomorphic relationships are usually described as metaphors or analogies, and at the most general level are often known as fables, myths, legends, parables, allegories and so on. In finer detail we recognize terms such as simile, metonymy, tralation, allusion, and synecdoche, amongst others, but for the sake of simplicity I will refer to this whole class of devices as metaphor.

Natural language is saturated with metaphor ("saturated" being an example). Scarcely a sentence can pass (in English at least) without some kind of analogous reference, and many metaphorical terms have become so familiar that we cease to regard them as figurative at all (the 'head' of a company; to 'put your finger on' something; to 'see' a solution; time 'flies' etc, etc). The psychologist and literary scholar Julian Jaynes went further, saying:

The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. But what an understatement! For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language. (Jaynes 1976)

Whether we speak or write then, we can't help but do so figuratively. "Analogical thinking"—to use Margaret Boden's term (Boden 1996, p79)—abounds, and is reflected in many of the words we utter.

What makes metaphor work, according to Jaynes, is that in each case one familiar idea (or set of ideas) is used to describe, limn, or add meaning to a new, target idea. Following the arithmetic convention of the multiplicand and multiplier, he similarly divides a metaphor into two parts, "the thing to be described," which he calls the metaphrand, and "the thing or relation used to elucidate it," which he calls the metaphier, saying: "a metaphor is always a known metaphier operating on a less known metaphrand." (Jaynes 1976)

Accordingly, when we say that language is "saturated" with metaphor, we think of something immersed in, or completely infused with, its surrounding medium. Saturated is in this case a known metaphier that is employed (employed!) to give meaning to the metaphrand (the connection between metaphor and language).

In her discussion of "analogical thinking" Margaret Boden (1996) shows that metaphors can be used and valued very differently according to the domain in which they are applied. Science, she argues, prefers metaphors (with metaphiers) that come from related and well-understood areas, and which most closely map on to the descriptive task at hand. But in literature—and especially in poetry—the best metaphors are often those that are the most unexpected and distant from the thing being described, but which still convey a strong and partisan sense of the relationship. She cites Shakespeare; Macbeth has "murdered sleep."

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast
(Macbeth II.ii)

She goes on to explain that although there is quite some distance between the metaphiers (the ideas that do the explaining—in this case knitting, death, bath, balm, etc) and the metaphrand (the idea that is being explained—sleep), the description is particularly effective not only because we are familiar with all these seemingly disparate and unconnected things—knitting, baths, nourishment and so on—but also because Shakespeare pulls them all together with his customary elegance to emphasize an "underlying unity of theme"—in this case the "alleviation of previous troubles." [9] (Boden 1996, p99) Maxwell's insight and Miller's play, both mentioned earlier, also conform to this pattern. Wherever we look, patterns in nature (including human nature) and patterns in language seem to be deeply isomorphic.

Returning to Perkins's "Klondike space" metaphor, it is strikingly similar to what evolutionary biologists call a fitness landscape. Perkins admits as much (Perkins 1994, p 125), but the resemblance goes further, for not only is his metaphier of the Klondike germane to the metaphrand of "locating valuable novelty within a domain" (in both the physical and imaginative realms — by comparing creativity to the search for gold), but it also reveals an underlying theme—that value, rarity and unpredictability are the bedfellows of creativity. A choice metaphor can be as hard to find as a gold nugget, and as unpredictable as an adaptive mutation.

 

Sexual Selection & Creativity

Automatic processes themselves are often creations of great brilliance.
Daniel Dennett [10]

Continuing the search-for-gold metaphor, Geoffrey Miller (2000, 2000a, 2001) shows how nature taps seams of reproductive value in the form of sexual selection.[11]

Using yet another metaphor—economics—Miller points out that while genetic investment in offspring is usually 50-50 between males and females,[12] the overwhelming majority of total parental investment—of making eggs, growing young, rearing them and so on—is almost always borne by females. The consequences of mating are therefore potentially much more expensive for females than males, which explains why females are generally much more particular than males about who they copulate with.

In many species, if a male is going to copulate with a female he must possess the right plumage, dance the right dance, sing the right song, or in some other way communicate the appropriate signal. Failure to do so is simply a bar to reproductive success. Among the many examples of stunningly elaborate mating rituals and courtship displays is the case of the Peacock's tail. On the face of it, this ludicrous handicap looks like a refutation of Darwinism (because natural selection is not supposed to evolve things that are detrimental to a lineage's survival), and Darwin himself was famously worried by this (Ref), although he also had the explanation at hand—sexual selection.

