I believe your essay is more important to another critical debate; how useful are humans compared to computers? But let’s start of with the idea of a “stable genius”. When we think of creative genius we think of Van Gough rather than Picasso, because creativity is somehow different from driving a car. But the greatest genius’s have been very stable, like Issac Newton and Einstein. So what exactly is creativity and is it associated with genius?
There is a condition in which blind people can see, called blindsight. They cannot identify something, yet they can grasp it! So blindsight is a faculty we all have intuitively, and people with apperceptive ataxia are mindblind. Note, mindblind is not mindless, just like colour blind is not colourless. The condition is found in ASD and Asperger’s, who compensate with a high degree of savants and a proclivity for numbers.
In your excellent essay you say that creativity is associated with traumatic events in the mind, and I’m wondering whether people with a greater facility for blindsight are better at generating apperceptions? Consider the case of Issac Newton who sat under a tree and observed an apple fall, and from this he discovered the gravitational constant of the Universe. In other words, are apperceptions the key to human creativity and genius?
Lastly, we are in an age of AI, where we are constantly compared to computers, which are faster and smarter, which is correct, but here is the important distinction; AI is better and faster than us at connecting the dots, but human creativity is better at connecting unconnected dots. These two distinctions are like oil and water, they will not mix, because of what Geoffrey Hinton calls algorithmic dominance over ephemeral creativity. We cannot have both, we must choose between a net zero biosphere and AI global-sphere.
I believe your essay is more important to another critical debate; how useful are humans compared to computers? But let’s start of with the idea of a “stable genius”. When we think of creative genius we think of Van Gough rather than Picasso, because creativity is somehow different from driving a car. But the greatest genius’s have been very stable, like Issac Newton and Einstein. So what exactly is creativity and is it associated with genius?
There is a condition in which blind people can see, called blindsight. They cannot identify something, yet they can grasp it! So blindsight is a faculty we all have intuitively, and people with apperceptive ataxia are mindblind. Note, mindblind is not mindless, just like colour blind is not colourless. The condition is found in ASD and Asperger’s, who compensate with a high degree of savants and a proclivity for numbers.
In your excellent essay you say that creativity is associated with traumatic events in the mind, and I’m wondering whether people with a greater facility for blindsight are better at generating apperceptions? Consider the case of Issac Newton who sat under a tree and observed an apple fall, and from this he discovered the gravitational constant of the Universe. In other words, are apperceptions the key to human creativity and genius?
Lastly, we are in an age of AI, where we are constantly compared to computers, which are faster and smarter, which is correct, but here is the important distinction; AI is better and faster than us at connecting the dots, but human creativity is better at connecting unconnected dots. These two distinctions are like oil and water, they will not mix, because of what Geoffrey Hinton calls algorithmic dominance over ephemeral creativity. We cannot have both, we must choose between a net zero biosphere and AI global-sphere.