Jonah Bossewitch	Senior Thesis Proposal

Advisors: Prof. G.Harman, P. Johnson-Laird	October, 15 1996

Originality, Spontaneity, and Creativity: A Computational Study

The Church-Turing thesis asserts that all computable functions can be computed by some Turing machine . Many philosophers have argued that it must be possible to explain consciousness in these terms, and have been searching for algorithms that model human cognition. While there has been tremendous success along these lines in recent years, the problem of creativity remains the holy grail of cognitive studies. What seems like such an "intuitive" notion, has intrigued philosophers since ancient times. What is creativity? Does the term describe a well defined class of processes, or is it just a catch-all phase for many types of mysterious and unexplained mental phenomena? How does the phenomenology experience of creating relate to the underlying cognitive processes? Are these processes computable, and if so how "hard" are they?

This investigation will involve a survey of the contemporary literature on creativity (Thagaard, Csikszentmihalyi, Hofstadter, and Jamison, etc...) as well as some traditional sources such as Plato and Kant. Examination of the computational questions my benefit from a detailed study of a specific problem, such as recognition or analogies. Focus will be on the generation of creative leaps, and will seek to develop a theory of creativity that may help suggest how a computer might be programmed to preform creatively, and also how people might enhance their creative skills. Possible topics to be studied include insight problems, analogies, conceptual revolutions, theory development, and wit.