Sound Research WIKINDX
Sound Research WIKINDX |
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Boden, M. A. (2004). The creative mind: Myths & mechanisms. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 06/06/2025, 03:18 Last edited by: alexb44 17/09/2026, 03:29 |
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| Resource type: Book Peer reviewed Published DOI: 10.4324/9780203508527 ID no. (ISBN etc.): 465014526 BibTeX citation key: Boden2004 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Language: en: English Categories: AI/Machine Learning Keywords: Artificial creativity, Artificial Intelligence, creativity Creators: Boden Publisher: Routledge (New York) |
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| Abstract |
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"How is it possible to think new thoughts? What is creativity and can science explain it? And just how did Coleridge dream up the creatures of The Ancient Mariner? When The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms was first published, Margaret A. Boden's bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. Boden uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart, together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the nature of human creativity in the arts. The second edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author. It is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind." Added by: alexb44 Last edited by: alexb44 |
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Originally published 1992. This edition and reprint is updated for the impact of artificial intelligence.
Some key concepts on Boden's view of creativity: Conceptual spaces: The options available within a field/discipline. For example in jazz music, certain things are viewed as acceptable, and are within the "map" of this particular part of jazz. If a student of jazz discovers new parts of this conceptual space on their own, this could be described as P-creativity (personal creativity) because it is new to them, but not the space itself. If they transform the conceptual space (transformative creativity) then they've done something new entirely, which would be historical creativity (H-creativity). This transformation cannot be entirely random, because it ultimately still needs to be accepted by others who are in that space, so it needs to be sufficiently familiar and sufficiently novel. Added by: alexb44 Last edited by: alexb44 |
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p. 10
On values and creativity
"I said earlier that ‘new’ has two meanings, and that ‘surprising’ has three. I didn’t say how many meanings ‘valuable’ has – and nobody could. 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: who will proudly admit, today, to having worn a beehive hairdo or flared trousers in the 1960s? They vary across cultures. And even within a given ‘culture’, 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. Even in science, values are often elusive and sometimes changeable. Just what ‘simplicity’ or ‘elegance’ means, as applied to scientific theories, is something that philosophers of science have long tried – and failed – to pin down precisely. And whether a scientific finding or hypothesis is ‘interesting’ depends on the other theories current at the time, and on social questions too (might it have some medical value, for instance?). Because creativity by definition involves not only novelty but value, and because values are highly variable, it follows that many arguments about creativity are rooted in disagreements about value. This applies to human activities no less than to computer performance. So even if we could identify and program our aesthetic values so as to enable the computer to inform and monitor its own activities accordingly there would still be disagreement about whether the computer even appeared to be creative." Parallel to intelligece. Intelligence is also tied to several value parameters, and as Boden argues, creativity is one of them. Those who accumulate great wealth and thereby power are often viewed as intelligent, but the two need not have any correlation, for example. What constitutes value is often what is viewed as succesful, but surely that is a reduction of such a rich concept.
Added by: alexb44
17/09/2026, 03:19
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