A Definition Poses Difficult Questions
What is creativity?
Volumes have been written on the subject, but a precise and satisfactory definition seems to have eluded experts and novices alike.
Is someone who is very bright--a genius--necessarily creative? Is a creative person necessarily a genius? Is an individual creative just because he or she does something original? What if no one appreciates the work or even notices it? Is the person still creative, or merely crazy, possessed by an idee fixe ?
And what of the creative act itself? Does creativity mean discovering, inventing, producing something new? Can it be a simple matter of solving a problem, a process of finding a new solution to an old dilemma?
No Easy Answers
There are no easy answers to these questions, but most scholars now accept a working definition of creativity. It must be original and it must be either useful or in some way valued by society. Nonetheless, a debate over the nuances and subtleties of creativity continues.
Recently that debate took a sharp and unexpected twist. This latest furor over creativity was caused by a computer in Pittsburgh.
At a meeting of the American Psychological Assn. in 1985, Herbert Simon, the Nobel prize-winning psychologist and economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, announced that he and his colleagues had programmed a computer to “rediscover” scientific breakthroughs.
Fed all the relevant data that the scientists had at their disposal, the computer can in a matter of seconds inductively re-create the original discovery, Simon said. Give a computer what Johannes Kepler knew in the 17th Century about astronomy and you will get the laws of planetary motion. Give a computer all that Charles Darwin knew in the 19th Century about animals and you presumably will get the theory of evolution.
Essentially, Simon said, creativity is nothing more than simple problem solving. And if that is true, then a computer can be creative.
Not surprisingly, this conclusion has caused considerable consternation among social scientists who have been studying creativity and who think it involves such complex issues as human emotion and motivation.
One scholar has likened the computer’s efforts to forgers who can make flawless copies of great masterpieces but cannot create original works of their own.
Another scholar evoked the words of Albert Einstein. “The formulation of a problem,” Einstein wrote, “is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new problems, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and makes real advances. . . .”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, has been studying creativity for more than two decades and is one researcher who has yet to be persuaded of the creative potential of the modern-day computer.
Whatever else the cognitive scientists and computer specialists have done, Csikszentmihalyi wrote in an article last year in the journal New Ideas in Psychology, “They are helping to sharpen some of the conceptual issues in a field that has long languished for lack of stimulating controversy.”
