Some Thoughts on Creativity and Critical Thinking
“The scientist finds his rewards in what Henri Poincaré calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibilities of application to which any discovery may lead.” — Albert Einstein
I have taught entrepreneurship at several universities for many years. What I have realized is that much of schooling teaches us history. Entrepreneurship and [science and engineering] research teach us about the future. Success in both domains — entrepreneurship and research — is driven by creativity and critical thinking. These two skills are fundamental requirements to see the future. Today we are at a major inflection point in history, what the World Economic Forum (WEF) calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I prefer to call this inflection point the Second Renaissance. I think most of us have no idea of the magnitude of the change that we can anticipate.
The Harvard Professor, EO Wilson, wrote in 1999:
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
Wilson demonstrated his own ability to synthesize when he proposed to combine computation and biology, thereby creating one of the most powerful concepts to shape the 21st century — computational biology. What Wilson helped to usher in was the realization that computers will take over much of the analytical work best done by repetition. Humans had best focus on the tasks requiring creativity and critical thinking. This article focuses on exploring the two skills that will forever withstand artificial intelligence — creativity and critical thinking — and demonstrating their value. In order to explain these two concepts I would first like to define inference.
Karl Friston, the noted psychiatrist and University College London physics professor, writing in Aeon defines inference as:
“…the process of figuring out the best principle or hypothesis that explains the observed states of that system we call ‘the world’. Technically, inference entails maximizing the evidence for a model of the world. Because we are obliged to maximize evidence, we are — effectively — making inferences about the world using ourselves as a model.”
Relying on Friston’s training in physics, one should focus on the phrase “inference entails maximizing the evidence for a model of the world”. If that does not help, this quote from Harvard Professor Steven Pinker may be useful.
“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”
Put simply, what both Friston and Pinker are proposing is that we receive (perceive) information, process it to reduce uncertainty and thereby create better working models to reduce risk, increase knowledge and foster utility. In the interest of energy efficiency, the brain rejects most inputs and only captures what fits a mental model or framework. Inference provides the material which creativity processes.
To understand creativity, it may be useful to compare it to imagination. If I say to you, imagine a mouse. Almost everyone thinks of a small, four-legged animal with brown, grey or white fur. The color you pick, the length of the ears and perhaps the number of whiskers is the imagining, but the entire exercise is based on your existing mental model of a mouse. If I tell you to pick a famous mouse, you might pick Mickey Mouse or Mighty Mouse. Putting yellow shoes, white gloves, red pants and a big smile on Mickey’s face, that was the creative process, what Einstein called “combinatorial play”. The combinatorial process was the combining of existing knowledge (in shoes, gloves, pants, colors and moods with a mouse) in a new, novel way. If it never went beyond the original piece of paper, it is still creativity. If it creates the multinational corporation The Walt Disney Corporation, then it is also genius. Linus Pauling, the two time Nobel Prize winner said, “The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” This “a lot of ideas” is where I see Einstein’s combinatorial play, but why did Einstein choose the word “play”? I think Einstein was saying that creating a lot of ideas was the play and the first step, without any critical judgment, and the second step was to pick the “best idea”. Given Einstein’s admiration for the great French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, history may support my interpretation.
Poincaré writing in The Foundations of Science (1921) proposes that invention is the act of choosing from the creative alternatives derived from discovery. Poincaré believed that “intuition”, an examination at the level of first principles, was the means to select and “invent”, what we would now call critical thinking. Jean Piaget, the seminal thinker on child development, believed that children learn to balance between assimilation (applying previous knowledge) and accommodation (changing behavior to account for new knowledge). Critical thinking is the process by which the choices from new information are made and the determination of where they are integrated into existing knowledge and mental models.
The act of choosing and integrating the new knowledge is either routine and incremental or fundamental and critical thinking. The difference between the routine and critical thinking is in how one frames the problem. One frames or reframes based on fundamental assumptions about the problem. Here I use assumption as a philosopher would, as a premise or assertion with no expectation one way or the other about its truthfulness. Updating or changing a fundamental assumption about a problem or issue is Poincaré’s intuition. The intuition is the insightful, critical thinking. The power of a change in assumption is shown by Newton’s view that the earth circled the sun, which launched modern science. Modern intellectual history is filled with examples of new key assumptions changing the then current paradigm. Einstein’s views on space, time and gravity is an example. EO Wilson applying computation to biology would be another example.
The writer Isaac Asimov summarizes this point well, “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.” The chemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who discovered vitamin C, said, “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” The renowned physicist Arthur Eddington more precisely counseled, “The contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual.” All of these legendary thinkers force us beyond our current assumptions and this is the foundation of critical thinking…and genius.
Will our critical thinking skills permit us to outperform artificial intelligence? The answer is yes, but that is the wrong question I think. The better question is how many of us will be able to outperform artificial intelligence? That is where we need to focus and more clarity about critical thinking will help. Fortunately, throughout history, the geniuses like Poincaré have studied discovery, invention and critical thinking and shown us the way.
References:
- The Mathematics of Mind-Time, Karl Friston
- 2017: What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to Be More Widely Known, Steven Pinker
