Emergence and Creativity

Abstract

Emergence is the appearance of novel entities that in one sense or another could not have been predicted from what came before. We outline a number of different conceptions of emergence: of formal structures, of material structures, of functions and organizations, of new perspectives. Epistemic emergence involves the creation of new points of view: the evolution of new sensors in biological evolution, the addition of new measurements and observables in scientific models, the creation of new concepts and meanings. In art, epistemic emergence can involve formation of new ways of seeing, new interpretive paradigms. We distinguish two modes of creating novelty: combinatoric (new combinations of existing primitives) and creative (new primitives). Although combinatoric systems may differ in numbers of possible combinations, their set of possibilities is closed. Creative systems, on the other hand, have open-sets of possibilities because of the partial- or illdefined nature of the space of possible primitives. We discuss classes of adaptive and self-modifying cybernetic robotic devices in terms of these two kinds of processes. We consider material systems constructed from genetically-directed patterngrammars. Although spaces of accessible structures are closed, function spaces can nevertheless be open. Works of new media art can be considered in terms of this combinatoric/creative framework, whether they explore an existing space of possibilities or whether they enlarge such spaces.