Creativity and Consciousness

Creativity and Consciousness Writing on the prospects for naturalising creativity, Kronfelder notes that Most definitions of creativity are based on two rudimentary criteria for the product of creativity. According to Sternberg and Lubart, ‘Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)’. The product must be novel and useful according to a certain standard. Similarly, Margaret Boden defines creativity as the ‘ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable’1 Although she offers much elucidation of its concepts, Kronfelder accepts this traditional analysis of creativity without restriction. Her case is representative: the vast majority of theorists working on creativity accept the traditional analysis. Topics of interest these days relate to Kronfelder’s naturalistic question: such issues as whether machines can be creative,2 and how we can model creative cognition.3 But almost no-one seriously considers that we may not yet have done adequate philosophical work on the concept of creativity. 4 Against this trend I argue that the traditional analysis is almost entirely mistaken. Creativity should be understood as an intrinsic disposition of individuals, specifically, of their mental processes; this means the production of novel and valuable works is strictly inessential to creativity, for these are extrinsic properties. In the final section I comment on Nanay’s attempt to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for creativity in terms of consciousness. Nanay’s proposal fits with my thesis that creativity requires intrinsic criteria, but his account fails. In its place I offer my own consciousness-based necessary and sufficient conditions for creativity. This is a work of conceptual analysis, but it confirms the value of such analysis, because our conclusions have considerable concrete ramifications. For one thing the Torrance test5 of creativity—by far the measure most commonly employed by psychologists investigating creativity—must be dispensed with, for it explicitly defines creativity in terms of the originality of the creative product. Another consequence of the present argument is that creativity is more prevalent than it is traditionally taken to be. On our account it is the preserve of the everyday individual as much as the genius. This is no problem, it will be argued, because we have other concepts for distinguishing the genius from the normal person. Before coming to our positive account we must first see what is wrong with the traditional analysis, which defines creativity with reference to works, which are novel, valuable and surprising. The elements of this analysis are considered in turn below. The Creative Product 1 Kronfelder 2009: 578. The embedded quotations are from R.J. Sternberg and T.I. Lubart 1999 (p.3) and Boden 2004 (p.1). 2 See e.g. Bedau 2004, Boden 1998, Nanay forthcoming. 3 See e.g. Stokes 2007. 4 Hospers and Nanay provide partial exceptions, but since they endorse portions of the traditional analysis, the critical points to come also apply to them. 5 Torrance 1962. 1 According to folk-discourse three kinds of item may display creativity.6 There is, first, a physical product, something that comes to exist at the end of the creative process. This could be some new object which solves a particular problem. For example, a friend of mine recently designed and manufactured an ingenious home-use smear-test kit. Or it could be an action, as when Mohammed Ali developed his novel way of hopping across the boxing ring to wear out his opponent. This creative product we call a ‘creation’, and it is an external, objective item—something public and non-mental in character. The second kind of item is the creative thought-process, that period of mental work on a problem which eventually ushers in the creative product. The third kind of item typically comes after the creative thought-process but before the creative product. This is the creative idea, closely connected with what is called the ‘Aha! moment’: that mental apprehension or eureka-style glimpse of a certain solution, of the answer, which is to be realised physically as the creative product. According to folk-discourse creativity is exhibited by products, thought-processes and ideas; we say of examples of each kind of item that they are creative. But it is not clear from such talk where creativity really inheres, whether, as seems plausible, the combination of one or more (but fewer than all three) of these kinds of item comprises the true core of creativity. I now argue that the core of creativity comprises the creative thought-process plus the creative idea. Let us label the combination of the creative thought-process and the creative idea the creative mental process. The creative mental process is essential to the creative product: Without a creative mental process behind it, no object or action can count as a creative product, even if intrinsically identical to another item which does qualify as a creative product. Consider in support of this claim the example of my friend’s home smear-test kit. In the actual world my friend began with a problem-space, how to devise a cheap, safe design which is easy to use oneself. She went through the four prescribed stages of creativity: starting with the challenge and its constraints she spent time incubating the problem, delegating consideration of it to non-conscious cognitive processes. At a certain point she experienced illumination; she was struck by the solution in her Aha! moment. Then my friend did some evaluating of her idea in the cold light of day, before putting it forward for manufacture. In a nearby possible world, however, my friend was not working on the problem of designing a home smear-test kit. Perhaps she is not an industrial designer in that world, but a high-grade chef who has never dabbled in design. Yet upon bumping her head the bath one day, the design for the home smear-test kit is revealed to my friend’s other-world chef counterpart, and she proceeds to put the design into production, just as my friend actually does. The same item, intrinsically, gets made in both worlds. Still, in the counterfactual world the home smear-test kit does not express my friend’s counterpart’s creativity; it is not creative. Rather, it is in the class of fluke discoveries—in light of our stipulations that the chef-counterpart has no knowledge of industrial design and was not thinking about the challenge of the home smear-test kit; likely she is completely unaware of this challenge. The crucial difference is that in the actual world my friend thought about and worked on the problem prior to having her idea and executing it. This example shows that the complete creative mental process—thought-process plus idea— is essential to the creation. Simply having an idea occur to you out of the blue and utterly unconnected to your previous thought-processes is not a manifestation of creativity, and nothing thereby produced counts as creative. I know of two objections to the thesis that the creative product depends on the creative mental process. One is Hospers’ Mozart example, the other is Carruthers’ account of creative action. 