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The senses of animals perform the same fundamental operations as the mea-
surements that provide the observables of scientific models (Pattee
1996
, Cariani
2011
) and artificial robotic systems. Outside of artificially restricted domains it is
not feasible to outline the space of possible sensory distinctions because this space
is relational and ill-defined. It is analogous to trying to outline the space of possi-
ble measurements that could ever be made by scientists, past and future. Emergent
creativity can be said to take place when new structures, functions, and behaviours
appear that cannot be accounted for in terms of the previous expectations of the ob-
server. For combinatorial creativity, the observer can see that the novel structures
and functions are explicable in terms of previous ones, but for emergent creativity,
the observer must enlarge the explanatory frame in order to account for the change.
More will be said about emergent creativity and the observer in Sect.
15.4
.
In this epistemological view of emergence, surprise is in the eye of the beholder.
Because the observer has a severely limited model of the underlying material sys-
tem, there are processes that can go on within the system that are hidden to direct
observation that can qualitatively alter overt behaviour. In biological, psychological,
and social systems, internal self-organising, self-complexifying processes can create
novel structures and functions that in turn can produce very surprising behaviours.
Because the epistemological approach is based on a limited set of macroscopic ob-
servables that do not claim any special ontological status, there is no necessary con-
flict with physical causality or reduction to microscopic variables (where possible).
No new or mysterious physical processes or emergent, top-down causalities need to
be invoked to explain how more complex organisations arise in physical terms or
why they can cause fundamental surprise in limited observers. The novelty that is
generated is partially due to internal changes in the system and partially due to the
limited observer's incomplete model of the system, such that the changes that occur
cause surprise.
15.2.6 Combinatoric and Creative Emergence in Aesthetic
Contexts
A first strategy for computational creativity is to use artificial devices to cause cre-
ative responses in human participants. In aesthetic realms distinguishing between
combinatoric and emergent creativity is made difficult by indefinite spaces of gen-
erative possibilities, as well as ambiguities in human interpretation and expectation.
Often many prior expectations of individual human observers and audiences may be
implicit and subliminal and therefore not even amenable to conscious analysis by
the human participants themselves. Nonetheless, to the extent that cultural conven-
tions exist, then it is possible to delineate what conforms to those expectations and
what doesn't.
One rule of thumb is that combinatorial creative works operate within a set of
stylistic or generative rules that explore new forms within an existing framework.
An audience implicitly understands the contextual parameters and constraints of the
medium, and the interest is in the play of particular new combinations, motifs, or
