Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to invite Josh Sheppard. He is an IEPR professor in Barcelona
and will be embarrassed if I mention many accomplishments like the ERC, the OEP book, the articles.
I think as well something that isn't mentioned enough is
just being a very good PI in the creative research community.
Like I would talk to his students behind his back and
they would say literally nothing for the nicest things.
And that is very, very bad. Right. And it's a real pleasure
to be here today to talk about agent fragmentation.
So thanks. That's very nice. Not entirely true.
All the nice stuff is not true about me,
but it's really lovely to be in Madrid.
I want to share some new ideas that I'm working on related to creativity.
So agent fragmentation and creative agency. I want to try to explain both
of those ideas today and a little bit about how they how they go together.
So the first thing that I'll talk about is creative agency.
Creative agency is an interesting type of agency and
there are a lot of different ways of thinking about it.
So I'm going to be very broad in how I
begin to think about creative agency.
So this is how I'm thinking of it. It's the kind of
agency that's deployed and developed in creative contexts.
There's a lot of ways to exercise creative agency
because this could be generating creative products.
It could be exercising creative processes.
It could be participating in creative practices.
It could be reaching creative achievements. And this is very
broad because there are many different kinds of creativity.
I think there's mathematical creativity where
people develop interesting mathematical proofs.
There's linguistic creativity. Someone that's a really
good writer or poet or good with metaphors or jokes.
There's scientific creativity. Interesting hypotheses and
science can show creativity and creativity in the arts.
Lots of different arts.
So there's creativity and dance and painting and acting.
OK, so this is very broad. And one really interesting thing
about creative agency is almost everybody thinks about it.
Thanks. There's something different about creative agency.
It's not exactly like agency in other kinds of contexts.
So a lot of people have been circling this kind of point.
So I want to give you some sense of what different
philosophers of creativity have recently been saying.
In a lot of different ways. So one thing that some people
emphasize is just how much luck creativity sometimes requires.
It's often the case that when you come up with a really creative
idea and you look back on how you had that moment of insight,
it seems like it might have been extremely lucky.
So Christopher Prud'homme, who wrote this article,
Lucky Artists, is arguing that sometimes creativity requires or is involved in so much luck that it's unclear
whether we should attribute the creative achievement to the actual person because there's too much luck.
And so it's a kind of challenge to creative agency.
Other people emphasize not just that there's luck,
but that there's there's different sorts of mental
capacities, psychological skills involved in creativity.
So this is Karen Gordycki arguing about aesthetic
agency, which is very similar to creative agency.
And she says, this is a quote from her. We have genuine aesthetic agency only
if we can exercise agency in acts of a capacity that is different from the will.
So the will would be the normal thing. But for her, it's what
she calls the rational affective capacity for appreciation.
Without an account of agency, exercise and appreciation,
we lack any account of genuine aesthetic agency.
So she's saying that while most people that work in
philosophy of agency emphasize the active nature of things,
the will and exercising the will and your planning
and your reasoning and your forming of intentions,
this capacity for appreciating is much more
important, she thinks, for this form of agency.
Maria Kronfelder and a lot of other people have emphasized
that creativity and when you're exercising creative agency,
there's a kind of independence from plans and rules. This was a feature
of constant kind of creativity as well, or at least an artistic genius.
So this is a quote from Kronfelder.
She says, we can raise our arms by willing,
but we can't come up with a solution of
a hard problem by the power of our wills,
at least as long as we do not know the solution already.
Creativity does not react to orders.
It occurs spontaneously if it occurs at all. In other words, creativity demands
partial independence from the intentional control and plans of the individual.
A lot of people emphasize she calls this spontaneity.
Other people talk about this in different ways.
It's interesting because on some accounts of agency, philosophical
accounts of agency at the core of agency is control and planning.
Michael Brodman famously emphasizes planning.
A lot of people, including myself, have emphasized control.
And here she's saying there's got to be some
independence from control and plans to get creativity.
Antonia Peacock makes the same kind of point
in a very recent paper on creative intentions.
So it's a long quote, but I'll read it just to
give you a sense of where she's coming from.
She says, what kind of impressive thing
does a creator do in creative conception?
Creative conception is coming up with a creative idea,
developing a creative project, something like this.
It's much easier to say what it couldn't
be than it is to say what it could be.
Most obviously, creative conception cannot be a matter of acting on an intention
that determinately specifies all the brilliant features of the idea that we can see.
That intention on which a creator acts would have to contain within
itself all the detail of the product of that creative conception.
Since having the intention at all would require the creator already to have
conceived the idea, this kind of intention would obviate its own execution.
It's a similar idea to the Kronfeller that
there's an independence from control and plans.
You can't fully come up with the plan for the creative idea.
Otherwise, there would be no point in continuing the creative process.
She says, look, even though there's this independence from kind of
action and plans, it seems that some kind of action is called for here.
There must be some sort of intention on which a creator
acts in conceiving the ideas for the great works.
The real challenge is to say what the
content of this state of mind could be.
She's thinking of it in terms of the content of a state of mind.
Other people like Gordyce keeps thinking about it in terms
of a specific capacity, which is a little bit different.
Kenneth Walden, this paper is forthcoming
in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
It's a really interesting paper. And he's arguing that
kind of creative agency has to be independent from plans.
And this is this is the argument that he's kind of giving right here.
He says, my suggestion is that the point of planning, what makes something
a plan, good or bad, depends on a particular regularity in the world.
And that makes planning ill suited to producing irregular things.
It's true that artists and inventors can plan out
large scale projects that turn out to be creative.
But it's not quite right to say these people are planning their creativity.
Instead, they're erecting a kind of scaffolding, a kind of support for
creative endeavors that makes the overall project more likely to succeed.
This scaffolding is an auxiliary to creativity, not its source.
So the idea here, Walden's idea, and it's consistent with
what Antonio Peacock said, with what Maria Kronfelder said,
what a lot of other people have said, is that you can get yourself in position
to exercise creative agency by setting up certain kinds of scaffolding.
But the essence of the thing is left somewhat mysterious.
And a lot of people feel this way.
And that might not be wrong. That might be right.
We could argue about it. But that's that's
the idea that a lot of people are working on.
Elliot Samuel Paul has talked about this kind of idea as it emerges
over the course of Western philosophy in the Western tradition.
And he argues that there's this paradox of creative agency
you see going all the way back to kind of Plato and Aristotle.
And he traces it through a lot of people in the history of philosophy.
The basic idea, this is this is Elliot's way of putting it, is that there's this
paradox where the origination of ideas is not an action the artist performs.
So in that sense, it looks like a passive.
These things just occur to you.
And yet the artist is praiseworthy for her originality.
So there's something active about that.
There's something that seems like that's their their agency.
OK. So those are a lot of different ways that people are trying to give a characterization
of creative agency and trying to say there's something a little bit different about it.
And there's a lot of ways they put it. So so people say creative agency doesn't
involve action or at least it doesn't involve action in the normal kind of way.
It doesn't involve standard intentions where you intend
exactly what to do and you follow your intention.
It doesn't involve a kind of planning capacity, but at least
not in the normal way. Planning seems somehow not the point.
It involves love. It involves what Crumfeld called
spontaneity or independence from from rules.
Yet it seems like it's something that you do.
So so we do give creative people a lot of credit.
We we tend to revere them. We tend to respect their
work as though it's something that they're doing.
So there's a question about how to explain this. And some people suggest
it might involve a novel capacity, this capacity for appreciation.
Other people suggest it might involve a
novel collaboration of lots of capacities.
Maybe there's a big story in the philosophy of
psychology to tell about how imagination contributes,
about how memory contributes, about how the
use of attention contributes to creativity.
These are things that. I've been working
on a little bit in other work here.
What I want to what I want to think about is how to take a step back and
put together pieces of this kind of puzzle, this puzzle of creative agency.
So that painting is supposed to look like a puzzle.
It's just illustrating.
You've got all these different parts. And the question is, is there a way to put
them together so that we can have some insight into the nature of creative agency?
And what I want to suggest is. That we can start to make progress
by thinking broader about the kind of structure of agency.
I mean, how that contributes to creativity.
So I want to develop an idea a little bit.
Actually, this idea needs more development.
So if you have ideas or criticisms or complaints.
I'm happy to hear them, but I want to develop some thoughts
about a gent of what I'll call a gent of fragmentation,
ways that agents can be not not fully integrative and
suggest that that's actually important for creativity.
So to understand the gent of fragmentation, it helps to understand
a little bit about the opposite of a gent of fragmentation.
That's a gent of integration, what it is to be well integrated as an agent.
And so there are two different ways you
might think about an agent being integrated.
What is functional integration?
So here's how I'm understanding functional integration.
You have functional integration to the extent that you have the kind
of right levels of causal sensitivity and functional assistance.