6 I omit a fourth kind for now, creative persons; it being plausible that individuals are creative in virtue of items of the other three kinds pertaining to them. 2 According to Hospers, Mozart reports musical ideas coming upon him completely out of the blue; that is to say, he does not take himself to be working on music, it is simply that ‘notes "swim into his ken"’ and he writes them down. We are to understand, then, that Mozart has not been thinking about music at all before his ideas come. And we surely want to say that Mozart was creative. Thus it seems that the creative thought-process is not essential to the creation: one can simply be struck by an idea, then convert it into a reality. The whole creative mental process is therefore not necessary to the creation, so it appears. Hospers’ tale recalls the Platonic notion that creativity is a godly gift, that creative ideas are planted fully-formed into men’s minds by divine action. Importantly, there is an intuition that if our ideas have a divine source then we are not truly creative: being the wholly unwitting recipient of an involuntary idea unrelated to one’s thought-processes hitherto does not seem to constitute a manifestation of human creativity. This intuition is correct, and is the reason why we must reject Hospers’ description of Mozart. It is not true that Mozart has not thought about music at the time of having his musical idea. Mozart is, takes himself to be, a composer. The state of his life at the time of his report is that he has an overall project to produce new musical compositions. It is against this backdrop that his musical ideas come to him. He may not consider that he is working on the ‘problem’7 of a particular new composition when an idea comes, because he is not conscious of thinking about composing music at that moment. But nonetheless the general state of his life-project suffices for us to regard him, in a broad sense, as working on new music. So it is not true that musical ideas occur to Mozart without relevant prior thought. It is only that there may be a considerable gap between his consciously entering into the project to compose new music and the actual occurrence of particular ideas, due to the overarching and ongoing nature of his musiccomposing project. What about Mozart’s very first musical idea? We may imagine him as a child, still unaware of his musical aptitude. The first time a set of notes ‘swims into his ken’ can we not be sure that he is not, and has never taken himself to be, working on music? The problem is that this case is difficult to imagine. It seems a more likely account of the young Mozart’s introduction to musical composition that he was exposed to music at some point in his early childhood, enjoyed it, and began to think about it more or less consciously. 8 We may then more easily imagine that sets of notes begin to present themselves to him, the discovery of his aptitude, and so on. But in this case it is again not true that musical ideas occur to Mozart without prior thought on his part. On Hospers’ behalf we might insist on describing a counterfactual situation where the young Mozart is simply struck by music, without ever hearing a note played, and without thinking about music previously. Perhaps this is possible. But now what happens is better understood as Mozart’s discovery of music (and his musical talent) rather than its creative production. If Mozart’s first contact with music is finding notes, already pre-organised, in his mind, it does not seem appropriate to say he has been creative if he writes them down, or that this set of notes manifests his creativity. There is the feeling here that Mozart does not yet know what music is, and so he cannot know what it is that has arrived in his mind. But then he can hardly be credited with creatively producing something which he knows not what it is. This sort of 7 This is a broad sense of ‘problem’, which can include cases of artistic creation: in this sense the problem may be what sort of brushstroke to apply in that spot, and in which colour. Hospers notes that Dewey's "five steps in solving problems" ‘have sometimes been applied to the arts, and variants of these have sometimes been employed as accounts of what goes on in artistic creation.’ (1985: 251). 8 Indeed this is known to have been the course of things—Mozart’s father was a notable musician, who inculcated his son into musical life. 3 description belongs with Plato’s godly gift, not with human creativity. It appears, therefore, that there is a crucial element of awareness to creativity: when one creates in a field, one must have consciously engaged with that field already, and one must have done some thinking about it. We return to this important idea in the final section. Meanwhile, we may conclude that Hospers’ Mozart provides no counterexample to the dependence of the creation on the creative mental process. Carruthers’ Charlie Parker example also purports to show that the creative product does not require the entire creative mental process. Parker’s saxophone improvisation was famed for its extraordinary speed. Carruthers claims there is insufficient time for Parker to consider the idea of every new note he plays: he cannot be having creative ideas corresponding to each note he is about to produce, ideas which he evaluates and approves before playing. Parker simply plays. This is also how we experience things when improvising. Consider playing tennis, for example. One sometimes has time to mentally evaluate the effectiveness of a possible shot, but not always. Sometimes one just strains sinews and hits the ball, without any real prior conception of what is about to happen: you just play. Still, these kinds of improvisation can surely be creative.9 Carruthers concludes that the connection between the creative idea—the mental embodiment of the creative solution, apprehended in the Aha! moment—and the creative product is looser than traditionally held. A cognitive process can issue directly in creative action, it appears, without prior conscious recognition or endorsement of the solution by the creator. Note that Carruthers’ threat to the claimed dependence of the creation on the creative mental process differs from that of Hospers’ Mozart. For Hospers, Mozart shows that no relevant thought-process need precede the creative idea, and nonetheless a creative product can result. Carruthers, though, need not deny that Parker is thinking about what he is doing—he is after all aware that he is improvising on the saxophone, and we can certainly take him to be willing the next steps in the improvisation to come to him. What is allegedly missing from Parker’s case is the creative idea: his putatively creative process goes straight from the thoughtprocess to the creative product, his playing the notes, without conscious apprehension of an idea of the creation, without any Aha! moment. We can however resist Carruthers’ strong conclusion, that the creative idea can go entirely missing from the creative process. He may be correct that there exist cases where no Aha! moment precedes creative production, but that does not show that no Aha! moment happens, nor that the occurrence of such a moment is not essential to the creative product. I imagine that in the sort of example Carruthers is concerned with, the Aha! moment can only take place as or after the solution is put into action. Parker might well feel an ongoing, fleeting, satisfaction with the improvisations he produces; he recognises what he is doing as successful jazz-playing. Likewise, when playing tennis, we are able to take the time to recognise that this is a great shot as the ball is flying down the line. So the Aha! moment need not be absent from such cases, although it may not perhaps occur when we conventionally think it does. The remaining question, therefore, is whether a process could count as creative if it did not contain an Aha! moment at any stage. So we must imagine Parker rather mechanically ploughing through his improvisations, without ever recognising that these are good and inventive variations on the musical theme. And we must imagine a John McEnroe thoughtlessly producing shot after magical shot, without any conscious recognition that these are effective solutions to the problems presented to him by his opponent. Can someone be creative when she is, as it were, completely on autopilot? In the final section I reject this possibility, arguing that conscious recognition of the effectiveness of one’s solution is an 9 I assume creative play is possible in tennis. 