{"id":11414,"date":"2025-08-24T18:02:49","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T22:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pioneering-philosopher-of-ai-margaret-boden-on-the-three-elements-of-creativity-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T18:02:49","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T22:02:49","slug":"pioneering-philosopher-of-ai-margaret-boden-on-the-three-elements-of-creativity-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pioneering-philosopher-of-ai-margaret-boden-on-the-three-elements-of-creativity-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Pioneering Philosopher of AI Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"Decoding<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,\u201d Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world\u2019s first algorithm<\/a> for the world\u2019s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity<\/a>, distilling it to a trinity: \u201can intuitive perception of hidden things,\u201d \u201cimmense reasoning faculties,\u201d and the \u201cconcentrative faculty\u201d of bringing to any creative endeavor \u201ca vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources\u201d \u2014 that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of raw material to feed the \u201ccombinatory play\u201d<\/a> Einstein considered the crux of creativity. <\/p>\n

The first comes from experience \u2014 intuition is what we call the pattern recognition unconsciously honed in the act of living. The third also comes from experience \u2014 everything we have ever read and seen, everyone we have ever loved, everything we have suffered becomes a building block for the combinatorial alchemy of creation. The second is the fault line between genius and madness \u2014 a creative revelation, be it the heliocentric model of the universe or the Goldberg Variations<\/em>, is seeing something no one else has seen, which has acute relevance to the world as we know it, touches it, transforms it; a hallucination is seeing something no one else can see without the ability to evaluate its irrelevance to the real world. <\/p>\n

A quarter millennium after Lovelace, we face the question of whether AI can achieve all three, and therefore originate truly new ideas, or remain in the straitjacket of binary logic \u2014 a disembodied intellect without the lived experience, in all its embodied and ambiguous wildness, on which true creativity draws. Out of this arises the far more disquieting question of whether we, as a species, are being trained by this \u201cmechanical kingdom\u201d<\/a> of our own creation to mistake the simulacrum of life for life itself, to reduce our aliveness to algorithms. Given that creativity is a hallmark of our species, questions about the nature of creativity in human and non-human minds are ultimately questions about what it means to be \u2014 and remain \u2014 human. <\/p>\n

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Operators at the MANIAC I (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer<\/em> Model I), 1952.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Few have reckoned with these questions more deeply, or more durationally, than British philosopher Margaret Boden<\/strong> (November 26, 1936\u2013July 18, 2025), who composed her revelatory book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) when the Internet was just a few years old and computational models still in their infancy. At its heart is an investigation of how the human mind can surpass itself, how our intuition works, and how it is possible for us to think new thoughts, anchored in the insight that \u201ca computational approach gives us a way of coming up with scientific hypotheses about the rich subtleties of the human mind,\u201d that AI-concepts are valuable not because they can (which they very well could) originate new ideas but because they can help us do so, because \u201cboth their failures and their successes help us think more clearly about our own creative powers.\u201d <\/p>\n

All of this requires a clear definition of those powers \u2014 not the ancient cop-out of divine inspiration, not the Romantic conceit of the chosen few gifted with special talents, but a model that accounts for both the immense range of creativity and the wide variations across that range, for its fundamentally mysterious nature and for the possibility of comprehending the mystery without reducing it to code. <\/p>\n

An epoch after Einstein observed that \u201cthe most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious\u201d because there is always \u201csomething deeply hidden\u2026 behind things,\u201d after Carl Sagan insisted that \u201cbathing in mystery\u2026 will always be our destiny [because] the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it,\u201d Boden considers the mystery of the universe within:<\/p>\n

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If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

A science of creativity need not be dehumanizing. It does not threaten our self-respect by showing us to be mere machines, for some machines are much less \u201cmere\u201d than others. It can allow that creativity is a marvel, despite denying that it is a mystery.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Margaret Boden, 1990.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Defining creativity as \u201cthe ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable,\u201d Boden argues that it permeates every aspect of human life, is not a special \u201cfaculty\u201d of the mind but \u201cgrounded in everyday abilities such as conceptual thinking, perception, memory, and reflective self-criticism,\u201d and is not binary \u2014 the question that should be asked is not whether an idea is creative but how creative it is, which allows us to assess both the subtleties of the idea itself and the \u201csubtle interpretative processes and complex mental structures\u201d through which it arose in the mind. <\/p>\n

Drawing on everything from Euclid\u2019s revolutionary geometry to Coleridge\u2019s \u201cRime of the Ancient Mariner,\u201d she distinguishes between two types of creativity \u2014 personal creativity, which \u201cinvolves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that\u2019s new to the person who comes up with it\u201d no matter how many other people have come up with it, and historical creativity, in which the idea is completely new in the whole of human history. Both are axoned in a substrate of surprise \u2014 \u201cthe astonishment you feel on encountering an apparently impossible<\/em> idea. It just couldn\u2019t<\/em> have entered anyone\u2019s head, you feel \u2014 and yet it did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boden identifies three aspects of creativity: First there is tessellating familiar ideas into unfamiliar combinations. Arthur Koestler, who greatly influenced Boden, termed this \u201cbisociation\u201d in his pioneering model of creativity<\/a>. Gianni Rodari echoed in his notion of \u201cthe fantastic binomial\u201d<\/a> key to great storytelling. For such a combination to be truly novel, Boden observes, it requires \u201ca rich store of knowledge in the person\u2019s mind, and many different ways of moving around within it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other two aspects of creativity both involve the conceptual spaces in people\u2019s minds \u2014 those structured styles of thought we absorb unconsciously from our peers, our parents, our culture, the fashions and fictions of our time and place: styles of writing and dress, social mores and manners, existing theories about the nature of reality, ideological movements. One creative approach to conceptual space is exploration. Boden writes:<\/p>\n

