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BISOCIATION of Arthur Koestler in the ACT of CREATION (1964)

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BISOCIATION of Arthur Koestler in the ACT OF CREATION (1964) as the foundation of HUMAN and COMPUTER CREATIVITY Bronislaw Czarnocha Napoli, May 13, 2014 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1964 • “I have coined the term ‘bisociation’ in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane’ as it were, and the creative act, which…always operates on more than one plane” p. 36 • for Koestler, bisociation represents a “spontaneous flash of insight...which connects previously unconnected matrices of experience” (p.45) !Aha! Moment Eureka Experience Albert Einstein (1949) Autobiographical Notes. P.7 • “What exactly is thinking? When at the reception of sense impressions, a memory picture emerges, this is not yet thinking, and when such pictures form series, each member of which calls for another, this too is not yet thinking. When however, a certain picture turns up in many of such series then – precisely through such a return – it becomes an ordering element for such series, in that it connects series, which in themselves are unconnected, such an element becomes an instrument, a concept.” Progress of Understanding and Exercise of Understanding (Koestler, p.619) “...it is necessary to distinguish between progress in understanding - the acquisition of new insights, and the exercise of understanding at any given stage of development. Progress in understanding is achieved by the formulation of new codes through the modification and integration of existing codes by methods of empirical induction, abstraction and discrimination, bisociation. The exercise or application of understanding the explanation of particular events then becomes an act of subsuming the particular event under the codes formed by past experience. To say that we have understood a phenomenon means that we have recognized one or more of its relevant relational features as particular instances of more general or familiar relations, which have been previously abstracted and encoded”. Associative and Bisociative Thinking and Pattern Finding [Koestler] distinguishes associations that work within a given domain (called a matrix by Koestler) and are limited to repetitiveness (here, in Computer Creativity: finding other/new occurrences of already identified patterns) and bisociations representing novel connections crossing independent domains (matrices). Two Aha moments of Sultan, the genius among Koehler’s chimpanzees (1914) • (I7.2.1914) Beyond some bars, out of arm's • The chimpanzee Sultan first of all squats reach, lies an objective [a banana]; on this indifferently on the box which has been left side, in the background of the experiment standing a little back from the railings; then he room, is placed a sawn-off castor-oil bush, gets up, picks up the two sticks, sits down again whose branches can be easily broken off. It is on the box and plays carelessly with them. impossible to squeeze the tree through the While doing this, it happens that he finds railings, on account of its awkward shape; himself holding one rod in either hand in such a besides, only one of bigger apes could drag it way that they lie in a straight line; he pushes as far as the bars. Sultan is let in, does not the thinner one a little way into the opening immediately see the objective, and, looking of the thicker, jumps up and is already on the about him indifferendy, sucks one of the run towards the railings, to which he has up branches of the tree. But, his attention having to now half turned his back, and begins to been drawn to the objective, he approaches draw a banana towards him with the double the bars, glances outside, the next moment stick. I call the master: meanwhile, one of the turns round, goes straight to the tree, seizes a animal's rods has fallen out of the other, as he thin slender branch, breaks it off with a sharp has pushed one of them only a little way into the jerk, runs back to the bars, and attains the other; whereupon he connects them again objective. From the turning round upon the tree up to the grasping of the fruit with the Had Sultan known Greek he would certainly have broken-off branch, is one single quick chain of shouted Eureka! (p.103) action, without the least 'hiatus', and without the slightest movement that does not, objectively considered, fit into the solution described.• (p.103) an Aha moment from 5000 years ago:The Hymns of Humble Appar Ero così ignorante (pieno di cecità indotta dal Malam), che non conoscevo il Chaste Tamil di versi illuminanti e non componevo poesie e testi con essi. Non sapevo come apprezzare le grandi arti e scienze portati alla perfezione attraverso riflessioni ripetute e continue su di esse. A causa di tali incompetenze non ero in grado di apprezzare la presenza dell’ ESSERE e della Sua essenza. Ma come una madre e un padre pieno di amore e di cura, l’ESSERE dischiuse su Sua spontanea volontà la Sua presenza ed essenza e continuò a stare con me durante la mia evoluzione tenendomi sempre come Suo proprio soggetto. Ora, pieno di vera comprensione dell'ESSERE, salgo su per la collina di ERunbiyuur e testimonio l’ESSERE come Luce benevola. COMMENT: Uno degli oggetti dell’Ontologia Fondamentale che è stato portato in parole dai giganti della spiritualità Tantrica come Tirumular Namazvar e così via è quella di MALAM, il Buio Metafisico che rende le anime CIECHE e quindi incapaci di vedere qualsiasi cosa. Questa nozione metafisica è antica quanto il Sumerico NeRi di Suruppak (3000 a.C.). I filosofi sumeri hanno anche notato che qualunque competenza umana, comprese le competenze tecniche come inventare un alfabeto per scrivere il linguaggio, è lì solo perché ESSENDO emerge nelle profondità dell'anima come il Sole Interiore che viola il buio interiore e lascia che ci sia la luce dell’Intelligenza (Utu ude-a aAM Uru iGanamee - 505 Enmerkar e Araata) Appar interpreta la sua intelligenza contro una comprensione metafisica fondata da questa Ontologia Fondamentale e in questo registra anche una continuità con i filosofi Sumeri. Examples of Eureka moment through a bisociation. Poincare: “Then I wanted to represent these functions by the quotient of two series; this idea was perfectly conscious and deliberate, the analogy with elliptic functions guided me….Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geologic excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea;…but I felt a perfect certainty” (p.115) Examples of bisociation; Darwin wherein lies Darwin's greatness, the originality of his contribution? In picking up, one might say, the disjointed threads, plaiting them into a braid, and then weaving an enormous carpet around it. The main thread was the evolutionist's credo that the various species in the animal and vegetable kingdom had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species…but it gave no explanation of the reasons which caused the common ancestor to transform itself gradually into serpents, walruses, and giraffes. The second thread that he picked up was of almost as trivial a nature for a country-bred English gentleman as Archimedes's daily bath: domestic breeding. The improvement of domestic breeds is achieved by the selective mating of favourable variations… He had found the third thread…In …Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population. When Darwin read the he saw in a flash the 'natural selector', the causative agent of evolution, for which he had been searching:…” (p.1`40) Examples of bisociation: Guttenberg’s Printing Press Here, then, we have matrix or skill No. I: the printing from wood blocks by means of rubbing. It leads Gutenberg, by way of analogy, to the seal: 'When you apply to the vellum or paper the seal of your community, everything has been said, everything is done, everything is there. Do you not see that you can repeat as many times as necessary the seal covered with signs and characters?' • Yet all this is insufficient. I took part in the wine harvest. I watched the wine flowing, and going back from the effect to the cause, I studied the power of this press which nothing can resist.... At this moment it occurs to him that the same, steady pressure might be applied by a seal or coin-preferably of lead, which is easy to cast on paper, and that owing to the pressure, the lead would leave a trace on the paper - Eureka! • A simple substitution which is a ray of light.... To work then! God has revealed to me the secret that I demanded of Him•••. (p.123) Bisociation: When two habitually independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact with each other the result is either: A fusion of intellectual a collision ending in laughter.A synthesis. Poincare fusion: Smullyan joke: For fifteen days I strove to prove that Un visitatore che vuole conoscere come there could not be any functions like those vivono i carcerati viene condotto in giro dal I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was direttore. Passano per i corridoi e guardano then very ignorant; every day I seated non visti, nelle celle attraverso certi spioncini myself at my work table, stayed an hour or chiamati "sportelli di Giuda".
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