One school of thought has it that peacocks are exploiting peahens' "sensory biases" (Miller 2000, p142) whereby females in season, by virtue of their neurology, find themselves sexually aroused by certain features of the male's plumage. Males who have more of these features thus win more mating opportunities than their less well endowed contemporaries. Other versions of the theory suggest that males are demonstrating their overall fitness by simply managing to survive despite the danger and handicap such plumage must incur.

How is this relevant to creativity? Miller persuasively argues that brains (at least big ones like ours) also act as fitness indicators—they are expensive and ornamental (in terms of the behavious they generate), and are excellent fitness indicators because genetic faults tend to show up readily. They can also act as stimulators of sensory biases by generating wit, charm, intelligence and so on—and of course creativity. We all prefer imaginative, creative partners to dullards.

Conclusion

In his Silliman Memorial Lectures given at Yale in 1967, Jacob Bronowski said:

Evolution is built up by the perpetuation of errors. . . . This is central to all inductive acts and all acts of imagination. We ask ourselves, "Why does one chess player play better than another?" The answer is not that the one who plays better makes fewer mistakes, because in a fundamental way the one who plays better makes more mistakes . . . he sees more ridiculous alternatives . . . [he] does not conform to the way . . . a machine would play the game. (Bronowski 1978, p112)

Creativity—whether in nature, humans or machines—is a contingent, unpredictable thing, quite different from guessing or calculation. Spotting solutions, discovering melodies, finding gold; all often require a random element, a bit of noise, a serendipitous mistake. In the fields of genetics, business and art, this is well known; but in philosophy and science we're unfortunately still trying to "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line" as Keats lamented. Perhaps we need to lighten up a bit and look a little wider.

 

RSP 2004

For more on computers and creativity see here and here.

 

Notes

 

 

References and Bibliography

Boden, M. (1996). Dimensions of Creativity. Boston: MIT Press

Boden, M. (1995). Creativity and Unpredictability. Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind. URL:http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/boden.html

Bronowski, J. (1978). The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. Yale University Press

Carruthers, Peter. (2002). Human creativity: its evolution, its cognitive basis, and its connections with childhood pretence. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53(2).

Davies, P. (1998). Did Earthlife come from Mars? In: Exobiology: Matter, Energy, and Information in the Origin and Evolution of Life in the Universe (eds. J. Chela-Flores & F. Raulin). Amsterdam: Kluwer

Dawkins, R. (2003). A Devil's Chaplain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Dawkins, R. (1982). The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: OUP

Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea. London: AllenLane

Gabora, L. (2000). Toward a theory of creative inklings. In (R. Ascott, ed.) Art, Technology, and Consciousness, Oxford: Intellect Press, p. 159-164.

Gabora, L. (2000). The beer can theory of creativity. In: (P. Bentley & D. Corne, Eds.) Creative Evolutionary Systems. Morgan Kauffman.

Hofstadter, D. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Boston: Basic Books

Jaynes, J. (1986). Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology. Vol. 27 (2).

Jaynes, J. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books

Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines: when computers exceed human intelligence. London: Penguin

Miller, G. F. (2001). Aesthetic fitness: How sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria, Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 2(1). 20-25 URL: http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/aesthetic_fitness.htm

Miller, G.F. (2000). The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. New York: Doubleday

Miller, G.F. (2000a). Mental traits as fitness indicators: Expanding evolutionary psychology's adaptationism. In: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 907: 62-74

Miller, G. F. (2000b). Evolution of human music through sexual selection.  In: N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, & S. Brown (Eds). The origins of music. MIT Press. pp. 329-360URL:http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/music.htm

Mithen, S. (2002). Human evolution and the cognitive basis of science. In: Carruthers et al (eds) 2002. p23-40

Perkins, D. (1994). Creativity: Beyond the Darwinian Paradigm. In: Boden 1996

Schopf,  W. (1993). The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils. Princeton University Press. 

Trivers, R.L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In: Campbell, B. Ed. Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man. Chicago: Aldine

Turner, M. and G. Fauconnier. (1995). Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression. Journal of Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10(3).

Veale, T. (1998). Pragmatic Pressures in Metaphor Appreciation, presented at CMA2, An International Workshop on Computation for Metaphors, Agents and Analogy, Aizu, Japan, April 1998 (to be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series).
URL: http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~tonyv/metaphor_frame.html