4 essential component of being creative. For now we can note that Carruthers’ counterexample is not decisive: for Carruthers does not show that the creative idea can be entirely absent from the creative process, just that conscious apprehension of the idea may sometimes occur only after production. We can therefore retain the thesis that the entire creative mental process is essential to the creative product, although it is to be further explicated and defended in the final section. Given the necessity of the creative mental process to the creative product, the next point to observe is that the creative mental process is all that is required for creativity. A physical product is strictly irrelevant to whether creativity obtains. This contradicts the traditional analysis, which defines creativity in terms of the properties of the ‘work’ or ‘artefact’ (c.f. the quote from Kronfelder above). To see this point, imagine that my designer friend went through all the stages of creativity up to evaluating her idea, but unfortunately, for whichever reason, was never able to put the idea into physical form, or even to write it down as a design. Would we say in this case that she had fallen short of creativity? We would not. Her mental process as specified clearly exhibits creativity, and she appears no less creative as such under this scenario than in the actual case where she does happen to be able to manufacture her product. In this counterfactual scenario she is merely unlucky: there is some contingent reason why she cannot translate her creativity into a physical product. It simply cannot be that a contingent blocking of the creative idea’s translation into the creative work evaporates all the creativity that preceded this mishap. Thus the creative mental process is sufficient for creativity; it is immaterial whether or not creativity leaves behind a material (extra-mental) product. The proof of this conceptual point is if we can imagine a world where the creative mental processes of the inhabitants are never converted into physical form: nothing gets made in this world. Perhaps the inhabitants are too cerebral, or too lazy, to bother to turn their good ideas into good works, despite being aware of the benefits the resulting artefacts would confer. Can we coherently imagine that the inhabitants are, nonetheless, creative beings? Surely we can. After all, some entrepreneurial alien might stumble across our lazy creatives and steal their ideas, manufacturing them and bringing them to market to great profit. It can scarcely be said that the lazy thinkers are creative in the scenario where the entrepreneur happens upon them, just because works are produced, but not otherwise. Nor is it plausible that all the creativity lies with the appropriator if and only if he steals their ideas. The thinkers are surely creative in their own right whatever else goes on after they have done their thinking. This confirms that works are not essential to creativity.10 We can of course preserve the creative product, by simply identifying it with the creative idea. This is particularly appropriate to the sort of creativity involved in philosophical theorising, for instance. When one sees the solution to some philosophical difficulty, there is nothing further one needs to produce in order to fully realise the idea. One may need to write the idea down to communicate it to others, but the idea, as a mental item, is itself the solution, the creative product, in this case. We can also accommodate artistic creativity under this conception: Mozart apparently composed entire symphonies in his head, and here is Hospers’ description of poetic composition ‘A poet, let us say, finds that some words suddenly pop into his mind…Then he thinks of some more words, combines them, selects, rejects, adds, and so on, all this without ever setting pen to paper. But when he has finished this process to his satisfaction, hasn't he created a poem?’11 The point against the traditional analysis can then be put by saying that no physical (i.e. extra-mental) product need be the result of 10 Hospers agrees: ‘creative activity may, but need not, result in the existence of a product which is made’ (1985: 245). 11 Ibid: 246. 5 creativity, or that creativity stops with the advent of the creative idea. This means that the creativity we ascribe to works is strictly derivative. Can we trim the creative process further? Could either the creative thought-process or the creative idea alone constitute an instance of creativity? It appears not. Imagine a thoughtprocess that never gave rise to a creative idea. The thinker worked on a problem, incubated it, but no answer occurred to her. Clearly this would be an unsuccessful thought-process, and it would not have managed to be creative, because it failed to yield any creative idea. In the absence of such an idea, in what could the creativity of this thought-process be said to consist? There is no plausible answer to this question. Therefore the genuinely creative thought-process requires the creative idea as upshot. Consider next the creative idea: We earlier examined a case where an idea comes into existence without being caused by a creative thought-process, this was where my friend’s chef-counterpart hits her head and is struck by the design of the home smear-test kit. But this was not a case of creativity, we said, just an example of fluke discovery. No-one interested in investigating the cognitive basis of creativity would want to study this chef. Therefore the creative idea requires the creative thought-process behind it. These two elements are in symbiosis—neither can properly exist without the other. And together they constitute the core of creativity: our discussion has shown that the creative mental process—the creative thought-process plus creative idea—is necessary and sufficient for creativity. We have now delineated the ontological contours of creativity. But many questions remain. So let us proceed to a discussion of further features of the traditional analysis. Novelty It is widely held that creativity implies novelty. But novelty for whom? We may ask, first, whether a creative idea must be novel for society. Must it be something never before thought of by anybody? It is true that we think of as most creative those geniuses whose ideas involve a great departure from what preceded them. But it cannot be that historical novelty (novelty with respect to everyone, at all times) is essential to creativity. If Kate develops an idea, but unbeknownst to her it was devised by someone else long ago, we need not take that to count against Kate’s creativity. Even if her creative mental process is only creative for her, it is creative nonetheless. Here we agree with Boden that what she labels ‘psychological creativity’ is creativity worthy of the name—as opposed to historical creativity, where something is psychologically creative and has not been conceived of before. Boden and Kronfelder affirm that psychological creativity is the fundamental notion, due to the asymmetry between psychological and historical creativity—viz., anything historically creative must be psychologically creative for the creator (if it has never been created before, it has never been created by her before) but not vice-versa (the psychological novelty of someone’s creation does not guarantee that it has not been conceived of before). I agree with Boden and Kronfelder, but I fear we cannot utilise this asymmetry as they do, to ground the primacy of psychological (or personal) creativity, since only if psychological creativity is viable in the first place can we note the asymmetry with historical creativity. If a hardliner insisted that historical creativity was essential for creativity per se, Boden and Kronfelder’s reasoning would not move him, for it assumes what he rejects—a variety of non-historical creativity. I will make the case for psychological creativity by returning to Kate. The only difference to her scenario that would make Kate’s idea historically novel (thus historically creative) would be if a certain other person had not previously had the same thought. But Kate’s mental process is insensitive to whether this previous person ever existed, or had the idea—for Kate 6 is unaware of this previous person and their creation. She has had to do the thinking and the work to develop her idea from scratch. Since the mental process that terminates in her idea would have the same intrinsic properties whether or not the previous creator existed, we should conclude that it has the same amount of creativity in both cases. Thus Kate is perfectly creative even if she is, unknowingly, re-inventing the wheel.12 To sharpen this point: if someone claims that to be creative an idea must not have been thought of before by anybody, then we are at conceptual risk, at least, of discovering that there exists no human creativity, because