A beginner’s first survey in Cognitive Science
GT 10/31/2013 Page 1
A beginner’s first survey in Cognitive Science Introduction An interest for cognitive studies could be said to have begun after 1930s, when the behaviorism was still widely accepted in the scientific community in the United States. Despite the fact that behaviorism only approached the external causes and effects of a person’s behavior and lacked the study of an internal mechanism (mind), the paradigm resisted until the advent of digital computers’ study, carried out by science people like von Neumann. He drew the first analogy of a computer with the human brain. In 1956, a remarkable event in the history of cognitive science happened: an invented machine was capable of deriving mathematical proofs just like humans would do. The implication of this invention led to considering that intelligence can exist both natural (innate) and artificial (computers). In addition, studying such computational machines which produce the same output as a brain gives, might suggest new perspectives of exploring the brain and the human cognition. In 1979, two years after the publication of the first Cognitive science journal, the new field is created in California, after decades of “incubation” and the final establishment of the new cognitive paradigm. Today’s Cognitive science is a blend of five essential disciplines, namely psychology, philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. For example, the explanations for
different cognition mechanisms might involve theories borrowed from psychoanalysis, whereas the famous triad Brain-Mind-Behavior reminds of the triad Hardware-SoftwareFunction from Computer science. Just as the Hardware alone would not make sense without the Software from the higher level, in the same way the science of the (physical) brain alone would not make sense without considering important concepts and observations from the Cognitive science, in attempting to understand human behavior. The study comprised in the material addressed by this review mostly approaches a history of cognitive science, creativity as a major topic, regarded also as the “highest level of cognition”, as well as some underlying mechanisms of the creativity, namely the consciousness and the unconsciousness. The purpose of this review is to describe, analyze and criticize the concepts referred to in the studies, through the personal standpoint of a reader with no prior exposure to Cognitive science.
A first glance on Creativity The plenitude of artifacts which are to be found in museums and public places as well as in our own personal houses would make people wonder about the nature of the drive that their creators had at the time of starting the creative process. The creative tradition, as it is named in the text, is equally represented in our world by the sum of the technological artifacts and the artistic pieces of work. While the technological artifacts have a purely utilitarian purpose, in other words meant to ease the life, the artistic 2
pieces may not necessarily have that, but they represent a personal expression of human emotions and beliefs. Nevertheless, both types of artifacts are in fact concretization of human ideas which did not hesitate to occur spontaneously throughout the whole history of mankind, which enable the concept of natural history of creativity to make sense for the given study. An important remark is that, although it is called a “natural history”, it will further deal with the artificial world, given that all the artifacts are human-made. Speaking of concretization of human ideas, the artifacts can be both material, as it is the case of palpable objects, and abstract, in the case of doctrines or ideologies. Creativity in the broader sense is then defined as the capacity of the created to make an impact in other’s people lives. But the artifact as a result of a creative process cannot be set apart from the creator himself, as well as from its consumers, which explains the symbolic title used by the author, “A ménage a trois”, in translation: “a household of three”.
On premises and types of creativity Regarding the consumers, one of their roles is to judge an artifact as creative or not. In attempting to judge an artifact as genuinely creative, the most important factor to be taken into consideration appears to be originality. Yet, originality should not be only about newness, as newness alone may not be relevant. Some cognitive scientists (Boden) agreed on newness, surprisingness and most of all value as preconditions for something to be creative.
A problem which occurs with judgement of creative artifacts is how the judgers are being chosen, since people are more or less expert in certain fields and the precision of the judgement may vary. The most proper consumers which can give the best judgement form the elite, all the others outside the elite being subalterns. However, the judgement of other people is always subjective. In order to balance, the author adds an objective factor which is the knowledge, both viewed as an input to the creation, and as an output, which makes the artifact brimming with knowledge, thus easier to quantify and qualify. Such is the case of an algorithm. With respect to originality, the author of the studies embeds from M. Boden three types of creativity, also known as: Personal, Historical and Consequential creativity. The three types are not necessarily mutually exclusive, sometimes they combine together or imply one another. The first one, P-creativity is the most common that one can notice even in the everyday life, when a person, without doing something very remarkable to someone, exceeds his own limit and creates something he has never done before. A P-creative person may not become famous for the world, in contrast to a Hcreative person, who creates something never seen before in the world and is recognized for that. A H-creative person is also considered as P-creative (according to Boden), whereas the reverse does not hold. In some situations, Pand H-creativity are considered on different layers which never interfere, such as is the case of a painter who paints hundreds of times the same landscape, but gets acknowledged only for one of the iterations (may it be one of the middle ones). 3
Moreover, there is another difference between the two types which is related to the naturalness of studying these two phenomena: the P-creativity cannot be studied completely “in the wild” without somehow affecting the creator, whereas the H-creativity can, as the artifact is already produced, without any interference of an observer and probably with enough accompanying information about the conditions it was produced. The third type, Consequential creativity, is independent of the H-creativity and becomes visible only later in time. It can be understood as the capacity of an artifact to become inspiration or reference for later artisans or science people. In the case of science people, many times the H-creativity coexists with the Ccreativity, given that famous discoveries are both important as standalone for the humankind, and would also be taken as a starting point for further developments, later in time. Personally, I would take the C-creativity as being the most interesting type because of the greater impact in has on the world and on establishing global trends, potential new paradigms. As for the similarity between human cognition and computers which I reminded before, in “The creative mind”, Margaret Boden argues that the computers cannot really manifest creativity, which is the programmer’s duty to manifest it.
