Transcript CONCEPTUAL CHANGE: LIFE, MIND, AND DISEASE

SOCIAL SIMULATION OF
SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY
Paul Thagard
University of Waterloo
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Outline
1. Creativity
2. Simulating scientific
consensus
3. Social simulation of
emotion
4. Social simulation of
creativity
5. Procedural creativity
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Creativity
Scientific discovery
Technological
invention
Social innovation
Artistic creativity
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Creativity Questions
1. What is creativity?
2. What are the mental processes that promote
creativity?
3. What are the social processes that promote
creativity?
4. Do different domains of creativity require
different mental and social processes?
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What is Creativity?
A creative product is:
1. new (novel, original),
2. valuable (important, useful, appropriate, correct,
accurate), and
3. surprising (unexpected, non-obvious).
Exemplars: relativity theory, television, public
education, Starry Night
Typical features: new, valuable, surprising
Explanatory roles: Creativity explains success,
etc.
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Cognitive Creativity
1. Combinatorial conjecture: Creativity results from
novel combinations of representations (Koestler,
Boden, Dugald Stewart, etc.).
2. In humans, mental representations are patterns of
neural activity.
3. Neural representations are multimodal, encompassing
information that can be visual, auditory, tactile,
olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic, and emotional, as well
as verbal.
4. Results: Thagard & Stewart AHA ! (2011), Thagard
(2012) The Cognitive Science of Science.
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Combining Cognitive & Social
Modeling
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Scientific Consensus
CCC: Consensus = coherence + communication.
Thagard (2000) Coherence in Thought and Action.
Individual scientific agents evaluate hypotheses with
respect to evidence on the basis of explanatory
coherence.
Agents exchange hypotheses and evidence and then reevaluate coherence.
Consensus is reached when all agents accept the same
hypotheses.
Applications: causes of ulcers; origin of the moon.
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Emotional Consensus
HOTCO 3: Hot (emotional) coherence in group decision
making. Thagard and Kroon (2005). Thagard (2006)
Hot Thought.
Agents make decisions based on emotional assessments
of actions with respect to goals.
Emotional communication of valences proceeds through
contagion, altruism, and means-ends processing.
Simulations: couples, academic hiring, energy decisions
(Institut Futur).
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Emotions in Scientific
Thinking
interest
curiosity
wonder
Generate
questions
avoid
boredom
happiness
hope
Try to answer
questions
fear
anger
frustration
happiness
surprise
beauty
happiness
Generate
answers
Evaluate
answers
worry
disappointmen
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Emotions and Creativity
1. Emotions provide motivation. James Watson:
never do anything boring.
2. Emotions provide evaluation: excitement,
elegance, disgust, etc.
3. Emotions communicate motivation and
evaluation in social groups, including
scientists.
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Social Mechanisms
Cognitive communication: beliefs, etc.
Affective communication:
Mirror neurons
Emotional contagion via mimicry
Attachment-based learning
Empathy and emotional analogy
Altruism and sympathy
Emotional cuing, e.g. anger -> guilt
Power: provide something desired, or threaten something
feared, generating motivated and fear-driven inferences.
Propaganda, advertising.
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Design for Social Simulation
of Creativity
1. From CCC and HOTCO 3: Scientific community
consists of agents with complex cognitive and
emotional processes, with both cognitive and
emotional communication.
2. From AHA (2011) new neural representations
generated by combinations of old ones, with emotional
reactions.
3. Approximation of neural representations: vectors,
including emotional representations.
4. Agents communicate vectors, and generate new
combinations with emotional evaluations.
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Design for Social Simulation
of Creativity
5. From PI (Thagard 1988, Computational Philosophy of
Science): Hypothesis formation – abduction.
6. From Mental Leaps (Holyoak and Thagard, 1995):
analogical retrieval, mapping, and transfer.
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7. Procedural Creativity
The products of scientific creativity include concepts,
hypotheses, and methods.
Procedural creativity is the generation of new methods:
ways of accomplishing goals.
Technology, art, and social innovation also generate new
methods, e.g. impressionism.
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Procedural Creativity:
Scientific Examples
Naturalistic explanation (Thales, c. 600 BC).
Experimentation (Ibn al-Haytham, 1021).
Mathematical science (Galileo, 1590).
Telescope (Galileo, 1609). Microscope (Malpighi, 1660).
Calculus (Newton, 1666). Statistical inference (Bernoulli, 1689).
Taxonomy (Linnaeus, 1735).
Spectroscopy (Kirchoff and Bunson (1859).
Polymerase chain reaction (Mullis, 1983).
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Procedural Creativity:
Cognitive Representation
Methods can be represented as rules: IF you want to
accomplish goal G, THEN follow procedure P.
Goals and procedures are not just verbal, but can be
multimodal (visual, kinesthetic, auditory, touch, taste,
smell, etc.).
So the IF and THEN parts of some rules need to be
represented by neural patterns, or vectors as an
approximation.
See the Semantic Pointer Architecture of Eliasmith (2013)
How to Build a Brain.
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Procedural Creativity:
Cognitive Process
Productive generalization:
Input: Goal, techniques consisting of one or more steps,
a problem solution showing that using the steps leads
to accomplishment of the goal.
Output: A method with the structure: If you want to
accomplish the goal, then use the technique consisting
of the steps.
Process: Identify the steps that led to the goal, and
generalize them into the method, with multimodal
representations.
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Method: Cognitive-Affective
Maps
Collaboration with
political scientists on
conflict resolution
and climate change.
Goal: graphical
method to display
emotional
coherence.
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Method: Cognitive-Affective
Maps
Procedure: use ovals
(+) and hexagons () to represent
emotional elements.
Improvements:
ambivalence node,
Empathica program.
Applications: climate change, etc.
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Procedural Creativity:
Social Contributions
1. Other people provide goals.
2. Other people provide some of the steps in the
solution.
3. Other people provide useful modifications.
4. Emotional communication of value.
5. Other people provide applications of the
method.
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Procedural Creativity:
Social Simulation
1. Multiple agents capable of procedural
creativity
2. Communication of goals
3. Communication of steps in the procedure
4. Other people provide applications of the
method
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Conclusions
1. Creativity results from
combination of
representations and
other cognitive
processes.
2. Social creativity
requires
communication of
representations and
emotions.
3. Simulation is feasible!
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