Creativity, Humans and Machines.

There is use in stepping back and asking a series of simple questions.

What is creativity? What is a creative act? What may one experience in life, and merit creative?

And perhaps a further question – can a machine of human origin be creative?

In addressing the first three questions pertaining to the nature of creativity, several motifs come to mind; those of music, paintings, and poetry - in other words, the arts. To examine these further, what regularities in the arts might there be? Does there exist a latent predicate of human creativity?

First, let us consider the notion of feeling as a product of human emotion, and human experience.

As follows an interpretation of creativity, or the arts, is that of symbolic expression of feeling. Moreover, as we do not exist in isolation, a symbolic expression of the cumulative experience of others symbolic expressions of feeling.

Now, we may be rephrase the above such that creativity is the symbolic expression of human emotion and human experience.

Next, let us revisit an earlier question - that of whether a machine of human origin be creative.

It follows that if a machine of human origin is to be creative to human interpretation, it must demonstrate symbolic expression of emotion and experience of a human. Unless we develop the tools to replicate all of that which is human on a material substrate, this approaches the impossible and we have arrived at what may be a dead end.

Why?

Current machines may only learn the patterns and regularities of human creativity, then sample from that distribution of creative act. Nothing truly new is to come of this.

However - what may exist is that of a machine with freedom of purpose from which a new manifestation of creativity may emerge. A new species of sorts. A species with machine experience, and machine feeling, from which machines derive symbolic expression. A machine creativity.

And who knows, perhaps most machine creativity may appear as noise to human interpretation - although I certainly hope it does not. It may be the most beautiful thing we have yet to set free.