So it's the action production processes or mechanisms
operating in a mutually sensitive and beneficial fashion.
So adjustments to one part of how your mind works lead to
coherent adjustments to other parts of how your mind works.
And I'll give some illustrations of that in a minute.
So what processes, what mechanisms do I have in mind?
Well, one interesting thing about the philosophy of agency and one thing that
draws me to thinking about agency is it's kind of where everything in the mind
comes together. So it's perception, it's
cognition, it's motor stuff, it's emotion.
So it's all of these things. You've got forms of attention, forms
of memory, the different perceptual modalities, metacognition,
imagination, sensory motor control, working memory
and cognitive control and so on and so on and so on.
Right. All of these things might be more or less integrated.
So you can imagine somebody that's, you know, having trouble
where their memory is not connected to their metacognition.
If your memory is not connected to your metacognition, every time you
think you're about to remember something, you get this metacognitive sense.
Oh, I know the name of that band. I know the name of that person.
Memory never gives you the name.
And so you're just caught in this loop.
That would be terrible. The older I get, the more I'm like that.
People ask me, do you remember this time when we
went to that bar? What was the name of that bar?
And I'm like, do you remember that guy we met who
was telling the funny stories? What was his name?
I can never remember. OK. So that's a functional integration.
We can also think about a different form of
integration that's representational integration.
This is a matter of whether your representational mental states
display patterns of influence over other representational states.
In different kinds of circumstances.
So what kinds of representations do I have in mind?
Well, beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions,
perceptual and sensory representations.
All of them, because we're talking about agency. So the normal way that it
goes, if you're if you're displaying a lot of representational integration is.
You see something and you form a belief about that thing. You know,
so like I was talking before the talk about running away from a bear.
This is how I hurt my wrist. It's not really hard.
But the sad bear also enters the room.
Right. And I think, oh, there's a bear.
Immediately my perceptual state bear causes a belief in me.
There's a bear in the room. Right. If that's well
integrated with the rest of me, I get an emotion.
Right. It's just fear. Get really scared.
And then that integrates with my decision system.
I have a few choices to make. I can see if I can jump out the window. I could
see if I could run and try to save all of you by fighting the bear courageously.
I could hide under the, you know, if I'm well
integrated, that's what's going to be going on.
And so in the normal case, we understand pretty well
what good representational integration is, is like.
I'm going to suggest that in some cases where we're representationally
a bit disintegrated and that's important for creativity, actually.
Why do I distinguish these two things? Well, representational
and functional integration are not exactly the same thing.
We don't use representations to explain every aspect of agency.
So sometimes we just explain the organization of our parts can make us more
or less functionally integrated without representations being that important.
So that's not super important for what I'm doing, but it's
important that there are these two different forms of.
Integration and self-fragmentation. Now, there's there's a there's
an extra issue here that's just worth putting on the table.
I've talked about integration and fragmentation. It's possible to be integrated, even if
there's something like opaqueness in the way the process is communicated to each other.
So if you think about how memory retrieval works, when you try to remember
something, I don't know how my memory works from an introspective perspective.
If I try to remember something, I send
something like a search in my mind.
Like, what was that? What was the name of that band?
And then the name either comes or it doesn't.
I don't know what's going on.
I just know that my memory works or it doesn't.
That doesn't mean that I'm representationally fragmented.
That's kind of the way the memory is supposed to work.
Right. So there's one thing that's like I don't
have full awareness of what's going on in my mind.
And there's another question about whether
it's actually working in an integrated fashion.
Those are just different. And and so a lot of times what can look
like fragmentation is really just this opaqueness or disunification.
That being said, I think these often will kind of go together.
So the more disunified you are, the less sensitivity
you have to the other kinds of parts of your mind.
So the more likely there will be some fragmentation.
One way of thinking about this, if anyone thinks about modularity
in the mind, is that the more highly modular the mind is,
the greater chance there would be for
fragmentation to emerge. But it's not guaranteed.
OK. Now. Those are abstract ideas, representational
fragmentation, representational integration and so on.
There's a question about whether human
agency displays much fragmentation.
So you can imagine building a system like out
of Legos or something that's highly fragmented.
But are human beings this way? And one interesting thing to
just note is that most accounts of human agency in philosophy
assume pretty high degrees of integration,
both functional and representational.
This is this is just kind of what people
tend to focus on in the philosophy of agency.
So Dennis Buehler has got an interesting account of action.
And for him, action requires guidance or control.
It's the individual's guidance for Dennis
is constituted by the executive system.
This is a kind of psychological system that he
thinks that the cognitive psychology studies.
So he argues, and this is a quote from Dennis,
when the individual actively guides her behavior,
then the executive system regulates processing across
her subsystems throughout the execution of the action.
When the individual does not so guide,
then the executive does not so regulate.
So you don't have action without this kind of executive system kind
of doing the work of integrating all the other parts of the mind.
Right. It's like no action without high levels
of integration is kind of Dennis's idea.
Wayne Wu, it's got a recent book on action for him.
Action involves kind of control, intention, attention.
And these are highly integrated.
So just on the story he tells, I can't summarize the whole book in a minute, but attention and intention and working
memory are all working together to kind of make sure that the agent's behavior unfolds in this highly integrated fashion.
And that's his account of agency. People who write
in a different tradition and philosophy of agencies,
so people who tend to take their cue from Elizabeth Anscombe, the British
philosopher, often emphasize the importance of practical knowledge.
So if you talk to someone who is an Anscombean,
they will usually think something like this.
We don't act intentionally. We don't display this kind of like
more sophisticated forms of agency unless we know what we're doing.
So every time you're doing something, you have this kind of
knowledge of exactly what you're doing and how you're doing it.
And so this knowledge is providing a high
degree of representational integration.
It's this kind of state of mind that organizes all the
things you're doing and the ways that you're doing.
So Laura Macon, in a recent paper in Mind, writes of a capacity to locate the action
in the conceptual nexus that is constitutive of its being an intentional action.
And she says that's involved in every action. So in every action, you have
this capacity to locate what you're doing in this broader conceptual space.
And that's why it's an action that
you can locate it in this kind of way.
So locating the action for her is this
knowledge that provides a degree of integration.
There are other examples here. I think maybe I'll skip
this part about Marcus, except for this one quote.
When he's talking about belief and inference
of just the mental actions of inferring,
says the unity of the rational mind consists
in the subject's consciousness of that unity.
So we have this kind of self-consciousness,
self-awareness of what's going on in our mind.
And without that, we wouldn't be unified. And without that, we
wouldn't really display the forms of agency that he's talking.
Now, look. These people aren't really
thinking about fragmentation and that's OK.
So I'm not really criticizing their accounts of agency.
I think what's going on is that there's maybe an aspect of agency
that people haven't really noticed or paid much attention to.
And I think that might be important for thinking about creative agency.
So I wouldn't want to. This is what I'm saying on this slide here.
I don't want to deny that our agency, human agency,
involves lots of functional and representation integration.
There's good reasons to want to be integrated
and to try to integrate yourself in certain ways.
But I also think there's lots of evidence for
fragmentation, at least partial fragmentation.
That's often pushed to the margins of philosophy of agency.
But I think we need to bring to the surface.
So I'll give you some examples.
And most of these are drawn from from the sciences.
Now, all of them. So here's a really interesting result
that comes out of the study of ocular motor control.
That is how it is that you control where your eyes go.
It looks like, you know, from just
from the perspective of introspection,
it seems like I'm aware of where my
eyes go because I know what I'm seeing.
And I kind of want to see certain things.
So I look at the room in a certain kind of way.
But actually, like when you study this in
detail, that's what these papers are about.
Our eyes are often guided to salient features of the scene.
Like if you see a face that's like really emotional, you'll
look quickly and for a longer time at aspects of that face.
And you can put people in conditions where their eyes,
so their ocular motor control is drawn to
features of the scene that are important for them.
So they pick up important information, but they're not
aware that they were looking in that direction at all.
Check. They'll talk about looking in kind of a different direction.
So it looks like there's a kind of divide between the system that's guiding your eyes to move in
certain ways to give you information about the world and your kind of experience of seeing the world.
There's a kind of disintegration, which is really interesting. It looks like
it's in this case can be functionally somewhat useful, but it's often surprising.
OK. There is interesting work on the ways that we
represent the body that suggests something similar.
So you might think that here's a way you might design an agent.
They have one representational schema for the whole
body, and that lets them plan things with their body.
You know, you got to know where my arm is so I can know
where my legs are going to go so I can know where my head is.
But actually, more recently, research
looks to be suggesting something different.
This is a quote from this paper. The body schema that is the representation of the body has been
assumed for almost a century to be a common body representation supporting all types of motor actions.
Results demonstrate, though, that the body schema is
organized as multiple effectors, specific body representation.
