My long journey to now

Wastwater, Lake District, England

Click to listen on BBC iPlayer

The other morning I turned on Radio 4 whilst washing the breakfast dishes and it sounded interesting, a kind of reminiscence. I’d missed the beginning and took a little while to catch on. I liked the sound of the lady though, full of fun, approachable and without false modesty. When she mentioned a former post in the Philosophy Department of Birmingham University, my listening became more personally motivated. Could it be Maggie Boden? It was!

We met once, at a weekend walking and climbing in the Lake District. I mentioned the occasion in a post published five years ago, here; but had no reason then to mention her.

We stayed at the Youth Hostel beside Wastwater, it must have been the winter of ’62/3. I imagine that Bill Cheverst, a noted climber and last of the original Telferers’ Club, would have suggested the venue; Jim Slater would have invited Dr Boden; Alan Williamson & I would have come because we were always keen for such expeditions. Of Maggie herself I remember nothing, except that she was there, and that she proposed we play Scrabble in the evening, using a set she had brought along. It was the first time I heard of the game. I wasn’t keen to play, retired early to my bunk exhausted, otherwise I might have got to know her. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t accompany us on our climb up Sca Fell. To me, there’s an unsolved mystery here: why is she such a blank in my memory? It may be that I simply felt uncomfortable with someone so beyond my league, so accomplished, whilst I was still in a crisis of adolescence, lacking a sense of personal identity, devoid of social graces. I see this now for the first time. It explains a lot. My diagnosis is confirmed by this article on Adolescence and Social Development. And you’ll see that the piece I link to above closes with these words: “Oh yes, I could be obnoxious in those days.” Enough said.

Listening to her speak on the radio, fifty-two years after our previous encounter, I was able to admire her on more equal terms, or at any rate from a position of mature serenity. I liked her poise and luminous clarity. She was being interviewed for an episode of “The Life Scientific”, which introduced her as a world expert on Artificial Intelligence. I’ve spent my working life in IT, and looked down upon AI as an oxymoronic wild-goose chase. My position was “Computers have no intelligence: they can only do what they’re told—if indeed that.”

So I bought a copy of her book The Creative Mind: myths and mechanisms, and was delighted to find it addressed to me: not personally of course, she wouldn’t remember me at all. It is addressed to someone who tends to think that inspiration, the Muse’s whisper, if you will, is at bottom one of those unfathomable mysteries, like a sense of the sacred, which I’ve touched on here in earlier posts. For her, it’s great fun to dismantle such ideas, because she does it so deftly, and here she is at the age of 78 still doing it, in her role as Research Professor at the University of Sussex. Her sense of triumph at solving puzzles is tempered by undiminished reverence for the wonders she carefully dissects. As her subject in the book is creativity, she picks a number of case histories, including Mozart, Kekulé (organic chemist famous for discovering the ring structure of benzene), Coleridge, Bach, the Impressionists, Kepler, Copernicus, Koestler, Poincaré. She picks them not just for being examples of creative genius from different fields, but also for their own views on how creativity manifests from within the heart and mind of man. This is fascinating enough, but she continually delves deeper, looking at the different kinds of explanation, different kinds of creativity, different kinds of lucky break, as in her chapter “Chance, Chaos, Randomness, Unpredictability”.

And then she brings in Artificial Intelligence, which she has clearly studied as deeply as she has poetry, music, how children learn language, all kinds of intricate lore. She doesn’t spare the reader by keeping to an overview. She takes you through detail, and sometimes gives you puzzles and exercises so that you can discover what she’s saying for yourself, not just let her words wash over you uncomprehended. So she explains how computational techniques such as parallel processing, heuristic & search-tree methods, semantic nets, neural networks can ape some of the creative processes humans perform. Genius, she avers, requires memory, connectivity, awareness of rules and readiness to break out from them into new areas of “conceptual space”. Computational models really can help. By teaching a computer the quickest way to learn English, for example, we can unravel the way young children learn their first language. First the child can only say “I go”, but then invents “I goed” instead of “I went”, and then at a later stage, more consciously understanding the rules for regular verbs, may say “I wented”. Creativity: to learn rules, then exceptions; finally to master both rules and exceptions to the point where you can take the rules to the extreme, and go beyond, to a conceptual space where new rules can be made, then broken and so on.

I haven’t got to the end yet, but there is one thing I haven’t found so far. She goes a long way to explain how creativity can occur. But why, and how, does it move us so? Is human creativity the same as Nature’s? Well of course it arises from Nature, so there must be a connection between the two. Not least of the beauty in her writing is that she opens new doors without slamming any others shut. And I can’t help comparing the significance of her research with earlier developments in understanding evolution and biology. Explanations don’t diminish the sense of wonder: they augment it.

Here’s a puzzle from her book. I hope I won’t be chased for breach of copyright.

“. . . try the following example on some friends chatting over coffee, you may find that the first person to solve it knows the least about mathematics. Engineers and physicists, for instance, usually have trouble with it (even though one might expect them to guess that there is some catch). Indeed, two world-famous mathematicians on whom I have tried it each refused repeatedly to answer, insisting that while the principle of solution is obvious the solution cannot in practice be found without either a computer or lengthy pencil-and-paper calculations.

“Here it is: There are two houses, x feet apart. A twenty-foot string is suspended between two points, A and B, on the neighbouring walls of the houses. A and B are at the same height from the ground, and are high enough to allow the string to hang freely. The vertical ‘sag’ in the string (the distance between the string’s lowest point and the horizontal line joining A and B) is ten feet. What is x? That is, how far apart are the houses?
. . .
“(One friend who solved this problem very quickly without pencil-and-paper—we were climbing Snowdon at the time—described himself as a ‘very bad visualizer’.)
. . .
People often say . . . that visual imagery aids creativity. So it may. But it can also prevent it.”

She doesn’t provide the answer. It took me a while. Let me know when you get it but please don’t reveal it here.

I find myself wondering which came first: that Snowdon climb or our visit to the Southern Fells around Wastwater. I might have learned a lot from her, fifty-two years ago. As it is, I think she’s changing my life anyway, telling me stuff I wouldn’t accept from Bryan White when we argued bitterly a few years ago. Ain’t that just the way? For now I see that if there can be a science of creativity, why cannot there also be a science of how we learn, or fail to learn, right from wrong? Why can’t there be a science of how some people overcome fear with love, and others do not? And then there might actually be progress in the world, contrary to the pessimism of John Gray, in his Straw Dogs.

Ah, but there is still “Chance, Chaos, Randomness, Unpredictability”. Hope is not dead yet, and the case continues.