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Within a given conceptual space many thoughts are possible, only some of which may actually have been thought\u2026 Exploratory creativity is valuable because it can enable someone to see possibilities they hadn\u2019t glimpsed before.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Exploratory creativity discovers novel ideas within an existing conceptual space and, in the process, invites others to consider the limits and potential of the space. But one can go even further, beyond exploring and toward transforming the conceptual space:<\/p>\n

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A given style of thinking, no less than a road system, can render certain thoughts impossible \u2014 which is to say, unthinkable\u2026 The deepest cases of creativity involve someone\u2019s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn\u2019t have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the preexisting style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, of course, is the paradox of all transformation, best illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment<\/a> \u2014 because our imagination is the combinatorial product of past experience, we are fundamentally unable to imagine a truly altered future state and deem such states impossible, chronically mistaking the limits of our imagination (which transformative experience expands) for the limits of the possible. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/a><\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Boden picks up where Koestler left off to explore what it takes for an idea to be truly transformative. \u201cBisociation\u201d alone, she argues, is not enough to originate such ideas:<\/p>\n

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Combining ideas creatively is not like shaking marbles in a bag. The marbles have to come together because there is some intelligible, though previously unnoticed, link between them which we value because it is interesting \u2014 illuminating, thought-provoking, humorous \u2014 in some way\u2026 We don\u2019t only form links; we evaluate them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This question of value is where the central paradox of creativity resides, because our values are largely inherited conceptual spaces, making it difficult to assess or even recognize the value of a transformative idea whose originality overflows and overwhelms the conceptual space. In consonance with Bob Dylan\u2019s observation that \u201cpeople have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,\u201d<\/a> Boden writes:<\/p>\n

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Our aesthetic values are difficult to recognize, more difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to state really clearly. (For a computer model, of course, they have to be stated really, really clearly.) Moreover, they change\u2026 They vary across cultures. And even within a given \u201cculture,\u201d they are often disputed: different subcultures or peer groups value different types of dress, jewellery or music. And where transformational creativity is concerned, the shock of the new may be so great that even fellow artists find it difficult to see value in the novel idea.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She returns to the most crucial element of creativity \u2014 surprise so intense it has an edge of shock: Something previously unthinkable has entered your mind. To be surprised is to watch your calculus of probability crumble in the face of the possible, to find the locus of your expectations too small to encompass what you have just encountered. (This is why societies and epochs, such as ours, that prioritize certainty and self-righteousness over exploration and surprise are shackling their own creativity.) Boden writes:<\/p>\n

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A merely novel idea is one which can be described and\/or produced by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar, ideas. A radically original, or creative, idea is one which cannot.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

To be fundamentally creative, it is not enough for an idea to be unusual \u2014 not even if it is valuable, too. Nor is it enough for it to be a mere novelty, something which has never happened before. Fundamentally creative ideas are surprising in a deeper way. Where this type of creativity is concerned, we have to do with expectations not about probabilities, but about possibilities. In such cases, our surprise at the creative idea recognizes that the world has turned out differently not just from the way we thought it would, but even from the way we thought it could<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We are animated by this creative urge to bridge the actual and the possible because it matters to us what world we live in \u2014 it matters because we are made of matter, because while a computer\u2019s generative flow is, as Boden puts it, \u201cimplemented rather than embodied,\u201d ours streams in through through the sensorium of our bodily aliveness<\/a>. A quarter century after the publication of Boden\u2019s seminal book, months after the emergence of transformer-based large language models, Cambridge University endowed a lecture series in her honor. In her inaugural address, she reflected<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Homo sapiens<\/em> is an intensely social species. Our needs for what Maslow called \u201clove and belonging\u201d (which includes collaboration and conversation) and \u201cesteem\u201d (which includes respect and dignity) are not mere trivialities, or optional extras. They matter<\/em>. They must<\/em> be satisfied if we are to thrive. Their degree of satisfaction will influence the individual\u2019s subjective experience of happiness (and others\u2019 measurements of it).Computers have no such needs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is out of this mattering, out of our creaturely neediness, that we originate anything of substance, value, and surprise. It is because things matter to us that we suffer, and it is because we suffer that we are impelled to transmute our suffering into art<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In the remainder of The Creative Mind<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, Boden goes on to explore the complementary role of chaos and constraint in creativity and how, despite their limitations, AI models can help us better understand the mystery of human intuition. Complement it with Oliver Sacks, writing three decades before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning<\/a>, then revisit his own take on the three essential elements of creativity<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,\u201d Ada Lovelace […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}