So we don't have just one representation of our body.
We have a representation of the arm.
We have a representation of how the shoulder and the
elbow work together. We have a representation of the legs.
And these are these are separated.
So it's a kind of representational disunification.
That might promote fragmentation in some cases.
There's, I think, evidence for fragmentation from work on action slips.
So this is a paper by a friend of mine, Mirtso,
quoting Britney Spears in the title of the paper.
But action slips are things where you're planning
to do one thing and you accidentally do another.
So she's got a lot of examples here. I'll just mention a couple of them.
So an action slip that involves the wrong objects is where you.
Activate a kind of motor schema, but you specify the wrong object.
So her examples are pouring orange juice into your cereal instead of milk or throwing out
your gum and keeping the wrapper instead of throwing out the wrapper and keeping the gum.
You didn't think you were going to do that. What's going on there?
It looks like there's a failure of attention.
You fail to select the right kind of option.
In action slips that involve repetition. So putting sugar
into your coffee twice or taking your morning vitamin twice.
Again, you activate the correct kind of action plan.
But because you're not paying attention to the task, you just repeat
steps one after the other, even though you never really plan to.
Habit intrusion. So her example is going to the kitchen sink to
wash a dish, but finding yourself washing your hands instead.
So you just kind of lose focus on what you're doing. So the task is
not kept in working memory is the way that psychologists would put it.
And so you end up making a mistake. And there are
lots of these action slips that happen all the time.
The basic lesson here is working memory and attention are distinct from the things,
the motor control that actually pushes our body out into the world to do things.
And so these can lead to mistakes and failures of
coordination because there's not perfect integration.
Here's an example from philosophy. Weakness of will or accuracy.
So we use the will traditionally is understood like this.
You judge that one thing is the best option for you to do.
You think, what should I do with my afternoon?
I'm going to go to the Prado, whatever, and see some art.
That's the best thing for me to do.
What happens instead, you end up at the bar
or afternoon drinking cerveza or whatever.
Why? Well, it's an interesting question.
Philosophers debate why there is weakness of will.
You it's a it's a weird kind of case like. You think about it and you think,
I know the very best thing for me is that and I affirm that I endorse that.
That's the best thing. Why on earth would you
then go do something that's worse for you?
And there are a lot of different ways to try to explain it, but it looks
like one explanation that I kind of like is the motivational force,
the tempting pull of some action options that you consider is just
not fully integrated with your rational evaluation of these things.
I mean, so this suggests, you know, going all the way back to Plato, people try to talk
about, like, the fact that we have a divided mind to explain how this could even be possible.
And that kind of account is still popular
with some people in the philosophy of action.
I think it's some evidence for for fragmentation. If you look
in the literature on belief and belief storage and epistemology,
one thing that the epistemologists have been talking
about a lot lately is it looks like belief is fragmented.
So there's a kind of way that we store our beliefs, that
they're not in perfect communication with each other.
That can lead to irrational patterns of
thought, rational patterns of behavior.
This is probably the last example I'll give, but
one reason I'm giving so many examples is because.
The extent to which fragmentation impacts our behavior
requires like really assessing a number of different sources.
So it might not be a very big deal or it might be really calm.
I'm trying to suggest that it is actually fairly common.
So if you look at the reflexes. Reflexes are really interesting.
Philosophers of action never talk about the reflexes, but we have all
sorts of reflexes that work very quickly after something surprises us.
There's defensive reflexes. There's reflexes
for how you stabilize yourself in space.
So how I actually hurt my wrist as I was biking
on one of the city bikes in Barcelona in the rain.
And I know it's stupid, but, you know, the streets in Barcelona get
really slick when it rains and the tires on the city bikes are terrible.
And I've seen people wreck before. But anyway, I'm just biking.
I turned to the left barely and the bike just went out from under me.
So what did I do? I started heading towards the ground.
Well, there's like this vestibulocollic reflex and cervical collic
reflex kick in immediately to stabilize you like head in space.
And then I had the grounds approaching shot in my hand out.
And apparently this is how people break their wrists all the time. The
doctors see it and immediately know what happens because everyone does it.
It's not like I had a plan, an intention to
like throw your wrist out. It just happened.
I heard my wrist. OK. But that's actually
can be kind of useful in some cases.
But one of the point I'm trying to make about reflexes is there's many different
types. They operate in different ways, but they often bypass intention.
That's the point I want to make. Now, you've got an intention.
You've got plans for what you're supposed to do.
I think what I was thinking as I fell off the bike, if I try to remember, I had a
bag on the bike and I was kind of trying to make sure that the bag had food in it.
I was biking home with groceries. I didn't want
the bag to crash. So my intention was save the bag.
It's a stupid intention to have, but my reflex was throw
your hand to the ground to like, I guess, protect your body.
And I guess that's evidence for fragmentation because you
have a kind of intention or a plan for what you're doing.
And then you also have all these other things that are
capable of causing your body to move in different ways.
The reflexes that aren't any part of your plan. So.
So to a certain extent, your reflexes are somewhat fragmented for me.
So, OK. You have a lot of examples.
I want to suggest I haven't made the full
argument, by the way. This is very impressionistic.
But it looks to me that there's some evidence that human agents, you and
I, are functionally and representationally disunified at the very least.
And this can promote fragmentation. In some cases, this is bad.
It leads to irrationality. It leads to weakness of will.
This kind of stuff leads to action slips.
But sometimes it's helpful for agency.
So, you know, our reflexes are often protected for us.
Oftentimes this is, you know, like fragmentation
of belief is sometimes resource efficient.
We have limited cognitive resources. It can be quite
good to store these things in a fragmented way.
So sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad.
Here's what I want to think about for the rest of this talk.
How might fragmentation relate to creativity? And I'm going to
suggest that it enables creative agency and in some circumstances.
OK. The basic idea, I want to try to
illustrate this to give a sense of it,
but the basic idea is that fragmentation enables
certain kinds of gaps in how we control our behavior.
These are gaps in our knowledge of what we're doing.
These are gaps between our plans and what we actually do.
And these gaps are filled in by capacities that we have
to operate kind of according to their own principles.
So we kind of let aspects of our agency take over in creative contexts,
and that enables us to produce interesting, surprising things.
That's what the creative person is often looking for.
So that the partially fragmented capacities operate kind of independently
is what allows for this kind of apt and surprising behavior.
That's the basic idea. But you can ask, you
know, which capacity? That's very abstract.
So which capacities are these that I have in mind? And here we come to a really
interesting question for the philosophy of creativity and for the science of creativity.
So you can have a debate in the philosophy and science of creativity
about whether creativity is what I'll call a domain general capacity.
So it's just some basic thing you bring to every situation and you're
able to pick up something that's creative or whether it's domain specific.
OK. Possibly there are domain general creative capacities.
Cognitive flexibility is often suggested to be one of them.
I actually am not convinced. I'll get another paper on that.
So I'm happy to talk about that.
But in the neuroscience of creativity, you often find people
saying, oh, cognitive flexibility supports creativity.
And the thought there is the more cognitively flexible you are, whatever that is, the more
flexibility you have in your cognition, the more likely you are to be a kind of creative person.
But I think it's likely that there are going to be
domain specific capacities that are really important.
That is to say. Like you can think about linguistic creativity, creative idea
production, creative action and motor context or mathematical creativity.
There's no great reason to think in my mind that if you're mathematically
creative, that's you're also going to be linguistically creative.
Those drawing different skills, different
capacities that are specific to the task at hand.
I think there's no great reason to think that if you are a really creative DJ or sound producer
or guitarist, you would also be a really creative visual artist and make really amazing paintings.
Those drawn different kinds of capacities, visual creativity,
auditory creativity, if you like, or something like that.
So you say so if you want to understand how creativity works and how fragmentation might
assist creativity, you really have to go and look in detail at specific kinds of cases.
So if you want to understand linguistic creativity, you have to start to think about theories of speech and word production, word learning, how semantic
memory is structured to call on different concepts at different times when you're trying to write a poem or say something interesting in conversation.
The same thing with like context like dance and jazz, where there's a lot of motor
control going on for the improvising jazz guitarist or the improvising dancer.
You might think that features of motor adaptation and motor control are really important in that case
and the ways that that relates to how you imagine your body moving, how you imagine playing the guitar.
So there's a lot of different kinds of ways you might think about this.
But the big picture claim, I mean, the thing that I just kind of want to put on the table with this
talk is, look, I think creative agency really is in some cases distinct from normal intentional agency.
And I think one reason we can understand that it is, is because in many places in the exercise of creative agency, when
people are trying to be creative, their creativity runs through, is enabled by functional and representational fragmentation.
That's kind of the idea.
So I think the last thing I want to do, I want to illustrate
how that looks by just talking for a minute about improvisation.