When the artifact meets its target consumers… Experiencing creativity often involves human emotions, especially in the case of the subaltern consumers.
A new concept discussed in the study is the cognitive identity, which, according to the psychoanalyst Erikson, can be equally thought as being individual (unique) and social (pertaining to a certain group) cognitive identity. The author gives a more elaborate interpretation, which is, the entire content of cognition that shapes a human’s cognitive identity, be they knowledge, beliefs, emotions, needs, and so on. Moreover, the content is in permanent change according to the experience one gets. An experience involving an artifact is called creative encounter if the artifact is capable of changing, no matter how slightly, the consumer’s cognitive identity, in which case, the producer can be judged as creative. Thus, the author concludes that the emergence of a creative encounter is as important for creativity as the originality is. In my opinion, the existence of surprisingness, referred earlier as precondition for creativity, does already imply some kind of impact on a human’s cognition, although it might not touch all areas of cognition as suggested in the creative encounter. Therefore, this new concept is more exhaustive. For the creative encounter to happen, the first condition is that the consumer identifies himself with the producer. Having described that, therefore, a human’s life can be considered a creative life if he either manifested or produced: a) H-creativity, b) Ccreativity, c) creative encounters. One of the emotions one can get out of a creative artifact is experiencing beauty, hence the weight it is given in the study to the aesthetics as a principle of creation itself; however, for the creative encounter to happen, the consumers must be also receptive to the aesthetics expressed in the artifact and they 4
must identify themselves with its creator. An example of a perfect creative encounter is that of poets Tagore and Yeats, when Tagore, through Gitanjali, definitely an original work, is able to stir emotions in Yeats. That would have not been possible without Yeats’s response sensibility towards the artifact. The desire to be original is one of the superneeds of a creative person, together with the desire of changing other people’s cognitive identities. Once the artifact is released, it might facilitate creative encounters with a short number of people (“private phenomenon”), as well as it might affect multiple consumers (“public phenomenon”). In the latter case, it might even lead to entire creative movements or even shifts and revolutions in thinking.
Underlyings of creativity After dealing with multiple faces of creativity, the author is then concerned with the underlying mechanisms of creativity, which inevitably involve the consciousness and unconsciousness. The very fact that the creators cannot really explain in technical terms the process of creation they have been through, permits to introduce the unconsciousness as a possible explaining factor. Many examples have shown a sudden illumination upon people’s minds after long time of thinking about a problem. Such revelations would occur in unexpected moments, such is while doing everyday actions a sign of manifestation of something beyond consciousness. Unconsciousness was very much in the public eye starting from Schopenhauer, to Freud and Janet. The science built upon psychoanalysis has
in fact the premise that human’s psychic is shared between conscious and unconscious. The way in which the two parts arise at certain moments has been called entwinement which means that, basically, consciousness and unconsciousness are inseparable during the creative thinking, and one’s mind can freely cross from one side to another on short notice. According to the Poincare - Wallas Hadamard model, the creative process has four stages: 1) Preparation - the time when the problem is profoundly and consciously analyzed; 2) Incubation – when the problem moves from the conscious to the unconscious 3) Illumination – when a solution arrives, but it is still in the unconsciousness 4) Verification – when the solution travels to the consciousness and the person is able to verify it I believe every one of us had experienced these four stages at least once in life. I heard it very commonly from students who had a tough problem to solve and would sleep thinking of it, and the next morning they would wake and be able to write down the solution. The most spectacular, however, is when this happens to great science people, such as, as Chandrasekhar relates in “Truth and Beauty”, it occurred to Dirac in writing the equation of the electron or to Einstein in prediction of the deflection of light. Among the four stages, perhaps the most interest is shown for the Incubation stage as a standalone process. The scientists have mixed opinions about it. While some of them (like Perkins) might think it affects the act of creation, the author of the studies does not 5
personally find it useful for understanding creativity. William James, speaking about the consciousness, suggests it is related to attention and it is a serial (or selective) process – meaning it can only have as object one thing at a time. The psychologist Jaynes believes that the conscious mind is like a personal mirror of the world, with its elements being analogue to the elements perceived from the world. The idea of analogues then extends to one’s own person, also called “the analogue I”. Further, another psychologist named Bruner would emphasize the role of the narrativization in shaping the cognitive consciousness.
opportunity to manifest a form of P-creativity while synthesizing and arranging the ideas presented.
In contrast to the apparent serial nature of the consciousness, parallelism would be what characterizes the unconsciousness. Also, the unconsciousness does not require attention in order to function, in the same fashion it does not involve the I (personal pronoun). The I, which can take the form of a narrative I, the protagonist I, the author I, as it is seen in written works.
Conclusion Cognitive Science is a continuing developing field which aims at explaining how the human thinks, at a higher level than the approach of neuroscience. Creativity is considered the highest form of cognition and has been intensely studied throughout the years. By the present review I wanted to offer some short insights on a few of the issues addressed by the Cognitive Science field. While it might not be exhaustive or very remarkable, it has certainly offered me the 6