What is Creativity Anyway and How Come the Human Mind is So Good at It?

By Lance Winslow
Can we define creativity, and if we do, does that mean we are one step further in duplicating it? Is it possible to train a computer to be creative? Why not say artificial intelligence computer scientists, but psychologists, religious scholars and philosophers say not so fast because if you train a computer to be creative, then you are setting rules of knowledge use, therefore it would not be creative, rather following rules.

Still, the skeptics of mankind's absolute domain on creativity say that if an artificial intelligent machine creates, it is creative, no matter how it got there. Some say sure, but it would not be artificial intelligence, it would computer rules; so, then can computers become creative? And if they can that would mean mankind's creativity is not special at all.

Worse, the debate rages on as to whether a creative computer is actually creative or that it would only prove that the human programmers was so creative he created a computer to be creative. Interesting lines of thought on the psychology of the Creative Mind and if this interests you as well, perhaps I might recommend a very good book to you:

"The Creative Mind; Myths and Mechanisms" by Margaret A. Boden; 1990.

The author, Margaret Boden also wrote the book; "Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man" and this later work we find that Margaret challenges all the past period psychologists and philosophers on the issue of creativity. Can we define creativity, Margaret Boden believes so and poses such a definition, and gives the history of the psychology of creativity, and probable futures. If you are a creative expert and do not own this book.

Well, I hate to say it like this, but there is a good chance you are a fraud. You see there are a whole lot of so-called psychology experts which specialize in creativity, and yet they have a really tough time with defining it, reproducing it or explaining how it happens.