all our inventions were thought up by long-dead Martians, or because they exist in the mind of God, or somesuch. But we would be loath to give up human creativity in the face of these possibilities. Hence we may dismiss the claim that a creation must not have been thought of before by anybody, that only historical creativity is bona fide. It remains to ascertain whether the creative idea must be novel with respect to the creator, regardless of whether it happens to have been entertained by another mind previously: is psychological novelty necessary for psychological creativity? What is clear is that if the would-be creator knowingly forms her idea by adhering to a previous model, even a model of her own earlier devising, then she is not, on this occasion, being creative. Must it be true, however, that the thinker has in fact never had the idea before? No: Imagine that an inventor produces a by-all-accounts fabulously creative solution to some problem, then suffers amnesia. Having regained his faculties, the inventor unknowingly re-traces his steps and reinvents his device. It seems we would say that he was still being creative the second time around; for he does not copy what he did the first time, and he conducts just the same activity that we previously regarded as creative and on the same basis, i.e. starting from the same psychological point. It does not seem that we can hold it against the creativity of his recent mental process simply that it occurred previously, not when the earlier thought-process exerts no causal influence over the later type-identical one. If having occurred previously sufficed to rob a mental process of its creativity, we would be forced to reject the viability of psychological creativity, defended above. Hence, either we accept that psychological novelty is not necessary for psychological creativity, or we must go back to the thesis that only historical creativity is creativity proper. We should embrace the former option, for the reasons provided. What (psychological) creativity requires, therefore, is not that someone conceives of something novel, but only that they not knowingly follow an existing model. Thus we leave open the possibility that somebody might repeat the same creative process over and over, each time equally creatively, provided only that she does not recall having done it before and does not base what she is presently doing on what she previously did. This fits with Kronfelder’s proposal that creativity excludes copying, in the sense of a causal influence on the current mental process of an existing model. What Kronfelder ignores is that somebody (e.g. an Alzheimer’s sufferer) might break the relevant causal connection even with an idea that same person has developed before. By acknowledging this possibility we also refute Boden’s necessary condition for creativity, that ‘the person in whose mind [the creative idea] arises could not (in the relevant sense of ‘could not’) have had it before’. 13 Intuitively, copying is incompatible with creativity since if you copy a solution you are not doing the work of mentally generating that solution yourself, whereas creativity seems close to the notion of mentally generating a solution oneself. But this is work an individual may do again and again, if memory does not serve her. 12 Hospers agrees (1985: 246). He takes no stand on the necessity of psychological novelty to psychological creativity, which I question below. 13 1994a: 76. 7 One further question concerning novelty. We have seen that novelty is not necessary for creativity. But is it sufficient? Is any original idea ipso facto creative? I side with Nanay in denying this. In support consider this example: Someone counts up to a number no human being has counted up to previously. The thought of this incredibly high number would be a novel one, but it, along with the process leading to it, would not thereby count as creative. That is because the thinker has merely followed a mechanical procedure for arriving at something new. Creativity requires some form of ‘leap’ of thought, it seems. We discuss this feature shortly, in the section on surprise. Value Must the result of creativity be useful or valuable? As before we can interrogate the proposal’s scope: is it value to the individual at issue, or value to society? It must be societal value that is implicated. For if the requirement were only that a creative idea be valuable to the creator, that requirement would be too easily satisfied, since we often value our ideas just because they are ours. Conversely, a creative idea may not be valued at all by its creator (perhaps she is excessively self-deprecating) despite attracting wider acclaim. However we should reject the requirement that a creative idea be valuable to society. The reason is that this renders creativity extrinsic: it ceases to be a question of whether a given individual is creative in her own right, a question concerning the creativity or not of her mental processes. Instead the question we have to ask becomes society-relative: the same individual might count as creative in respect of a given mental process in one society, but not in another, due to her idea being valued in the former but not in the latter. I suggest this is an unwelcome result, although I have no knockdown argument for this conclusion. Perhaps the reader will agree with Weisberg that the following description is absurd: Mendel did not become creative until his work was discovered and found by the field of biology to be valuable. Conversely, if one's work loses its positive evaluation, the creativity of the work and the creator decrease as well. A complex example of change in evaluation is that of J. S. Bach, whose work was valued when he was alive, ignored after his death for some 50 years, and then once again became positively valued.14 Being creative, it seems reasonable to suggest, is not like being fashionable. Given a certain intrinsic base, a particular outfit, one may find oneself in fashion in this place at this time, and out of fashion in the same place at another time, or in another place at any time. Scientists interested in the workings of human beings, body and mind, are unlikely to take up the study of what makes certain people fashionable. It is not that this is not an interesting question; it is one anthropologists might naturally want to pursue, for instance. The reason is that there is little understanding of what it is to be in fashion that could be gleaned from studying individual human beings: how they are built, what their capacities are, and so on. This is not to deny that the intrinsic make-up and capacities of a human being bear on whether she is in fashion: these factors help determine her choice in wardrobe, and she may need to be perceptive enough to notice what the prevailing trend is, or will be. But the ultimate decider of whether even the perceptive person is in fashion are just certain matters going on outside of her—some combination of the developing customs and judgements of others, what occurs on catwalks and in magazines across the globe, what young people are wearing, etc. Because what ultimately settles whether our individual is in fashion are these extrinsic factors, there is relatively little to be learnt about her sheer fashionability (as opposed to the inner 14 Weisberg 1994: 556. See also his 1993. 