One of the things that got me actually interested in creativity was I was working on some stuff to do
with action and consciousness, and I started to read improvisers and see how they talk about their work.
So by improvisers, I mean people that
improvise music, jazz musicians, dancers.
I met some people in Barcelona who are improvisational dancers and was talking
to them about how they can see what their practice is really interesting.
Hip hop, like improvisational rappers. I like improv rap.
There's all these YouTube videos where people are
making up what they're doing as they go along.
That's that's one way you can think about it.
So there's a lot of different forms of improvisation.
But what improvisers, improv comedies, another
one, comedians who react to each other on the fly.
What improvisers are often trying to do is produce kind of surprising, unplanned actions, but not just any surprising, unplanned action, nothing just random,
actually something that's interesting, something that's good, something that the community that they're working with says, oh, we didn't see that coming.
And that was great.
So here's a quote from Michelle Merritt,
who's a dancer, but also a philosopher.
So this is in a philosophy paper, but she's
talking about what it feels like to improvise.
She says, I can attest to the phenomenological difference between having
to think about the movement and simply letting the movement happen.
In the former case, your thoughts are like blueprints for actions.
So that's the kind of plans are guiding
intentions are guiding kind of case.
And we saw from like Maria Kronfelder earlier and Kenneth Walden, people
like this in creative agency, there's often an independence from plans.
And she's saying the same things, what it feels
like to her to improvise when she's dancing.
She says in the latter case, it's as if all the movements
you spent so many years learning to perfect just happen.
This experience of you're not the one
controlling it, but still really good.
Are they skilled dance movements are occurring?
These are some other non not philosophers, but just
dancers in interviews talking about their practice.
The roots of porous and sometimes my body seems to have a mind of its own.
It fidgets slumps and jerks while my mental attention is elsewhere.
David Apple says there's a feeling in dancing
that something is singing itself as I'm moving.
I don't know whether it's me that's doing the same or whether, in fact,
what I probably think it is, is that something is singing through me.
There's a question of allowing myself to be a conduit for this.
There's one really interesting feature that doesn't
feature heavily in what I was kind of talking about today.
But interesting feature of these reports, which is that there's often like agency and intelligence
and sophistication attributed by the person, not to themselves, but to some part of themselves.
So the force of my body seems to have a mind of its own.
And Apple says something is singing itself through me when I'm
dancing, as though, you know, he's not in total control of it.
But what's happening is interesting and he wants this kind of thing.
OK, so we can ask. I mean, this is a much bigger
topic, but I'm just going to be brief here.
We can ask what's really happening psychologically in improvisation.
I think there's probably two levels of description for what's going on.
So one level of description you have,
like what the agent's up to in general.
The agent's trying to shake their action
and their activity towards some kind of end.
They're trying to be responsive to some space of norms.
So in cases of improvisation, the improviser
knows what they're doing in an abstract way.
What are you doing? I'm improvising. What are you doing? I'm trying to say something funny
or I'm trying to respond to the drummer with what I'm playing on the piano or whatever.
OK, that part is not that mysterious. What's mysterious is that this fine
grained level of description, sort of fine grained level of description.
You have spontaneity. You have really surprising things going on.
You have the improviser doing things they didn't expect to do that might
even feel like mistakes, but that everyone thought were really good.
So there's this really nice paper by Robin and Huffington where they they interviewed a bunch of
improvisers and then tried to reconstruct, like, theoretically aspects of what the improvisers were saying.
And one way they talk about this is they say improvisers often engage in
what they call an oscillatory process of assuming and relinquishing agency.
So you have this back and forth where you're letting go of control
and letting things happen with the way that you're behaving.
And then you're trying to take control back for
a minute and guide it in some more specific ways.
And they connect us to the experience that improvisers have.
So they interviewed a saxophonist, Torben Schneckestein.
And this is them summarizing what the saxophonist says. He says, look, you might
learn to play multifonically, producing a number of unstable undertones and overtones.
He says, I usually say this is the saxophonist.
I usually say I'm not playing a solo. I'm playing a duo.
It's me and the sax. And we sometimes work
together and sometimes against each other.
So he's attributing a kind of sophistication and agency, but in this case to an object,
which is interesting to the saxophone and probably to how he's playing the saxophone.
So he says even with great skill, he can't fully control the multifonics.
He can't fully control the sounds that are happening. So surprising
tones or sounds sometimes emerge as part of his improvisational practice.
He often deliberately pushes his play toward this state of losing control and
the unexpected sound becomes a fertile ground for yet other improvisations.
So the thought here, just to think about the saxophonist, is he's not fully integrated
with everything that his fingers are doing and his mouth is doing with the sax.
He's letting certain kinds of interesting things emerge. And he's
thinking about this as though he's he's pushing himself to lose control.
But that's exactly what he wants to do in improvisation. So in a way, he's kind of
leaning in to his fragmentation to produce something that's creatively interesting.
Now, my thought is. I think that that's an
important, not the whole account of creative agency.
I think that's an important part of creative agency. And so what I want to think
about more is how much this can help explain what's going on with all these
mysterious features of creative agency. From earlier in the talk,
I talked about how it doesn't involve action in normal ways,
doesn't involve planning in normal ways, involves luck
and spontaneity, it might involve novel capacities.
I think thinking about fragmentation might help us to explain why
creative agency has so many of these puzzling and bizarre features.
OK, that's it. Yeah. Thank you.
I like a lot when you say that we may wonder
if creativity is specific and general.
And then, for example, with improvisation, it's very good. I come from philosophy, but I work with a
psychometrician and for them it's absolutely sure that creativity is specific and they identify it with a skill.
And I have the impression that that fits very well with your idea, especially in improvisation and
in the course you provided, because people train a lot, they acquire some automatic capacities.
And because of this, they are able to work at the general goal and for
something that is more fine grained, they can let it go automatically.
And so my question would be about the integration and non-integration idea, because I am not sure that I have
the impression that what you mean here is that integration is a matter of metacognition or phenomenology.
You have the impression that it's not belonging to you, but actually, and that's why I
like this idea of skill, your action is still guided by the higher order goal you have.
And it's why you play a saxophone, you give rise to something
that is in the same direction of what you want to do.
You don't just do something randomly. So maybe can you explain
why you need this idea of integration and non-integration?
Is it for accounting for our phenomenology or do you think that there
is a real discrepancy between our general goal and the other actions?
Thank you. It's a good question. I think that phenomenology can be one clue
to whether you're integrated at a moment or when you're behaving or not.
But I don't think that phenomenology will be the whole story.
So sometimes, you know, you're not aware of everything that your body
is doing when you're dancing improvisation or something like that.
But that doesn't guarantee that you're fragmented.
It just means you're not aware of everything that's happening.
Your whole like your mind and your body as
a system might still be working just fine.
So I suppose what one thing that I think is.
Why fragmentation becomes important, especially in creative contexts, is because you might have a very abstract
goal to kind of dance in a way that's wild or to respond in a way that's quick and smart and very sarcastic.
If you're being a comedian or something, you have this abstract goal.
But very specifically, what you do, you don't want to control that because
because you want to do something surprising and you want to do something.
It won't be interesting unless it's surprising.
And so if you have to surprise yourself, you have to produce
behavior that the goal is not telling you what to do.
The goal is maybe marking out a space like
something in this region of the normative space.
But you could do anything here.
And what you really want is to surprise yourself.
So to surprise yourself, you have to get some
distance from kind of planning things out.
And so that's that's at least why I'm tempted by the idea
that fragmentation has a role to play in helping to explain.
It's certainly in lots of cases involves lots of skill,
lots of prior training and all that kind of thing.
But it's the the in exercising the skill, you're kind of like able to release yourself from the
control of like metacognition, cognitive control, planning and let other parts of yourself take over.
Thanks so much. This is super interesting.
So I am kind of not really persuaded, but I want to go.
I mean, I want to be persuaded. But the problem is that I have this
thing. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to explain it correctly.
But the kind of cases that you describe that exhibit fragmentation seem to have like this
structure where you have a plan of doing something and something else completely different happens.
This can be good or bad, but if it goes in the good way, well, you
would describe it as you know, you're lucky or whatever, right?
It's luck rather than something that you died in. But it seems to me that the cases of
creativity are precisely in the opposite side, whereby you do have a sort of a plan.
Right. But you don't know how to achieve it. And what you come up with is
something that really is integrated to your plan, to what you wanted to do.
But you didn't know exactly. I mean, you couldn't represent
it or you weren't aware of how that happened. Right.
So it seems that in a way, I am more prone to think that as an integration. And the way you
describe the literature, I mean, it's true that there has to be some independence of plan.
But it's very important in the literature of creativity that it's not completely, I mean,
if it's complete, full luck, then you can't praise the person for being creative. Right.
So it has to be a spontaneous action in the sense that you cannot
follow rules. So you may have a plan and you may well have a plan.
