> Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others
Basically can you provide a new perspective on solving a problem that hasn't been considered or a new way of looking at an existing idea in a new way to unlock a path.
That is such a good quote to remember. Thanks for your answer! It actually opened my understanding a lot. I searched your quote and found some other good ones.
You’re asking the right questions, IMO! Chomsky has spent his life trying to answer this question in different forms, and has ultimately arrived to the conclusion that we live in a “Pre-Gallilean” era of cognitive science, where the only answers available to us are developed through the use of intuitive interpretation (like they used to do with ‘the heavens’/space) instead of empirical contradiction (aka science).
He does have some answers, such as “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”, but that’s obviously not a very satisfying answer. It tells us a little — I think Tao is gesturing to exactly this when he complains that GPTo1 can only apply and combine mathematical approaches within a sort of closed domain rather than propose radically new ones - but it’s not helpful for an everyday understanding of creativity. IMO :)
In his words, from Language and Mind:
"Roughly, where we deal with cognitive structures, either in a mature state of knowledge and belief or in the initial state, we face problems, but not mysteries. When we ask how humans make use of these cognitive structures, how and why they make choices and behave as they do, although there is much that we can say as human beings with intuition and insight, there is little, I believe, that we can say as scientists…
What I have called elsewhere 'the creative aspect of language use' remains as much a mystery to us as it was to the Cartesians who discussed it, in part, in the context of the problem of 'other minds."
If this sounds intriguing to you/anyone, I highly recommend his (in)famous debate with Foucault, which is available for free on YouTube. It’s a bit wandering, but about halfway through they discuss creativity in depth, contrasting Foucault’s vaguely postmodern view-that human creativity is mostly constrained by societal circumstances-with Chomsky’s view, that human creativity is mostly constrained by the natural structures of our cognitive system(s).
Wow. Thank you for your thoughtful answer!
> “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”
Do you think this can be used as a metric? Like the more useful answer we can come up with, the more "creative" we are. The constraint of outputs and "some useful way" is such a good insight.
A couple days ago I saw a tweet that described how to remove an element from an array in O(1) time instead of O(n). The key to it was identifying that for the purpose the given array was being used for, it could be unordered / not fully ordered, and it would not be an issue.
This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's pretty creative: whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.
In practice, I'd say creativity is often being able to manifest people's qualia in some unprecedented way. For example, say you're experimenting in your DAW, and discover a pretty cool sound. You identify the ways it can be used to emote and then utilize it in a work. If you really stumbled upon a sound that a lot of people find as emotive as you did, you just did something creative: it's as if you translated the qualia of an emotion into sound.
This qualia to manifestation is what's behind creativity in all of senses of the word I believe. In my previous example, discovering that orderedness is not actually a strict requirement, and (ab)using that to significantly alter the scaling of such an action is creative, because it undoes the notion that orderedness is a requirement. It goes against what's natural, but in a way that becomes extremely natural and indispensable once realized.
I think, in that way, current AIs are trained to be uncreative, since being creative inherently requires experimentation that is unaligned with the normal.
> whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.
In fairness, that is an extremely standard trick so it's reasonably unlikely that the author came up with it themselves.
Thank you for your answer! TIL a new word: qualia
I like your two examples. They have different perspectives. Though I must say the "qualia to manifestation" is still a bit abstract for me now. I'll keep them in mind.
vlovich123|1 year ago
Basically can you provide a new perspective on solving a problem that hasn't been considered or a new way of looking at an existing idea in a new way to unlock a path.
drzzhan|1 year ago
bbor|1 year ago
He does have some answers, such as “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”, but that’s obviously not a very satisfying answer. It tells us a little — I think Tao is gesturing to exactly this when he complains that GPTo1 can only apply and combine mathematical approaches within a sort of closed domain rather than propose radically new ones - but it’s not helpful for an everyday understanding of creativity. IMO :)
In his words, from Language and Mind:
If this sounds intriguing to you/anyone, I highly recommend his (in)famous debate with Foucault, which is available for free on YouTube. It’s a bit wandering, but about halfway through they discuss creativity in depth, contrasting Foucault’s vaguely postmodern view-that human creativity is mostly constrained by societal circumstances-with Chomsky’s view, that human creativity is mostly constrained by the natural structures of our cognitive system(s).https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?si=WA3DpnaFEvd3QqCt
drzzhan|1 year ago
perching_aix|1 year ago
This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's pretty creative: whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.
In practice, I'd say creativity is often being able to manifest people's qualia in some unprecedented way. For example, say you're experimenting in your DAW, and discover a pretty cool sound. You identify the ways it can be used to emote and then utilize it in a work. If you really stumbled upon a sound that a lot of people find as emotive as you did, you just did something creative: it's as if you translated the qualia of an emotion into sound.
This qualia to manifestation is what's behind creativity in all of senses of the word I believe. In my previous example, discovering that orderedness is not actually a strict requirement, and (ab)using that to significantly alter the scaling of such an action is creative, because it undoes the notion that orderedness is a requirement. It goes against what's natural, but in a way that becomes extremely natural and indispensable once realized.
I think, in that way, current AIs are trained to be uncreative, since being creative inherently requires experimentation that is unaligned with the normal.
IshKebab|1 year ago
In fairness, that is an extremely standard trick so it's reasonably unlikely that the author came up with it themselves.
drzzhan|1 year ago