8 determinants of her choice of clothes) from study of that individual and her workings, body and mind. If creativity were an extrinsic property like fashionability, it follows, it could not possibly be the topic of interest that it actually is to psychologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and philosophers, all of whom are interested in the mind and its mechanisms. The conclusion to draw is that creativity is an intrinsic property of the individual, specifically concerning her mental processes. That is why it makes sense to study creative individuals in order to understand the basis of creativity, as researchers in fact do. A thought-experiment to test the intrinsicness claim: Imagine that our most brilliantly creative mind, someone who has produced a multitude of inventions or mathematical solutions or what have you, is transported to an alien civilisation (or into the future, if you prefer) where such ability is commonplace; everybody has at least as much creative capacity: moreover, far better versions of our creator’s innovations exist. Would any of this make our man less creative in his own right? It does not seem that it would. We would say, perhaps, that this man no longer counts as a genius in the new culture, and is no longer such an original thinker. But his ability to thoughtfully produce ideas is in no way impinged—his creative faculty remains in perfect operation. The culture we are envisaging would just be one where everyone was remarkably creative, including our newcomer. If this is right, then creativity attaches to individuals as such, and it is an intrinsic affair. Thus there is no need to settle whether an idea is valuable to society in order to ascertain its creativity; that is merely an incidental further matter. Nevertheless it is widely held that creative ideas are socially valuable. The concept of creativity, according to Boden, ‘implies positive evaluation’15 so that ‘positive evaluation should be explicitly mentioned in definitions of creativity’.16 Yet we can hear the words ‘That is a creative, if ultimately useless, idea’ perfectly well, without hint of contradiction. Imagine a car-manufacturer canvassing solutions for an engineering problem: perhaps the challenge is how to cool the engine of a new model. One designer develops an imaginative solution, but the mechanism will not fit the engine-cavity the manufacturer envisages for the chassis. The proposal is creative, but ultimately useless, because it cannot be implemented. Since this example is coherent, a creative idea need not be useful. Further support comes from the following case: if some new solution to a problem is just now produced, but a better solution was adopted only minutes ago unbeknownst to the developer of the present idea, that should not undermine the creativity of his idea, even though it is redundant. It would seem perverse if what happened a few minutes ago and completely outside the ambit of this individual affected the question of his creativity. What may be true, perhaps this is the grain of truth in the widespread intuition concerning the connection between value and creativity, is that the creative thinker at least needs to be aiming at providing a useful or valuable idea. This suggestion goes with the notion that when we think creatively we are trying to solve a problem, and it rules out the troublesome freeassociation of schizophrenics (Weisberg says this is the reason for the value criterion). My proposal is that the term ‘creative’ qualifies a thought-process and its outcome—the outcome being creative because it is the product of the creative thought-process, and the creativity of the thought-process deriving from production of the idea. This is the intrinsic view. Creativity, whatever it is, does not depend on usefulness to wider society. Boden claims if we made this concession ‘we could not claim to be studying what the layman means by "creativity."’17 But I cannot see that value is built into the folk-concept of creativity. 15 16 1998: 354. 1994b: 520. 17 1994b: 559. 9 Something can be creative and diabolical, like the invention of an ingenious torturecontraption; similarly, it seems that something might be creative but value-less. Creativity and value are independent variables.18 Before leaving this section I want to consider one attempt to avoid the criticism we pressed above, that the value criterion renders creativity an unacceptably relative affair. Novitz observes that ‘What is of real value under one set of conditions can, of course, have no value at all under other conditions.’ accepting that ‘It follows from this that what is properly described as creative changes from one set of circumstances to another.’19 He tries to forestall the objection that this renders creativity relative through a distinction between ‘(a) the fact that the real value of an act depends on circumstances’ and ‘(b) the supposed fact that the real value of an act depends on the value ascribed to it in any given social circumstance.’ 20 What Novitz has in mind is the difference between something providing real benefit to society independently of what anyone thinks or says (e.g. the creation of a vaccine), and values whose existence consists in their being ascribed (e.g. the conferring of a knighthood by the Queen). Novitz’s reply to the relativity objection is that if the value of episodes of creativity were of the latter variety, then creativity would indeed be unacceptably relative. But since he construes the value of creativity as ‘real value’, i.e. objective social benefit, Novitz believes his account does not imply relativity. But this is mistaken, as the nuclear bomb case demonstrates. This invention proved valuable to one population, by ending a war, but also harmful to another population, because it caused thousands of deaths. So the bomb provides ‘real value’ to the population that wields it against its enemy, nevertheless it is extremely harmful, hence negatively valuable, to the recipient population. This fact is independent of anybody’s ascriptions of value to the bomb or to anything it causes. Hence according to Novitz’s account creativity remains a relative affair—since the bomb is valuable, and so possibly creative, according to one society and not so according to another. Novitz acknowledges as ‘untenable’21 the verdict that the bomb was and was not creative. He attempts to solve the problem by re-casting his value criterion as the requirement that a creation be intended to benefit society. This helps with the bomb case since, according to Novitz, the primary intention of the bomb’s creators was to end the war and preserve the freeworld. By contrast, slaying thousands of Japanese was ‘at best secondary—a conceptually unavoidable consequence of entertaining the primary…beneficial aim.’22 This description is distasteful, but also logically objectionable. There is no genuine distinction to be drawn between the inventors’ intention to end the war and their intention to kill lots of the enemy, since the very means via which the bomb was designed to end the war was by killing large numbers of people. These two factors are not separable, in the event. Thus even if we consider its inventors’ intentions we are forced to conclude that the bomb was and was not of value. Overall, Novitz cannot account for the undoubted (though perhaps regrettable) creativity behind the invention of the nuclear bomb. By insisting on the value criterion, Novitz implies that the bomb was and was not creative, or was creative in this place but not in that place. That is why we must jettison the value criterion. 18 I find one author who agrees with me. Murray says creation is ‘a process which results in something new… regardless of its value, destiny, or consequences.' (1959: 99, emphasis mine). Of course we disagree regarding novelty. 19 1999: 80. 20 Ibid. 21 1999: 79. 