You may well have something that you want to solve, a mathematical problem
or a good piece of music, but you can't represent every step of the way.
But that doesn't mean that it's completely independent of plans.
That just means that you can't know every step of it. Right.
So in a way, what I'm saying is like it seems that in creativity, what happens is that
you do have a sort of a plan, a sort of idea, a guiding thing that you want to do.
And what happens in the end is that, you know, the idea
that you have, it's very much integrated with that plan.
It's not like in the model of the fragmentation
cases where it goes completely the other way.
I mean, it's another thing that you were planning to do.
So in a way, I mean, I'm thinking like it's more perhaps.
I mean, why can't we think that it's precisely integrated action rather
fragmented action, but in a way that the integration is not under our control?
And then I guess I guess that that's, you know, whether your faculties are integrated
or your representations are integrated or not, it's not fully in your control or not.
I mean, that's you didn't I mean, you said you
mentioned something about opaqueness that that might be.
I mean, I was more persuaded by that part.
So, yeah, I mean, sorry for the fragmented.
I mean, I think I agree with you or
with the thrust of what you're saying.
So you can imagine a highly fragmented system, not a human being, but just, you know, someone that
got built that was capable of producing very random behavior, you know, that was very unpredictable.
And some of those things, if what that system is producing
is like actions or ideas or objects, you know, whatever.
Some of those things might be really interesting
and you might think that's very useful.
You wouldn't be tempted to call it kind of creative
because it's so fragmented. It's it seems random.
So this gets to the kind of paradox of
creative agency that Elliot all talks about.
You're trying to find something in the middle where there's elements of what you're
doing that are surprising, that don't don't seem like under your full control.
But then still, it seems like it's something
you do, something you're good at, you know.
So, you know, if you could imagine like a playwright or somebody trying to come up with interesting
ideas for a new play, if they're really good, really creative playwright, they're producing good plays.
They produce not just one, but like five or six or seven.
You know, well, how do you explain that?
A lot of times the way that this gets discussed in philosophy, creativity and
in the sciences is there's kind of like two different sides of the process.
You come up with ideas and then you judge whether
they're any good and you integrate them or you don't.
So you're selecting a lot of candidates for for a character or a
sentence or a plot line, and then you're picking the best ones.
So the ideas at the end of the day are going to be very well integrated. You're
going to you're going to have a lot of agency in how you write your play.
What I'm thinking about here is that moment where you're actually coming up with ideas just to coming up with
ideas for you have to come up with interesting ideas or else you'll never make progress in writing a play.
So that's that's the place that more fine grained place
where I want to suggest fragmentation is really useful.
But I think if you look at if you zoom way out and look at the
whole process, of course, there's kind of like a general plan.
You've got a general method. You've got skills that you put to work.
So there's like there's like a combination of agency and something
a little more surprising that I think is being brought together.
And I think fragmentation helps with explaining explaining. I want to suggest it
helps with explaining how we come up with the surprising parts of our activity.
But what fermentation rather than integration theory,
because, you know, both of them could work in the same way.
I mean, you don't need your faculties to be
or, you know, your beliefs to be not connected.
I mean, you can't ignore it. They cannot. Right. I mean, so I don't I don't see the argument for one rather than the other, where I see that, you
know, if it's integrated, it makes sense that you come up with that thing because it's connected in a way that you could foresee, but it's connected.
So it's an integrated thought.
So I believe that these may work in solving this problem.
Maybe I didn't have it in my mind, but it's connected. If it were connected, then
it wouldn't be relevant for the kind of question that I'm trying to solve. Right.
That's interesting. So I think the issue there,
then, is what we're saying when we say integrate.
Yeah. So, I mean, the way I'm hearing you talk about it, it makes sense.
Some things integrated in the sense that it
kind of comes out of your your knowledge base.
It's, you know, involves something like conceptual recombination
in a way that makes sense of how you think of things and so on.
That makes sense. If you think about a case like how motor stuff is often like the actual ways
that we move the body is often disconnected from intentions in cases of action, such as reflexes.
That case seems maybe a little clearer to me as a case where fragmentation might allow you to
produce really interesting, unusual movements that are nonetheless useful in cases of improvisation.
But I think I think the thing to do, the thing that I need to do is to think more carefully about the specific
cases to see whether fragmentation is useful in certain cases, because it might be in some cases and not another.
So, in your account for creativity, you need two things. So you need the
relevant non-intentional skills and then you also need to be fragmented.
So, could it be said that one of the capacities, or maybe one of the traits involved in creativity is precisely its disposition to be fragmented or to manifest
fragmentation so that more fragmented people or people that are able to get into more fragmented states are in a way more creative or have the potential to be more creative?
The question is, do you think we have any control, direct or indirect, about fragmentation,
about becoming fragmented or getting ourselves to positions where we are more fragmented?
Because in the improvisation bit, some of the things that
were said by different people pointed in that direction.
So, you sort of like have your attention elsewhere, you relinquish control.
So, do you think we have intentional or intentional control over these things?
Can we train ourselves or maybe even directly manipulate our, I don't know, separate and
make sure that we become fragmented and then we are in a better position to be creative?
That's really interesting. I think I want to say yes. I mean, I think the saxophonist, what the saxophonist was saying seemed
to be, he seemed to be saying something like he tries to put himself in a position where he loses control and he takes it back.
So, he's trying to get himself into a space
where he's behaving in a somewhat fragmented way.
Whether this would be a kind of general disposition in some people, I
mean, I'm not sure, but I'm attracted to the thought that it could be.
You often, you know, this is part of some of our myth about, you know, the artist is that
they have a certain kind of personality and fragmentation might be a way to understand that.
I don't know for sure, but I'm attracted by that thought.
The type of control we have about getting ourselves
into more fragmented forms of behavior or states.
It's interesting. I don't know. I mean, I'm not myself a terribly
creative person, but I would think it's a form of indirect control.
So, there are ways you can put yourself in circumstances or prompt yourself to be in a
certain headspace, what you might call a cognitive mode or a cognitive style or something.
That's more conducive to creative agency.
And people do talk about trying to do, but it seems indirect.
It seems like trying to push yourself into the right position, but
you can't just get there directly or just because you decide to.
And do it directly to people in line.
The next on my list is Maria.
Thank you. Thanks. Thanks a lot. So, I found the talk very fascinating.
And so, I have a small comment about some possible
evidence that might be in favor of your general thesis.
It might be trivial, but I just was, I would anyways say that it was about, but I
actually don't recall how much weight you put on the idea of executive function.
But there's this evidence relating ADHD and creativity.
So, it's people that have impaired executive function
and they are found to be on average more creative.
So, but that was just an aside in case. I mean, I don't know how much you would put on that,
on how much you would put up, how much weight you would put on that kind of evidence or not.
But the other comment was about, so in following your saxophone
example, and in general, your examples about improvisation,
I was wondering how much what you're saying might
be just true of all forms of spontaneous action.
And whether that in a way puts a challenge to some
of your overall thesis, because I was thinking,
so suppose sex follows a lot of what you were
describing, but it's neither public nor not.
There's a name for creativity necessarily.
There might be, but not necessarily.
And whether that counter example points in to the, I mean, opens up the need for you sort of,
or your account also thinking of other social determinants of what we consider creative or not.
So, it's not in the way we do the thing,
but in the way other people see it. Right.
So, I was wondering if that, how would you, yeah,
how would you, what would you say to that sort of?
Yeah, thanks. So, about the point about ADHD, I mean, the science of creativity does
often look for traits or features of people that correlate with creative performance.
And so you might think that, yeah, different functioning of attention
would be one along different, different metrics, including ADHD.
People look at whether a propensity to mind wander, if
you mind wander a lot, is that related to creativity?
I think those are interesting places to look. And in each case, it's it's it would
be worth thinking about whether that has anything to do with fragmentation or not.
In some cases, yes, maybe. And in some cases, no. About about whether
this kind of fragmentation can occur in non-creative contexts.
I think this is a question in the background of any work on
creativity or creative agency, which is like, what is creativity?
And, you know, there's philosophers debate that still. So, I think that some normal
aspects of human behaviour, you can think about them as models for creativity.
Conversation is one. So some people are really creative in conversational contexts, but that's not
quite the same thing as these more aesthetically loaded domains where we give artists a lot of credit.
So in this talk, I'm kind of starting from thinking about creativity in these contexts where where we're trying to, like,
really assess artworks for, you know, the level of originality and novelty and depth of insight, that kind of thing.
But I think one thing I think is when you start to think about the structure of agency in general, if you think that fragmentation is just a
feature or at least partial fragmentation is a feature of human agency, then you start to think, well, it's going to show up all over the place.
