AI, Creativity, Representational Redescription, Intentionality, Mental Life: An Emerging Picture

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

This paper outlines a general theory of creativity and locates the concept of creativity with respect to the concepts of thought, knowledge and intentionality. The picture that I provide is outrageously simplified, but, as Dennett said recently, such idealisation is the price we must sometimes pay for synoptic insight (Dennett 1992). I first provide account of a significant and central type of creativity. Then I show that there is independent empirical evidence that we are natively endowed with this kind of creativity. The emerging picture throws light on what it is to have a mental life, and on what it is for a representation to mean something to a system. This in turn gives a broader perspective, including a general theory of creativity that, on the one hand, distinguishes between creative and non-creative systems, and, on the other, accounts for individual differences between creative systems.