22 Ibid. 10 Surprise We have seen that, against the traditional analysis, creativity requires no physical product, nor must a creative idea be novel, nor valuable. It may well be, however, that refined versions of the traditional attributes survive: we noted that while no physical (extra-mental) product is necessary, a product of creativity in the form of an idea is essential. We also saw that while the creative idea need not ultimately be valuable, the creator must take herself to be trying to devise something of value or relevance. Similarly, the novelty criterion survives in the observation that a creator must not knowingly draw from existing sources, and there must not be a causal connection23 between extant models and what is now created. In each case what has occurred is largely a restriction of an apparently objective criterion to the mental domain: an inner vestige of each element of the traditional analysis survives. We await further elucidation of these internal/mental features in the final section. Meanwhile, one element of the traditional analysis remains to be considered: the notion that the creative idea is surprising, or unexpected, or otherwise out of our control. If the trend of our investigation continues, namely that apparently objective, mind-independent criteria are found to collapse into mental counterparts, we can expect the spontaneity criterion, uniquely, to persist unscathed, since it is already framed in mentalistic terms. One feature that makes creativity fascinating is its tendency to visit us in an unexpected flash, the Aha! moment when you suddenly see the answer to the problem, or an idea occurs to you that never before seemed a possibility. When the flash comes, it is a flash because you are not currently thinking about the problem. The answer just suddenly ‘bubbles up’ from somewhere. So what was going on before the idea came? This is a puzzle. It makes creativity fascinating, but also threatens to push us towards mysterianism or simply giving up hope of understanding the phenomenon. It was the spontaneous nature of creative ideas that led Plato to declare them divine inspiration. Before examining the puzzle, we should ask whether this is an essential feature of creativity. Must the creative idea arrive without warning? Let us try to imagine a counterexample: Someone has a certain problem in mind, and carefully, methodically, works towards the solution. So that there is no ‘leap’, no unexpectedness to the answer’s arrival, we must imagine that the shadow of the answer is present in some of the steps of thought leading to it—the thinker glimpses the way things will turn out even before he gets to the end. It is hard to imagine such a case: perhaps we can think of someone steadily solving a complex mathematical equation. Or perhaps a better example is a join-the-dots picture, where at a certain point one can see from the layout of the dots what the final image will be. Intuitively, such processes are not creative ones. It is hard to say in a principled way why this is, but it certainly feels to be so. If this feeling is correct, then the spontaneity of the creative idea is indeed necessary. On this we find ourselves agreeing with the traditional account, and writers like Nanay, who says creativity is something that ‘happens to us’, Kronfeldner, and Hausman, who says ‘the creative act is discontinuous. It includes at one or more of its stages a break with the constraints that prior intelligibility imposed on the creator.’24 Some brief remarks concerning the necessity of spontaneity to creativity: Clearly, the solution which the creative idea embodies cannot be known to the creator as he begins his mental work. For then there is nothing to be devised, and no creativity can occur. Creativity 23 Though of what exact kind, we do not know. Kronfelder rules out ‘the causal influence of an original (directly or via a model for action)’ (2009: 585) on the creative idea, but is no more specific than this. I leave the question of the nature of the illicit causal connection untouched. 24 1979: 245. 11 involves being without an answer and coming up with one. Nor can the solution be present to the creator’s mind except at the end of the creative process. This is, in one way, a trivial point: since at whichever stage the solution occurs to the thinker, this ipso facto constitutes the terminus of the creative work, especially in light of our identification of the creative process with the creative mental process. So far the account lacks the resources to discount either mathematical deduction or joining-the-dots as creative. What separates such cases? It must be the sense that in these examples the solution already exists, it is ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered as opposed to created. The answer to the equation in a sense already exists, the image whose dots are to be joined likewise. Now, somebody might object that in cases of what we consider genuine creativity the answer exists no less independently of the creator—it is there to be found. It seems we are forced to retort that if this is truly the situation then strictly speaking there is no creativity, merely a more or less long-winded mental process of discovering pre-existing ideas. To preserve creativity, we must maintain that it is possible really to produce ideas, as opposed to finding them.25 Turning now to the putative mystery of creativity’s spontaneity: Stokes has an appealing account of the cognitive processes underlying the Aha! moment. According to him it seems likely that when we consciously concentrate on a problem a relatively small set of neurallyassociated circuits are intensely activated, for when concentrating we are usually thinking through some specific possible avenue of solution. Then we forget the problem: the phone rings, or the baby cries; life demands our attention. The puzzle does not go away, however; instead it becomes the focus of more widespread, weaker, activations of associated neural circuits: incubation. This is the brain in effect, rather mechanically, trying out, ‘sifting through’, different possible combinations in search of a solution. Later, when conscious attention again drifts in the direction of the difficulty, it may find the solution waiting for it in the cognitive wings, and ‘Aha!’; there it is, quite mysteriously from the point of view of the subject’s conscious life. We can compare this story to the process David Bowie used in the 1960’s to write lyrics. Bowie would take hundreds of pieces of paper with a single word or phrase on each and would throw them into the air. When they fell he would look over the pile of jumbled words on his floor, waiting for inspirational combinations to catch his eye. Here we have again a non-conscious mechanical sifting phase followed by conscious selection and endorsement: for those sympathetic to the idea of extended cognition, Bowie was in effect outsourcing some of his cognition to the shuffling of the pieces of paper.26 Stokes’ account of the element of surprise attaching to creativity possesses a satisfying quality, 27 though it raises a question—one Stokes dismisses, but which I find important: 28 Is the creative act completed by the unconscious sifting phase, so that we come upon something that has already been creatively produced when we have our Aha! moment? Or should we say that what makes the mental process, including non-conscious elements, truly creative is the seal of approval consciousness provides in the Aha! moment? Is this conscious experience integral to creativity as such? Next I attempt to settle this question. Creativity and Consciousness 25 We earlier allowed a thinker to be creative if she produces an idea that was entertained by a previous thinker (including herself) so long as copying is not involved. What supports the intuition that creativity is possible in such cases is that the reproducer does not arrive at the same token idea as was previously produced, but only one of the same type. She produces something all her own, that happens to resemble what went before. 26 See Clark and Chalmers 1998 for an influential argument for extended cognition. 27 It might remind us of Poincare, who talked of our ideas being like hooked Epicurean atoms, flurrying about and latching on to one another. By our account, of course, this does not detract from the creativity of Stokes’ explanation. 28 And which we encountered earlier when considering mechanical Parker and McEnroe. 