And I think that that's I think there's evidence for that as well. So, so part of what I'm trying to do is just apply what
I think is a more general lesson about how human agents work and function to more specific kind of aesthetic contexts.
Yes. I want to ask you about the scope of your approach. I'm aware, because I'm
going to the philosophy of science, of creativity concerning scientific production.
There's a lot more concerning, for example, multiple simultaneous discoveries,
where, as Maria was saying, social determinants are probably very important.
There is another strand that tries to identify
something similar to what you're doing, the lack aspect.
So an analogy has often been done with in between scientific discovery and mutation, random mutation in biology or biological
processes that are, you know, kind of that have an element of randomness, let's say, or spontaneity, whatever it means.
I have no clue, but that's another issue.
I was also thinking about artificial kind of creativity.
So if you think about AI, for example, and you think about not so much unsupervised,
but generative AI, there is also there an element of what you were saying.
But as Paloma was saying, there is also an element of integration.
So, for example, in AI, you've got the system that creates data, but then there is the system
of rules in order to take all data into consideration and come up with different outcomes.
So, for you, given that you gave lots of examples concerning improvisation, and I can relate to that, not because I'm an artist, but I
remember when I was playing tennis that after a while I felt, I would call it passive knowledge, I had assimilated, you know, some capacities.
And it seemed, at least to me, that I was
playing better, which was not the case.
But, you know, there are so many elements. And so I want to ask you whether you're
thinking about taking all these other strands concerning creativity into account.
And if you want to build a theory that encompasses also, for example, I don't know, animal or biological agents, non-human
being creative, like, I don't know, crows opening bottles of milk or cracking nuts, if they have creativity at all.
So, my question is, where do you go from, you know, because
you're talking a lot about artistic creativity in the human face.
Yeah. Right. So, I am interested in terms of the background project on creativity and all the
things you were just talking about, and all of those angles on creativity, really interesting.
So, I mean, maybe just two things to say. One is, these ideas about fragmentation are really
quite narrow in scope, because the question there is, how does human creative agency operate?
And so how can features of the structure of human
agency explain ways that humans are creative or not?
There's a chance that that could apply in some cases
to non-human creativity and other animals, I think.
That you have to think about the specific animal, you know.
There's a much bigger issue that's in the background of this talk that is in the background of what you were
talking about, which is this general pushing towards a general account of what creativity is and how it's produced.
So, if you think about AI or machine creativity, there's a kind of question
about whether it can be creative that people are talking a lot about these days.
There's also a question about what those processes look like, you know.
So, does it, so an AI that produces creative products,
let's say, let's just assume that that can happen.
Is it anything like the way that humans do it? And should that inform, I think it
should inform, but how should that inform our theory of what a creative process is?
So, when people ask what is creativity, they often, the answer is fragmented, because there's, you can think about creative
products, just actions or objects that you produce, creative processes, which is how you go about producing products.
But you can do that more or less creatively, and that might be a psychological process, or for an AI, it might be
something else, an algorithmic process, a computational process, if not at all like the way the human mind works.
And so, ultimately, I think what you want, if you're a philosopher of creativity, is a kind of understanding of all these different
ways we apply the term creativity and how they either go together, or maybe how they're actually about just completely different topics.
We just happen to use the term creativity to talk about
products and professions and people and all this stuff.
So, I want to understand all those things, but that's a piecemeal
effort, right? So, that's why this talk is much more narrow.
Yes.
Can I hear you?
Can you unmute yourself?
Hello, I can't see you either.
Hello?
Thank you for your talk. Something has been hinted at before in some of the questions, but I was kind of concerned that under this
account, creativity was, in some scenarios, could be a byproduct of low skills in other aspects or impairments of other skills.
Like, I'm thinking, for instance, in neuroscience, there are some
experiments where different aspects of memory are tested together.
Like, there is a mouse or a rat that needs to find food, and there's a maze where the food is hidden, and the
mouse needs to navigate the maze and also do something, like a procedure, and then the mouse gets the food.
So, spatial memory and procedural memory are tested.
Then, what happens when you theoretically inhibit one of these two memories for the two at the same time, other abilities
kick in to compensate, and then you see improvisation and sometimes creative behaviors where the mouse gets the food.
This is because, in a way, these memory blueprints, like the
space or the procedure, are like plants, like implicit plants.
So, once you don't have these plants because you have pharmacologically
impaired the memory of the animal, then you see more creativity.
In this case, could creativity depend on impairments or
having low ranking loads, other abilities like memory?
In this case, could creativity be the byproduct of other
good skills where you are trained going to the rescue?
Yes, I think so. I mean, that's an interesting thought.
So, one feature of the discourse on creativity is
it's almost always considered a positive thing.
You know, like if you've been creative, we mean
to say you did something good in a vague way.
But some of the constraints that you place on, so for example, like the case with the mice, you know, the rat in the
mazes, some of the constraints that you give to an agent that enable creativity might be negative for them overall.
But, you know, in a specific circumstance, they have to behave in a really surprising
way that we call creative because of the constraints that you've given them.
So, that makes a lot of sense to me.
My worry would be that maybe, let's say, creativity is a
latent ability that jumps in when the situation requires it.
But the situation requires it, maybe because
there are problems with other abilities.
So, we may attribute creativity to people that are
in this situation because the situation requires it.
And some people, we tend to consider not so creative only because they don't need it, because
they have their memory capacities intact or they are very good, so they just plan ahead.
And this may be bad in some scenarios where creativity is needed, but because
they are so meticulous, they have very strict plans, it just doesn't show.
So, there are kind of two ways of seeing creativity here, as a latent ability that
may or may not show, or as a byproduct of other abilities compensating for others.
Yeah, I mean, I think that sounds right.
And so, I wouldn't worry so much about that with respect
to the kind of things I wanted to say about fragmentation.
I just think that if you have a kind of view of creativity in the background, where it involves a lot of kind
of processes of social assessment and social judgment, you can think there's a lot of different ways to do that.
So, someone who has no deficits, like you say, might be really good at producing things that the
community finds novel and useful and appropriate or whatever your definition of creativity is.
So, they're giving us creative products, but the way that they go about it doesn't
involve this independence from rules or planning in the way that it does for other people.
I think those things are kind of consistent with each other. So, I think there's
multiple routes to producing something that gets certified as creative by communities.
Philippe?
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah, sorry, I'm on the phone and turns out
I'm a boomer and I can't operate my phone.
So, I have a similar worry to the earlier on mine question, I think also Palomas, just the account
of creativity that you're giving doesn't seem to be giving the other half of the account, right?
So, how you actually choose the good ideas and whatever.
But anyway, so that's been raised, but I also think I'm not sure how sort of
novel or contrasting with existing accounts of creativity, the first part is.
So, the agentive fragmentation is, it seems to me, so I guess this would be the objection to
which I'd like to know what you think, seems to me is sort of the sort of improvisational,
agentive side of the general view of creativity, all the ideas that creative people have more
sort of, they have an easier time connecting different domains or different bits in their brain.
I think there was some earlier science, if I'm not wrong, from examining Einstein's
brain, that some of the connections between neurons span a bit more widely than others.
So, that seems to be a very old idea that people who are creative connect
different bits of the brain or the mind more easily than people who are not.
And your case is more to do with agent-based forms
of art, like improvisation, playing, and whatever.
And then you'd need to have something similar for more contemplative,
I guess, forms of art, like writing or things like that.
So, I'm not sure what adds to the literature, this
account of creativity. Maybe I'm missing something.
Is the objection that the fragmentation idea
doesn't add to the connection kind of account?
Yeah, the first bit. So, as you were saying, usually the creative, so accounts of creativity,
they have the first bit that they say, you know, you connect lots of different things.
And then the second bit, you choose the right, the
bits that are more creative or whatever. Right.
And I'm not sure the first, so the second part, I think there's a problem. I'm
not sure how you sort of, that you've given an explanation, the second part.
The first part, I'm not sure how different. So, I mean, it
focuses on agents, on agency, rather than on cognition in general.
But that seems to me just because you're talking about forms of
art that are very agent-oriented, like improvisation and music.
But I think the general account still stands that you've got creative people who are
more able to connect different parts of the brain or the mind than non-creative people.
So. I think that the things I was saying today were not meant to be
necessarily in conflict with those kinds of accounts of creativity.
The point was a kind of structural one about the structure of agency that's supposed to form
a part of an explanation for how agency plays a role in helping us understand creativity.
To go beyond what I said in the talk and try to address some of
these other accounts of creativity would be, you know, more work.
But if you look, if you think about the accounts that say, oh, creativity is
mostly or involves people being able to connect different parts of the mind.
So it involves like more flexible structure of semantic memories, the way that some people
put it, or it involves on the blind variation selective retention account of creativity.
It involves the kind of capacity to have
really interesting associative structures.
So, you know, the blind variation part of it involves
you generating really surprising associations.
