Single Review on past events

Sidney Carls-Diamante (Fellow / Philosophy) gave a talk entitled "Creativity as uncertainty reduction: an active inference model".

Abstract:

This presentation introduces an active inference-based model that construes creativity as a set of strategies for reducing uncertainty, thereby accounting for how imagination is actualized into invention. The model focuses on creativity as novelty, originality, and unusualness end elaborates the processes by which creative thought is translated into creative action. Creative thought is used as an umbrella term for creativity-related cognitions. Creative action refers to behaviours, such as invention, by which the contents of creative thought are actualized to produce creative output.
    The model formulates creative thought as an epistemic strategy for exploring the world, where novel, original, and unusual aspects of creative thought are interpreted as positing new configurations of objects, ideas, or concepts. Because these configurations are not yet extant in the world, there are as yet minimal sources of sensory signals required to test whether the configuration will have the physical, aesthetic, or practical features attributed to it in creative thought. Uncertainty regarding the configuration is thus generated. To minimize uncertainty, action policies prescribing behaviours appropriate to realizing the configuration are formulated, generating creative action.
    The presentation will first discuss the model in its basic form, before exploring its applications to some common patterns of creative action. These include leaving output uncompleted, jumping from one project to another, variations on a theme, derivative works, and continuous, focused work on a particular project. These patterns are accounted for in terms of how they implement uncertainty-reduction processes.