12 By consciousness I mean ‘phenomenal consciousness’, distinguished from mere cognitive awareness, i.e. availability of mental states for report or to inform action.29 Phenomenal consciousness comprises such episodes as sensations and feelings—proprioception of one’s body, sensations of taste, colour etc., and more complex experiential states like overall mood. Nagel famously said that a creature is (phenomenally) conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be that creature, something it is like for the creature.30 The question facing us, therefore, is whether there obtains any particular connection between creativity and phenomenal consciousness. Is there anything one must feel when creating, is there a defining ‘creative conscious experience’? Nanay claims that ‘a mental process is creative if and only if it produces an idea that is veridically experienced as something we have not thought to be possible before and… something we have not learned from someone else.’31 Nanay’s criterion complements our discussion in two respects: First, Nanay agrees that mental processes count as creative in the first instance, not works. Second, he does not require the creator to veridically feel that she has produced an historically novel idea, only that it feel novel for her, plus not copied from someone else, and that this be true. Nevertheless, Nanay’s criterion is too strong. It is possible to be creative without feeling one has realised a possibility hitherto unseen (by one). Imagine somebody struck by an astoundingly novel solution to a problem she has been considering, a person whom everyone praises as a creative genius, yet this poor inventor has the persistent feeling of having developed the same idea some time ago, and believes those around her are only humouring her by lauding her creativity, whereas she is in reality just rehashing her previous mental process. In fact this sensation of unoriginality with respect to her past self is a manifestation of her excessively self-deprecating nature, and the idea is indeed a new one. She is creative, undoubtedly, but she lacks Nanay’s sensation of having uncovered something previously unthought by herself.32 Her feeling, mistakenly, is effectively one of having copied from her past self.33 Nanay’s veridicality component is also problematic. Recall our amnesiac inventor. When he unwittingly re-creates his invention he may well feel he has developed something previously unthought by himself. But of course he is wrong: he invented the same item before getting amnesia. So his sensation is not veridical. According to Nanay he is not creative, therefore. But we previously agreed that he is creative, because, roughly, he is not knowingly drawing from a pre-existing pattern in devising his present solution. Nanay’s account must be rejected. But he is correct to seek criteria for creativity in terms of consciousness, for what our investigation has led us inexorably towards is internalisation of the conditions for creativity. We found that the traditional criteria for creativity, understood as a faculty for producing novel and valuable works which are unexpected, have, under analysis, left behind only mentalised vestiges. Moreover, what has seemed increasingly important is what the creator takes himself to be doing when he engages in the creative process; that is, how he consciously represents to himself what he is up to. If that is the decisive factor for creativity in a given instance, this chimes with our thesis that creativity 29 30 See Block 1997. Nagel 1974. 31 Nanay forthcoming: 6-7. 32 On our account it would not matter to this inventor’s creativity if she were in fact repeating a past mental process, as long as she was not using it as a model. 33 According to Hospers ‘so much…unconscious activity goes on without the artist's conscious cooperation that it has seemed to many creative artists that they were mere copyists, that they were passive vessels in the grip of a superior power who dictated their creative activities.’ (1985: 248). These creators also lack Nanay’s sensation of having uncovered something novel and uncopied. 13 requires to be understood as an intrinsic feature of the individual’s mental process. Thus all roads seem to lead to characterising creativity via the state of consciousness that accompanies it. Accordingly, let me now propose a consciousness-based necessary condition for creativity —a way creativity must feel in order to be the genuine article. To illustrate, I will revisit Bowie’s lyric-writing technique. To remind, he would throw hundreds of pieces of paper into the air, each carrying a word or phrase, and then would look over the fallen pile of words, hunting for striking combinations. When the pieces of paper have fallen, once all the random combinations are generated, the answer to Bowie’s problem—if there is one—is already present: it is somewhere in the pile. The answer, in this sense, has already been created. But the creative process is not complete until and unless Bowie peruses the combinations and consciously endorses one of them. He must see a certain production of the random sifting, and it must strike him as exactly what he is looking for, or as singularly appropriate to his problem-space or as just right. Until and unless this happens there is nothing that singles this particular combination of words out as the creative solution. Even the mere (mechanical) employment of a solution will not suffice for creativity, so long as the agent is not conscious of what he is doing as the solution. For nothing is known to be being done in such a case, if the agent is only on autopilot. Consequently the agent, himself, cannot be said to be genuinely addressing the problem he began the creative process by engaging with. It is consciousness, before or after the solution comes into existence, which constitutes the required selection of the solution as such; this is essential to the idea that the agent is creatively responsible for that solution.34 This sort of conscious experience corresponds closely to the traditional conception of the Aha! moment, except that I have disagreed with other authors that the creative idea must be experienced as novel. All that is really needed is that the idea be consciously perceived as the, or an, answer: it is experienced as a key with which to open the tricky lock under investigation. Of course, this feeling of finding a solution must be veridical—you take yourself to have found a solution and indeed you have.35 That, again, rules out schizophrenic free-association as creative. Importantly, this veridicality component is not the same as the requirement that your idea be objectively valuable. The present requirement is only that you correctly apprehend the relevance of your idea to the problem at hand. Perhaps this is what certain authors have been getting at who propose that the creative idea is appropriate in some sense. But that proposal is unsatisfactory as it stands: for it would not matter that an idea was appropriate to a given problem-space if its producer did not apprehend it as such. If someone devises a solution to a problem but does not apprehend it as a solution, then somebody else sees the relevance of the idea and applies it, the better part of the creativity in this case attaches to the perceptive applier.36 Thus the ‘consciousness element’ is paramount. The condition just bruited is necessary, but not sufficient: it is insufficient for creativity to see (veridically) that this is the answer to some problem. For we can have this sensation if the idea merely came to us via a bump on the head. For this feeling to signal the end of a genuinely creative process the thinker must have been working on the problem in the first place.37 This means there must have been a consciously instigated search by the agent within a problem-space, and some attempt at thinking about (and/or incubating) the solution. So here perhaps we have jointly necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of consciousness: the creative process is consciously instigated, and consciously approved—consciousness has the 34 35 This constitutes our response to the mechanical Parker/McEnroe cases. Thus there is an unavoidably external element to ascriptions of creativity. 36 This point echoes Novitz’s Strangelove case. (1999: 79) 37 C.f. the discussion of Hospers’ Mozart above. 