I'm not super sold on any of those kinds of accounts. I actually think that there's there's room to see agency beyond
something like association and beyond something like semantic memory structure in those kinds of moments as well.
But I think that that goes beyond beyond strictly
with the fragmentation idea is supposed to do.
So I think that you can have a debate about how it is that creative ideas are
generated and how they're integrated into the overall product you're trying to produce.
And you can offer accounts of those sorts of things. And then you can see whether fragmentation
is kind of useful as a part of a broader account of how kind of creative agency works.
And I would want to keep those separate, even though I
think there is explanatory relationships between them.
And I am next on the list.
Yes, you talk about creative agency and at one point you
talked about the aspects of agency taking taking over.
But then I was wondering, couldn't one just say that creativity involves these various aspects that
are personal or non-agental, but isn't to say that they themselves are agental, like kind of reflexes.
I mean, myself, I guess there's probably a lot of philosophers
who agree with me to say that a reflex isn't agental.
It's just, you know, like you've kept my knee and it spasms up.
So that doesn't really seem agental.
And like the I guess this kind of relates to Bloomer's point about how many things can be brought into the action
scheme that the endoscopium would say, well, your action is agental under the description that you see it under.
And it's as far as the question why it's applicable. But obviously,
there's going to be like lots of components that you don't know about.
And maybe it's not intentional or agential under that description.
I intend to pick up the pen, but the sea fiber is fine.
Like all the you know, the weird like visions, you know, who,
you know, what goes on in fission science, you know, who knows.
And but then on agential, they're like
the subcomponents that realise it.
So could one say that, yes, we do have this kind of maybe
integrative account of agency as far as what is agential.
Are the things done under certain mode of description,
but that can be broken down in order to realise that goal.
There's all kinds of random things. And just that, you know, let's see if I
was far in some ways to pick up the pen when I'm improvising in a certain way.
Some random stuff happens, but that itself isn't agential.
Although I was wondering about like the reflex things seems a bit of an odd
one to bring in, because I wouldn't say that improvisation seems simple.
Reflexes in the same way that you had a reflex when you're
out, it would be kind of more intelligent kind of reflex.
It's funny to that reason in some way, but isn't
like, you know, when you hit my knee and it goes up.
So, yeah, so rambling with saying that, is it really that you want to say that all of
these processes are agential or just that creativity involves non-agential processes?
I don't want to say that all of them are agential.
Creativity will involve some that aren't.
I think these things come in degrees.
Is that kind of how I feel like the personal
subpersonal distinction involves a lot of properties.
And I think some processes have half of those properties.
So in some ways, they seem so personal in some ways.
They seem personal on many different ways of drawing a distinction.
So just to give you an illustration, reflexes are often like this
paradigm of passive, non-agential things, at least for philosophers.
But when you actually look at reflexes as they show up, when we've
studied them, there's an interesting range of sophistication and reflexes.
So when you're like moving your arm out to grab something,
if you if you bump the arm, there's a whole reflex arc.
So initially from like zero to 50 milliseconds, there's
this really quick, like stabilizing reflex that happens.
And then for 50 to like 100 milliseconds after you're bumped, there's what's called a long latency
stretch reflex where your arm is starting to react in a way that is actually sensitive to your intention.
So depending on where I'm reaching and how fast
I want to reach, that reflex will be different.
In other words, it's a really quick reflex.
You're not aware of it. You have no voluntary control over it.
But it's sensitive to the content of your
intention in this kind of sophistication.
And then as that reflex arc goes on longer,
you start to get voluntary control over it.
So somewhere in the middle there, that long, what's called a long
latency stretch reflex, that's got some kind of properties of agency.
It's sensitive to the content of your intentions.
It's functionally appropriate and circumstantially apt.
You don't have voluntary control over it.
You don't have awareness of it. So it's somewhere in the middle.
And my thought was not that that reflex is necessarily
super important for any particular improvisational practice,
but that there are ways that motor control and motor adaptation works.
There are ways that the expression of your skill, if you've learned
how to play the saxophone in a number of different ways, work.
There are sophisticated, there are at least
partially agential, whatever we want to mean by that.
It's got to mean some degree of control and
flexibility and responsiveness to reasons, really.
There's some of that going on. So it's somewhere in the middle.
So I want to think that creativity is sometimes going
to involve those kinds of like quasi-agential processes.
And that seems OK to me. About the kind
of anthem under a description point.
I mean, this is really the crux of at least I don't know
if this is terribly responsive to what you're saying,
but the crux of the paradox of creative agency, the way that
Elliot always lays it out, can be understood in this kind of way.
Like at one abstract level of description,
of course, you know what you're doing.
And of course, it's intentional. You're intentionally
improvising or painting or composing an opera or something.
But sometimes the most creative moments in that whole
process are at this fine grained level of description.
So you did something that was highly creative, but you didn't know
what you were doing and you didn't plan to do exactly that thing.
And so then there's a question about how
to understand is it an intentional action?
Is it just creative behaviour that's not an action?
In what way does that involve agency?
That's a part of the kind of paradox of creative agency, I think.
And so that's that's that's where I think we
can place focus by thinking about fragmentation.
So just like appeasing my powers. And so I see the issue of just talking
about intentions is that you kind of have this vision for the world
and then you're trying to brute force it onto the world.
And then you have the people I really like talking about
responding to two reasons in Skull Bay, it's called action,
like the tennis player, which is responding
to things kind of in the environment.
And then obviously, under certain kinds
of agency, that is very, very gentle.
And I wasn't sure then if you were kind of moving away from that in this paper or
you did want to say in a lot of the things you talk about in organisation cases,
the subject would be kind of, you know, it isn't
intentional, but it's still responding to reasons.
But then that would, I guess, depending on how you
understand reflexes, that would discount reflexes.
So, yeah, would you say that in these kind of gentle cases that they are kind of
like still responding to reasons in the way that you can say in the other people?
Or you also wouldn't say no, it's just like, we'll say like reflexive
action, so like group habituation or all kinds of other random stuff.
I think that that will really depend on the case.
So for some creative capacities in some contexts, I want
to say, yeah, responding, there's some response to reasons,
responsiveness to reasons going on. In other cases, not.
And so in other cases, you might really be trying to produce yourself
into a position where you're able to behave a bit more randomly.
And then you use that randomness later to
kind of like generate a creative product.
So that doesn't look as much like responding.
Thank you. I have a comment a bit similar to what she was relating to.
In a sense, to me, creativity in some aspects
is kind of the opposite of fragmentation.
Because in mathematics or someone who is creative will
maybe have a good ability to see connections with concepts.
Someone in general is creative because they
manage to see analogies, so connections.
Even in improvisation, someone may be able to improvise because they see a
connection between a way of playing and they know that it will sound right.
So there's connection. So this makes me think
that in a sense, everything is connected.
But I want to propose maybe a connection with your idea. Maybe that
creativity would be the ability to see the connection when everyone,
the consciousness of everyone, not our
awareness, only sees fragmentation.
Because we are unaware of what's the connection.
So could it be that fragmentation is what we see consciously?
And someone who is creative is just able to see
the connections that actually is the non-fragment.
So I like the idea about seeing the connection. I do think a lot of times someone who's creative
or has developed a lot of skill in some kind of domain develops really rich kind of perceptual,
emotional capacities that lead to the right kinds of judgments.
They see the right kinds of possibilities before other people do.
And that's a kind of cognitive skill or
cognitive perceptual skill in some cases.
That's a little bit different from the type
of fragmentation idea that I wanted to pursue.
So, I mean, you're right that the concept of
fragmentation can be applied to those kinds of cases.
But the way I was thinking about fragmentation is
it's more about how the parts of me are linked up.
Parts of my mind, parts of my mind and body.
And so to the extent that they're not linked up in the right way,
then that's where you find fragmentation, which is a little
bit different, I think, from the case you're expecting.
David? Yes, thank you, Sophie. My connection
is very bad, so I have typed my question.
Shall I read it in my impression of your voice?
Please. Nice talk, my connection.
So from an outsider's perspective, what I would have understood
fragmentation would be a source of randomness and predictability,
both for the agent and his audience.
There are things we can't genuinely know, plan, intend.
And this is where creativity would originate. My question is whether you
can't derive the same randomness from much simpler sources than fragmentation.
Penalty shooters in soccer seem to be very good at
randomising, even if they have full control of their shots.
In other words, do we need such a complex and demanding explanation of
creativity if you can reach the same outcome in predictability with less?
Like those accounts Jose was mentioning.
Not sure if we can, I will not stand up.
Thanks, Sophie. That's I mean, that's interesting. I think in some. Cases,
so like penalty shots that are constrained in the right kind of way.
Yeah, you might think I've got a nice randomisation process and that that plus my
skill and actually putting the ball where I want it to go gives me all that I need.
