Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15
Creating New Informational Primitives in Minds
and Machines
Peter Cariani
Abstract
Creativity involves the generation of useful novelty. Two modes of creat-
ing novelty are proposed: via new combinations of pre-existing primitives (combi-
natoric emergence) and via creation of fundamentally new primitives (creative emer-
gence). The two modes of creativity can be distinguished by whether the changes
still fit into an existing framework of possibility, or whether new dimensions in an
expanded interpretive framework are needed. Although computers are well suited
to generating new combinations, it is argued that computations within a framework
cannot produce new primitives for that framework, such that non-computational
constructive processes must be utilised to expand the frame. Mechanisms for com-
binatoric and creative novelty generation are considered in the context of adaptively
self-steering and self-constructing goal-seeking percept-action devices. When such
systems can adaptively choose their own sensors and effectors, they attain a degree
of epistemic autonomy that allows them to construct their own meanings. A view of
the brain as a system that creates new neuronal signal primitives that are associated
with new semantic and pragmatic meanings is outlined.
15.1 Introduction
Open-endedness is an important goal for designing systems that can autonomously
find new and unexpected solutions to combinatorically-complex and ill-defined
problems. Classically, issues of open-ended generation of novelty in the universe
have come under the rubric of the problem of emergence.
In this discussion we distinguish two general modes of creating novelty:
combi-
natoric emergence
and
creative emergence
. In combinatoric emergence new com-
binations of existing primitives are constructed, whereas in creative emergence en-
tirely new primitives are created anew. Although combinatoric systems may differ
in numbers of possible combinations, their set of possibilities is closed. Creative
systems, on the other hand, have open-sets of possibilities because of the partial or