14 first and last word on the process. What comes in between is a more or less mechanical phase of option-generation: incubation of one form or another. If consciousness is essential to creativity does this preclude the possibility of machine creativity? The issue boils down to the difficult question of whether machines can be conscious. I do not know. There seems no doubt, however, that even non-conscious machines can be valuable components of the creative process by assisting with the mechanical-sifting phase. Perhaps in such cases, as suggested by the Bowie example, the creative mental process comprises a loop stretching from the creator’s head, into the environment and through whichever device he employs to generate solutions, and back again to final conscious endorsement of the answer. This would constitute an interesting new manifestation of extended cognition if so. How does this attempt to capture creativity via consciousness relate to the mental features we earlier found to characterise the creative process? Recall that a creator must be attempting to devise something of value or relevance, must not be copying from a model, and her idea must come to her spontaneously. These features are all implied by the present account. We said that the creator must consciously engage with a problem-space: this ensures she is attempting to produce something of value or relevance. The inclusion of the mechanical-sifting phase and conscious apprehension of the solution guarantee that copying has not occurred: for if one is copying a model, even unconsciously, there is no need for a phase of sifting possible solutions, nor will a solution strike one (phenomenologically) as such, since one already knows of the solution on some level. Finally, spontaneity is entailed by the whole tri-partite process: since one is not copying from a model, the solution which consciousness apprehends, generated by unconscious cognitive sifting, will be unexpected; for one did not enter the problem-space possessing it, and the mechanism by which it arises is opaque to consciousness. Our account faces an obvious objection, however. The objection is that our criteria are too easily satisfied, and therefore entail an excess of creativity in the world. Very many human actions, it may be said, are solutions within a problem-space that is consciously approached and where the solution is consciously endorsed or apprehended as such. Thus according to our account a vast swathe of human actions will count as creative in respect of the mental processes behind them. This, the objection continues, is far too much creativity: we thereby risk losing sight of the special nature of the phenomenon, that rare quality which attracted our attention in the first place. We have erred, the objection concludes, if we end up saying that the brush-stroke of the amateur and that of Picasso are on a par as regards creativity. This objection is confused, but the confusion is an instructive one; identifying it helps us to see why so many have attempted to understand creativity in relation to such things as originality and value, which we have discovered to be inessential to creativity properly delineated. It seems a fair paraphrase of the objection that we do not want an account of creativity which fails to distinguish the creative genius from the average person, even if it allows, as any account should, that the latter is creative in some measure during his life. But our account might seem to lump these two sorts of individual together. Hence it is to be rejected. The beginning of a response on behalf of our account is to note that the phrase ‘creative genius’ is ambiguous. On one reading, the creative genius is someone who creates things (or ideas) of genius. That is to say, he may be no more creative than the average person in terms of the quantity of items he produces, he is not creative on more occasions than the average 15 individual, but the items he produces are exceptional. What does it mean that they are exceptional? It is here that the concepts of originality and value properly enter the scene. For one thing exceptional works of genius will be of surpassingly high quality, i.e. they will be highly-valued by people, compared to other examples of work within the field. The work of genius is also practically guaranteed to be of startling novelty or originality: part of the concept of genius is of that creator who is able through her own power to open up a radical breach with what went before, and to leap to the other side of that breach, there to look back upon us mere mortals. Our account of creativity accommodates this reading of ‘creative genius’. It is not, strictly speaking, that the creative genius is more creative than the average person. Rather her genius lies in the quality of what she creates. She is a creator of genius, rather than a genius in respect of her creativity. This interpretation is supported by considering the case of someone who has but one idea of genius in her lifetime because that life is cut short: she is only able to create one thing before she dies. This person surely (and sadly) counts as less creative than another citizen who paints in his spare time, and not to a very high standard, but whose lifetime output comprises thousands of canvasses of his own composition. One of these people is a genius and the other is not. But her being a genius does not make her more creative, as such, than the run-of-the-mill painter. This shows that creativity and genius are traits which really run in different streams; only occasionally do these streams merge, and to brilliant effect. The other reading of ‘creative genius’ is that someone is a genius in respect of her creativity, i.e. she creates prodigiously. That somebody is a creative genius in this sense does not imply anything about the genuine novelty or value of what she creates. The prolific creator may create nothing of real quality, nor anything very original. This confirms our analysis that novelty and value are extraneous to creativity per se. This kind of creative genius is simply somebody blessed with a very fertile creative faculty: she is like a one-person research and development department. Our account accommodates this creative genius too: such a person, it stands to reason, experiences many more instances of the phenomenology we identified as the hallmark of creativity than are enjoyed by the average person. The present account, therefore, accommodates both readings of ‘creative genius’. The sense of the gulf between a Picasso and our spare-time painter is captured on the first reading: Picasso is a creator of genius, whereas our spare-time painter is not. But that does not imply that Picasso is more creative than the spare-timer, not unless ‘creative’ is simply to be read as a conjunctive expression for ‘novel’ and ‘original’. To be sure, it is possible to hear the word ‘creative’ in that way, particularly as applied to the physical items creators produce. But what I have suggested is that creativity can be distinguished from the production of novel and valuable items. We already have perfectly good concepts to ascribe these properties to items people create (and to other things not created); namely, NOVELTY and ORIGINALITY. Meanwhile, to have distilled the concept of creativity to its pure, not originality or valueinvolving, form, as an intrinsic attribute of people and their mental processes, is a philosophical exercise of some importance because of the new clarity it affords us. As a closing thought, it is useful to compare creativity with mere productivity. We have not assimilated creativity to productivity, because anybody (or any machine) can be productive without giving it the least bit of thought. The factory machine can be immensely productive, as can someone mechanically churning out identically hand-painted canvasses for tourists to buy. Creativity is in its essence thoughtful productivity. It is precisely because active and conscious thought is involved that creative processes so often result in products of originality and value; though they need not, as we have seen. Mere by-rote production is far less likely 16 to achieve these virtues. This is another reason why novelty and value have been so irresistibly linked with creativity. Bibliography Bedau, M. (2004) ‘Artificial Life illuminates Human Hyper-Creativity’ in D. Bulatov, (ed.) Biomediale: Contemporary Science and Genomic Culture, (Kaliningrad: The National Center for Contemporary Arts). Block, N. (1997) ‘On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness’ in N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Guzeldere (eds.) The Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge, M.A.: The MIT Press). Boden, M. (2004) The Creative Mind (second edition), (London: Routledge) —(1998) ‘Creativity and artificial intelligence’ in Artificial Intelligence 103, 347-356. —(1994a) ‘What is creativity?’ in M. 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