It is a commonly heard statement that there is such a thing as the "creative spark", that an "unanalyzable leap of the imagination" takes place when a great mind comes up with a new idea of work of art. Great creators are sometimes said to be a "quantum leap" away from ordinary mortals. People like Mozart are held to be somehow divinely inspired, to have magical insights for which they could no more be expected to be able to account than spiders for the wondrous webs they weave. It is all felt to be somehow too deep down, too hidden, too occult a gift, to be mechanical in any sense. Creativity, in fact, is perhaps one of the last refuges of the soul. "You may mechanize your logic," says the English professor to the computer scientist, "but you'll never lay a finger on poetry." (You may substitute music or any other domain of artistic creation for poetry.)

Is this kind of statement irrational? Is it a reflection of a deep-seated fear that even this most sacred aspect of humanity is doomed to be taken over soon by metallic machines, or by silicon chips? Why make such a big deal out of an activity of the human mind which, like every other activity in life, has shades and degrees? After all, the creative blurs with the mundane so much that it would be hopeless, would it not, to try to cull what is truly creative from what is not? Or — is there some clean dividing line that distinguishes the run-of-the-mill workaday deviser of ditties from the Great Composer of Eternal Symphonic Masterpieces? And if so, is it possible that here lies the elusive difference between the living and the dead, the human and the machine, the mental and the mechanical?

With such a "magical" view of creativity, there is, of course, a problem. It would seem to imply that the poor composer of ditties is actually dead and mechanical inside; that only certified geniuses like Mozart are qualitatively different from machines — and that even old Mozart was nonmechanical only when he was composing (certainly not when he was merely sipping ale at a tavern!). Probably most people who believe in the magical view of creativity would dispute this way of portraying their position. They would maintain that Mozart was nonmechanical all the time; moreover that you and I, no less than Mozart, are also nonmechanical all the time. No matter that some, even many, human abilities have already been mechanized or will be mechanized someday.

About the touchy question of the mechanization of the mental, many educated people feel that, although a machine may now or someday be able to do a creditable job of acting like a person, any machine's performance will always remain lackluster and dull, and that after a while, this dullness will always shine through. You'll simply be able to tell that it is unoriginal, that its ideas and thoughts are all being drawn from some storehouse of formulas and clichés, that there is nothing alive and dynamic — no élan vital — behind its façade. If it comes up with a bon mot now and then, well, tant mieux — but even the best will just be an automaton par excellence. There may be nothing specific to point to other than the "vibes" you pick up of its dullness and unoriginality, but after a while they will inevitably start to come in loud and clear. (Incidentally, I would be delighted if some of the more vocal antimechanists felt that way, instead of insisting, as they more often do, that operational tests are of no use in deciding who or what possesses "genuine mental states".)

This sense that you will eventually be able to "just tell", from its inevitable lack of sparkle, that you're dealing with a machine and not a person, seems to depend upon a tacit assumption about human thought, one with which I fully agree: namely, that "creative spark" is not the exclusive property of just a few rare individuals down the centuries, but quite to the contrary, it is an intrinsic ingredient of the everyday mental activity of everyone, even the most run-of-the-mill people. In short, it seems that people who feel that machines — even intelligent ones — will always remain duller than minds are tacitly relying on the following thesis: Creativity is part of the very fabric of all human thought, rather than some esoteric, rare, exceptional and fluky by-product of the ability to think, which every so often surfaces in places spread far and wide.

With this thesis I agree. Where I differ with the antimechanists is over the matter of whether creativity lies beyond intelligence. I see creativity and insight, for machines no less than people, as intimately bound up with intelligence, so that I cannot imagine a noncreative yet intelligent machine — something that, in order to make a point about what is essentially human, they seem to be willing and able to do. To me, "noncreative intelligence" is a flat-out contradiction in terms.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Originally published in Scientific American, September 1982
Copyright © 1985 by Basic Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

Posted 29 June 1997

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