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on our planet. It is also due in part to the primary reasons that we create machines—
to carry out pre-specified actions reliably and efficiently. We usually prefer our de-
vices to act predictably, to carry out actions we specify, rather than to surprise us in
some fundamental way. In contrast, we expect our artists, designers, and scientists
to continually surprise us.
Nonetheless, creatively emergent artificial systems are possible and even desir-
able in some contexts. In Sect.
15.3
we consider the problem of creativity in the
context of adaptive goal-seeking percept-action systems that encapsulate the func-
tional organisations of animals and robots (Figs.
15.2
,
15.3
,
15.6
). Such systems
carry out operations of measurement (via sensors), action (via effectors), internal co-
ordination (via computational mappings, memory), steering (via embedded goals),
and self-construction (via mechanisms for plastic modification). We then discuss
the semiotics of these operations in terms of syntactics (relations between internal
informational sign-states), semantics (relations between sign-states and the exter-
nal world), and pragmatics (relations between sign-states and internal goals). New
primitive relations can be created in any of these realms (Table
15.1
).
We are already quite adept at creating ever more powerful computational en-
gines, and we can also construct robotic devices with sensors, effectors, and goal-
directed steering mechanisms that provide them with fixed, pre-specified semantics
and pragmatics. The next step is to design machines that can create new meanings
for themselves. What is needed are strategies for creating new primitive semantic
and pragmatic linkages to existing internal symbol states.
Three basic strategies for using artificial devices to create new meanings and
purposes present themselves:
1.
via new human-machine interactions
(mixed human-machine systems in which
machines provoke novel insights in humans who then provide new interpretations
for machine symbols),
2.
via new sensors and effectors on an external world
(epistemically-autonomous
evolutionary robots that create their own external semantics), and
3.
via evolving internal analog dynamics
(adaptive self-organisation in mixed
analog-digital devices or biological brains in which new internal linkages are
created between internal analog representations that are coupled to the external
world and goal-directed internal decision states).
The first strategy uses machines to enhance human creative powers, and arguably,
most current applications of computers to creativity in the arts and sciences involve
these kinds of human-machine collaborations. But the processes underlying human
thought and creativity in such contexts are complex and ill-defined, and therefore
difficult to study by observing overt human behaviour.
The second and third strategies focus on building systems that are capable of
emergent creativity in their own right. In Sect.
15.3
and Sect.
15.5
respectively,
we outline a basic accounts of how new primitives might arise in adaptive percept-
action systems of animals and robots (emulating emergence in biological evolution)
and how new neural signal primitives might arise in brains (emulating creative pro-
cesses in individual humans and animals). Combinatoric and creative emergence is
