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PaulHoule · 2024-09-12 · Original thread
Creativity is one of the most problematic concepts in psychology. I am right now reading

https://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Bell-Jar-Psychotic-Authors/dp/...

where the authors (a psychologist and two literature critics) carefully tease apart the connection between creativity and psychosis which is of course problematic because insanity mostly gets in the way of being creative which leads to much more serious definition of what "being creative" really means than one usually finds. (One thing they point out is that a third-rate artist (Andy Warhol?) can become quite prominent if they are good at marketing their work.)

People who are religious will make a theological argument to the effect that "God gave you the power to create when he created you" or "You can be creative because God is inside you".

Atheists may dismiss these arguments out of hand but it's a mistake to do so because of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

in the sense that "God" can be defined as "the reason why there is something instead of nothing" which could have no relation to the image of some old patriarch on a throne. If we are made "in his image" we should consider the image revealed in a microscope that reveals that we are based on cybernetic principles that apply to the individual cell as well the whole organism and how those principles apply to the evolution of language and culture as they do to our genetic endowment.

(Insofar as God can delegate his creative ability to you, can't you further delegate it?)

A vulgar version of this is Rodger Penrose's "I can solve math problems because I am a thetan" where he claims to be exempt from the problems that Godel and Tarski and Turing warned you about but since there is nothing complete or consistent about Rodger Penrose these don’t apply (he can't solve Collatz and neither can a OT VIII!)

Muddy thinkers may reject the existence or relevance of God or not explicitly believe they are "a spirit in the material world" but often think there is something uniquely human about creativity (can other animals be creative?) but I sense that the ghost of the arguments above is behind that thinking.

In this transcript I get Python to create something that was never seen before and will never be seen again

   >>> uuid4()
   UUID('21205a92-2611-4710-b120-4a94f5ccf2d9')
which is by no means interesting; real creativity involves creating something that is useful and/or expressive using certain resources and subject to some system of constraints. Insofar as some task is repeatable, creativity is involved in the creation of some process or and/or system that makes the task repeatable.

As Edison put it “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” so it is not so interesting that the LLM can generate novel (yuck I hate that word, "novel" is the first word I delete when I have to squash a long paper title to fit into 80 characters) research ideas, I'll be impressed when it can fill out a grant application that gets funded.

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