Quote from: Crypt_Current on November 08, 2012, 06:11:25 PM

Quote from: mobodick on November 08, 2012, 05:45:02 PM

Quote from: Crypt_Current on November 08, 2012, 05:34:40 PM

Quote from: mobodick on November 08, 2012, 05:31:04 PM

Quote from: Crypt_Current on November 08, 2012, 05:24:50 PM

Quote from: mobodick on November 08, 2012, 05:22:50 PM

Quote from: Crypt_Current on November 08, 2012, 05:07:04 PM

Quote from: grondilu on November 08, 2012, 04:56:11 PM

Quote from: mobodick on November 08, 2012, 04:43:16 PM

Nonsense.
An amoeba can adapt to its surroundings but i don't see it being 'creative'.
My computer can draw graphics autonomously (without me telling it what to do) and yet it never showed any creativity (unless you mean the artifacts from overheating Wink

)

Indeed creativity is not necessary for autonomy. My bad. Yet it is usefull. And humans use it, so if machines are to do as good a job as humans, they might need to use it too.

No, you were probably correct in the first place. The amoeba was amazingly creative in that it did things that up until that point had never been done. Not creative by our elite human standards.

Nope.
Creativity implies intention.
I can assure you DNA molecules don't have intentions.
Intentions are a result of brains and so cannot precede them.
Amoeba simply did what their genes were programmed to do with a healthy dose of randomness and those things they did turned out to make them better at survival and thereby making more of the genes that happen to survive etc.

Creativity, like all other abstract concepts that have no specific physical entity that they point to and predates them, is a human creation.

Well, not exactly.
I think that, for instance, all mammals posses a certain degree of creativity.
We as a species just happen to have a lot of it.
My point is just that creativity requires certain specific brain structures.
Without them an organism cannot be creative.

My point is that when you say "all mammals posses [sic] a certain degree of creativity", you are imposing the concept on them. If there were no humans, creativity would not exist, but that is not to say any actions of any entity would change or would have been changed in any way.

Aah, well, then you just have to make your idea of creativity a little wider.
Like intelligence, creativity is something we can recognise in other organisms than just humans.
You are maybe refering to the specific human form of creativity.
I'm not talking about the 'a human making a painting' type of creativity.
I was talking about the possibility of an organism to dynamically recombine old information into new information that may help it to deal with the environment better.
We humans have so much of this recombinatory stuff that we invented things like fiction to account for the shitload of stuff we can imagine.
But the process of creativity is not exclusive to humans.

Like I said earlier, the amoeba was being creative. So are the mammals.
But they could not have been "being creative", even if they were doing the exact same things, before humans existed, because creativity is an abstract concept and the TERMINOLOGY did not exist before humans invented it.
Fork in the road: The actual definition of the words "create", "creation", "creative" and "creativity" are concretely defined, but is this different than the abstract concept of "creative" that we are speaking of here?

Also, I implied but meant to explicitly state that it is the underlying terminology (information codified into symbols) that facilitates our abstract conversation that we have now. The monkeys and amoebas could not do that, so this sort of "creativity" was not available to them. Maybe it will be someday.