CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Fernandez, Bailey |
|---|---|
| Title | Emerging Ideas: How, if at all, Can Creativity Be Captured Computationally? |
| Summary | Creativity has recently received significant attention in the brain sciences and in artificial intelligence. However, the literature on creativity in contemporary philosophy — and especially in the philosophy of these fields — has been comparatively scant. This thesis aims to take steps to address this gap by arguing for an account in which computers can be creative, and then reflecting on the significance of its results. I first synthesize diverse literature in the cognitive sciences, A.I., and philosophy which aims to derive additional necessary conditions for creativity beyond the standard definition of novelty and usefulness. Noting a resulting puzzle, I then examine existing cognitive and computational models of creativity, with a particular focus on a computational model of creative problem solving known as CreaCogs. I argue that the synthesis initially described can best be captured by the metaphysical notion of “emergence,” and argue that this condition is compatible with computational creativity and that the model examined exhibits it. Finally, I use these results to offer an account of why “computational” cases of creativity might still seem like edge cases. Namely, emergence is often associated not only with a metaphysical gap between the base and emergent properties, but also an epistemological one regarding the explanation for how the emergent properties are produced from the base. By specifying a procedure which produces the creative/emergent results in explicit formal terms, we erode the epistemological gap even if we retain the metaphysical one. This observation brings forward a reflective sketch on the future of philosophy in discussing computational creativity. |
| Supervisor | Crane, Tim |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/fernandez_bailey.pdf |
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