Book Review: The Creative Mind

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

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Hi all,

In light of the discussion on art, computers and elitism, I thought you 
might like to know about a book I've been reading and really enjoyed. It 
is pretty much spot-on for quite a few of the points that have been 
raised. I've been meaning to get some book-reviewing practice anyway...

---

Book review of 'The Creative Mind' by Margaret Boden

Get four or five people interested in philosophy in a room together, 
provide a few drinks, wind the clock forward a few hours, and just as 
regret follows sambuca, the talk will eventually turn to god, tables, or 
art. Maggie Boden's The Creative Mind is primarily a provocative and 
accessible study of the latter topic, but also features cameos from the 
former two.

Boden's angle is notably different from the well-worn and somewhat stale 
'What is Art?' (also known in its modern Young British Artist form as 
'What can I get away with selling to art collectors?'). Rather than 
retread the familiar streets of family resemblance, idealism, and 
institutionalism, Boden takes the premise that the interesting thing about 
Art is actually its cognitive origin. In this she immediately puts Art (in 
the capital 'A' sense of Fine or Modern Art) into exactly the same 
category as Science (as in Chemistry or Physics). What interests her in 
this book is not the presentation or nature of external texts such as 
sculptures, paintings, machines or scientific research papers (though 
there are incisive comments on all of these), but rather the internal 
processes of the minds that originate them. Hence the title.

The first step in Boden's argument is the denial that creation is ever 
creation ex nihilo - from nothing. Using case studies from the journals of 
Friedrich von Kekule (discoverer of the structure of benzene) and Samuel 
Taylor Coleridge (from when he was working on the brilliant but abortive 
poem Kubla Khan) she demonstrates that all great creative acts have as a 
background a serious amount of quite conventional, rote consideration. 
They always involve pre-existing materials and theories. And they never 
truly occur just in a momentary flash of brilliant realisation, though 
this is characteristic of an essential stage of the process - the creative 
jump.

To mark the difference between the ordinary day-to-day exploration of 
familiar ideas and almost mechanical thinking that we undertake when doing 
anything from the washing up to mathematics, and the fundamental 
transformation that occurs when somebody has a truly creative thought that 
'breaks the rules' of day-to-day cognition, Boden introduces the idea of 
creative space. It is this that distinguishes Boden's theory of creativity 
from postmodernist 'grammars of creation' (to borrow George Steiner's 
phrase). It is a common postmodern trope that creativity amongst humans is 
simply a rearranging of what has come before, a shuffling of the cards 
rather than a new game. Boden argues that this is true of day-to-day 
'exploration' of what is possible within the rules of art or science that 
we inhabit. So Dickens was pushing at the boundaries of Victorian literary 
creative space when he took adjectival description about as far as it 
could go in his description of Ebenezer Scrooge as 'a squeezing, 
wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.'

However true creativity occurs when somebody questions, changes or 
eliminates an existing rule, or shows that something previously thought 
fixed might be variable. This transforms the creative space in which the 
artist or scientist works. All of a sudden there is a new direction to 
explore, existing directions are given a new lease of life by their 
association and relation to this 'extra dimension', and a new set of rules 
for everyday working is established. This is what occurred when Kekule 
came up with the idea that molecular structures may include rings of atoms 
rather than just straight lines, when the Florentines developed 
perspective so that paintings could have realistic depth, and when 
Schoenberg realised he could write music that no longer respected the 
rules of tonality.

As a philosopher of cognitive science, Boden analyses the ability to work 
within rule sets, and the ability to transform them, in terms of cognitive 
algorithms. In other words the rules that you follow in thinking, and the 
rules that you question, depend in turn on what rules are inside your 
cognitive apparatus. This discussion proceeds within a functionalist 
framework, so the exact details required in the brain are deliberately 
left open. Her position on this is one that most people would empathise 
with. Leaving aside the question of what mind is, just as the question of 
what Art is, allows us to focus on the conditions that make creativity in 
the arts and science more likely. This is a refreshingly modern break from 
the focus of most philosophy of art and science. Furthermore most people 
will identify with Boden's claim that acquisition of new thinking rules 
makes a transformational difference to our lives as thinkers. Learning the 
'rules' of analytic philosophy (validity, bivalence, logical forms, and so 
on) leads most people to re-evaluate their pre-existing views and see 
debates that they have considered before in a completely new light. The 
effect of your 'rules for thinking' being changed can be felt.

However Boden's central idea has a couple of consequences that people may 
be less happy with. The first is that since artistic and scientific output 
are so often about exploring creative space rather than transforming it, 
computers can be pretty much as good at it as we are. She uses extensive 
examples from computer science and artificial intelligence to back this up 
- from the artistic program AARON which can draw and paint acrobats and 
jungle scenes, to the 'postmodernism generator' (available at 
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ ) which can generate literary 
criticism on demand, to systems that come up with new scientific 
hypotheses and mathematical proofs, computers can create texts that look 
increasingly like human creative output. But this may be good news for the 
less creative of us. If the ability to explore and transform creative 
space really is about rules, then the rules for challenging rules 
(heuristics such as 'consider the negative' which encourages you to look 
at each of your premises in turn and consider whether its opposite being 
true would make a difference) can be studied and even taught. We could 
perhaps be taught to be more creative artists and scientists.

But then, if this works, we would have to be aware that computers could be 
taught the same rules, so would fairly soon be catching us up again. 
Boden's argument is levelling - creativity is not something elite, there 
is nothing different about Mozart over the rest of us, other than the 
heuristics he had tacit access to. But it is also somewhat humbling - we 
must recognise that just as great geniuses of the scientific and artistic 
world are basically the same as us, so computers are also capable 
creators. This is troubling since we have often used creativity to define 
humanity itself.

Boden's prose is lucid and mercifully jargon-light. Her examples are, save 
perhaps one about necklaces, intuitive and clear. This is an overview and 
'big ideas' book rather than a closely-argued thesis. Whether this is a 
shortcoming or not depends on what you are looking for. As an introductory 
book with ideas it is excellent. As a formally-rigorous piece of deductive 
reasoning it falls considerably short - creative space is given no 
definition in necessary or sufficient conditions, the metaphysics and 
ontological claims underlying Boden's conception of mind are not examined 
in any detail, and it is unclear whether this is supposed to be a model of 
creativity or a necessary, empirical, functionalist theory about the inner 
layout of minds. But it is also a fascinating read, rich in references to 
real-world cases and computer systems that will make you think and 
reconsider your views on creativity, art and science. I think I can go as 
far as saying it transformed my own creative space on the subject.

Recommended.

Rab.
---
BUPS


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