Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
15.4 Recognising Different Types of Creativity
How does one distinguish combinatoric from emergent creativity in practice? This
is the methodological problem. The distinction is of practical interest if one wants
to build systems that generate fundamental novelty—one needs a clear means of
evaluating whether the goal of creating new primitives has been attained.
15.4.1 Emergence-Relative-to-a-Model
Theoretical biologist Robert Rosen (
1985
) proposed a systems-theoretic, epistemo-
logical definition of emergence as the deviation of the behaviour of a material sys-
tem from the behaviour predicted by a model of that system. At some point the
behaviour of a material system will deviate from its predicted behaviour because of
processes in the material world that are unrepresented in the model.
This concept can be put into concrete practice by formulating an operational
definition. Like the description of an experimental method, an operational defini-
tion specifies the procedures by which different observers can reliably make the
same classifications, e.g. is a given behaviour emergent, and if so, how? In this case
an emergent event is one that violates the expectations of an observer's predictive
model. However, simple violations, such as when the engine of one's car fails, are
not so interesting or particularly useful, because they can be outward signs of the
breakdown of internal mechanisms as much as signs of the evolution of new func-
tions. Instead, we are interested in deviations from expected behaviour that are due
to adaptive construction of new functions and qualitatively new behaviours of the
system under study.
In the late 1980s, in conjunction with the adaptive systems taxonomy, we de-
veloped a systems-theoretic methodology for how one could go about recognis-
ing the operations of measurements, computations, and actions from the observed
state-transitions of a natural system (Cariani
1989
;
1992
;
2011
). In the process op-
erational definitions were formulated for how these functions can be distinguished
from each other, and how changes in a given functionality can be recognised. The
method partitions the state-transition structure of the system into regions of state-
determined transitions that resemble computations and regions of indeterminate,
contingent transitions that resemble measurements and actions.
15.4.2 Tracking Emergent Functions in a Device
Consider the case of an observer following the behaviour of a device (Fig.
15.5
,top
panel). The observer has a set of observables on the device that allow him/her/it to
observe the device's internal functional states and their transitions. Essentially if one
were observing a robotic device consisting of sensors, a computational coordinative
