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Creative Theories

Once I have exercised my free will by getting out of bed in the morning, I often decide to do something creative. Humans seem driven to create. We compose music, draw, paint, and solve mathematical puzzles. Computers are not naturally creative; they spend most of their time doing exactly the opposite – following preset rules. Is this a fundamental limitation distinguishing the computational world from the real world?

The Conventional View
Most scientists believe pattern-matching algorithms in the brain allow us to be creative. To see how this might work, imagine our brains are chaotic – not hard to do – and process many competing ideas at the same time. The neurons in our brains build millions of useful, and useless, connections based on the patterns in the data we see and hear. Then a selection process goes to work – something akin to natural selection – to sift and prune the connections until something bubbles to the surface and we get that, ‘aha’ feeling.
Douglas Hofstadter, Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University, famous for the book Gödel Escher Bach, has written a computer program using pattern matching to discover number theorems; things like any number ending in a zero is divisible by 5. The program produces interesting results, even perhaps generating some new theorems. He argues the human brain is essentially a scaled up version of his program. By the way, if you like trivia, his book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies was the first book ever sold on Amazon.com.

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