I think in other cases. Imagining how that randomisation process would go pushes you in the direction of maybe more complicated
processes and that that might get you to this kind of complicated and demanding thing that I was trying to suggest here.
Whether that's true or not, I do think whether that's true or not depends on
actually looking in detail at the domain specific capacities you have in view.
So that those few slides where I talked about linguistic creativity
or motor creativity and jazz musicians and that kind of thing.
The question for someone like me is can fragmentation give
us an interesting explanation in those kinds of cases?
And the challenge would be from you here, I think, would be something like aren't there simpler
ways of kind of randomising or generating something that's surprising and useful in that domain?
Maybe. I didn't do I didn't really do that work in this talk.
So I'm hopeful thinking about the cases that fragmentation can be
really useful for thinking about creativity in these specific domains.
But that's more of like that's more of an explanatory
project than it is something I was able to argue for today.
Thanks so much. So I have another question.
Is there any other question at the end of the queue at the moment?
I have an extra question in terms of you mentioned
lots of different sources of fragmentation.
And so ultimately, which do you think are going to be the
most important for creative creativity, creative agency?
Because like for example, I can't really. Yeah.
Are you thinking that a quasi plays a role in creative performance?
Are there going to be cases? I mean, I guess you could kind of concoct
a case where the reluctant artist is like, oh, no, it should be.
It should be like this. Should we let this not do any.
But it's harder to kind of imagine then.
So kind of the reflex when you're just kind
of vibing out in the plane, not a colony.
So reflex seems easier or some kinds of
like chunks, automated action protocols.
But it is kind of hard to imagine. So it's one way.
What was you think of the most important and like a crisis, for example?
Do you think that does play a role in creativity often?
No, I wouldn't think that it does often.
The clearest cases I have in mind are on the
one hand, cases of kind of motor production.
So I think that which maybe I think about this more just
because I've in the past worked more on action control.
I think planning and intentions are somewhat
fragmented from motor adaptation and motor control.
And so I'm very physical domains that allows
space for the generation of surprising behavior.
So dancing jazz in particular. Another example that might
be interesting is what psychologists call option generation.
This is basically just coming up with ideas for what to do. It's a kind of.
Memory search, it's a kind of inference that you're
sometimes making about this is the circumstance.
This is my goal. This would be an interesting way to behave.
That process of option generation might sometimes benefit from fragmentation so that
you're able to come up with ideas or suggestions in line with what Filippo was suggesting.
Other kinds of creativity of said, but I have a certain way of trying to
think about that process that involve a kind of interesting, interesting.
Appearance of fragmentation when you're when
you're trying to generate creative ideas.
Those are two cases that I would think
are the most promising places to start.
I guess maybe the case would be getting your own
viewpoint to then generate ideas around another viewpoint.
So then, like, you know, the playing devil's advocate, you need to kind of bracket
what you think on that to then really take seriously the opposite position to that.
Yeah. Yeah. OK. I didn't talk about that.
Yes. Thank you. This is a really naive
question, but maybe also just terminological.
I was just wondering how would you define
fragmentation in the context that you've presented?
It seems like creative agency has more to do with
like switching on and switching off conscious control.
But I don't see a lot of fragmentation there.
I see the capacity of an agent to let go of some metacognitive monitoring of
their actions, but it didn't seem like it had to do with fragmentation per se.
So I was wondering how you define it.
Thank you. I don't want to think of fragmentation as just involving
whether conscious control is heavily involved or is not heavily involved.
It's really more of a kind of you take a third personal perspective on the agent
as an integrated system of capacities and mechanisms and that kind of thing.
And fragmentation is whatever that whatever all the capacities
are that you that you put into your account with the agent.
They don't talk to each other. And kind of fully perspicuous ways
that they aren't causally and functionally linked up with one another.
So part of the agents doing this one thing over here. So a good example of
fragmentation that's quite bad is an anarchic hand syndrome and anarchic hand syndrome.
This part of the hand, the right arm is kind of like being controlled by parts of
the brain that because of brain damage are not linked up to the rest of the brain.
So, you know, people with anarchic hand syndrome will see a cup.
And even though I'm trying to respond to you and I know it's socially
inappropriate, I just reach it and pick it up and put it to my mouth.
And they often will have to do this and
control their hand with their other hand.
Right. So that's like fragmentation. That's probably not good for
creativity or really much of anything, but it's just fragmentation.
That's kind of how I'm thinking of fragmentation is that it's going
to show up in people without brain damage in more subtle ways.
So when you think about the improvising jazz
musician, it's a little different than the dance case.
They talk about letting go of control. Often they're
like really tuned in a lot of conscious control,
but they're still producing notes on their instrument that
are that are surprising to them that they hadn't planned.
So there's a kind of fragmentation that in spite of like a
lot of thinking, a lot of monitoring, a lot of, you know,
conscious control in the moment is still allowing them
to produce a kind of performance that is creative.
That's the thought. It's like free
writing, like trying to generate ideas,
like the whole idea of free writing where you
just sit with a paper and you just let it.
That's a kind of letting go. Yeah.
I just said that you you didn't believe in cognitive flexibility.
Oh, good. Well, so, OK, it's not that I don't
believe in cognitive flexibility at all.
You get this claim in the sciences that's like
cognitive flexibility supports creativity.
And I thought is the more flexible you are, the more creative.
So then you ask, OK, well, what's cognitive flexibility?
It turns out there's six or seven different, very
different accounts of it in in different literatures.
So it's understood as involving a certain kind of ability
to switch tasks quickly in some parts of cognitive control.
It's involved. It's understood as a certain kind of
structure in your memory and other parts of neuroscience.
And so there's just like so there's not
one cognitive flexibility. There's several.
And so you have to look at each one for this
cognitive flexibility. Is it related to creativity?
And when you look closely at it, you often find that it's not it's not plausible or
we don't have a lot of evidence to suggest that it's closely related to creativity.
It's not that it couldn't be. It's that it's an empirical
question, whether it's important and how it relates.
And I think the current state of the science on it is that we just
kind of don't have great evidence to say one way or the other.
That's all there could be like research in 15 years that that shows that
there's this really interesting connection between one form of creativity.
You just haven't. No one's done that research.
To my mind, no one's done the research in a satisfying way.
And I was wondering about what kind of
credit and praise this is all about.
So I guess the idea is that it's not the kind of praise or credit with this is that is associated
with responsiveness or rational agency, including those as the responsibility and stuff like that.
But something closer to when we praise, say, a runner for how fast they
can run or how skillful a basketball player is or something like that.
So it's that kind of evaluation on praise, creativity,
skill, further reason for responding capacity.
I mean, I think that that's actually probably a good consequence. When you see
the paradox that it is this idea that it's not active but it's praiseworthy.
Yes, but it's praiseworthy in a way that is different from action. So in practice, it's not clear that
in the case of creativity, it's always pertinent to ask why you did that, why you reacted in that way.
Precisely the person, the individual, as well.
I don't know exactly. It's not under my control.
But you still can evaluate it in some kind of super style.
Yeah, and it is more or less how I see it. And so when people praise the artist, it's often it's because of
something about them, something about their nature or their style, their skills that are somewhat opaque to us.
Why people are often surprised or delighted by kind of creative geniuses because
they don't really understand how they do what they do, but they do like it.
And it seems really good, skillful. So, I mean, like, I'm going to get this kind of wrong, but, you know,
I'm talking about geniuses, the capacity that by which nature gives the rule to art or something like that.
But when geniuses exercise this capacity, they
don't have a sense of how it is that they exercise.
They're not consciously aware of the way that
they're giving the rules to art, but they do.
So it's this kind of capacity that's it's yours in some sense.
At least I think that this is how people react to artists.
There's something about you that's
praiseworthy, how that works and what that is.
I don't know. And you don't know. That's why we say, like, why do you why did
you do this? Rather than that, the right response is usually like, I don't know.
It came to me. So, yeah, it's not it's not the kind of praise
or credit that's normally associated with intentional actions.
It's definitely a finger. OK, but I mean, it's just it's just a question.
I didn't get why exactly his account has
to connect with skills rather than reasons.
I mean, his account as opposed to an account of integrated action.
So would that apply? I mean, if the question is for creativity in general, like is the
praise that we attach to creativity a question of skill in the tendency of his account?
But it is a question of his account. I don't see why a fragmented account
would have different results with regard to praise rather than an integrated.
So I just wanted to clarify. I mean, I really love this.
I mean, I understand this. Even because of the fragmentation, there
are other skills and mechanisms that are not under rational control.
Thinking and producing creativity, those
mechanisms and skills, we don't control them.
It's like the reflexes case, what is called
the response of our reflexes in the same way.
So is the idea that there's more control in
integrated action rather than fragmented action?
Because I didn't see that, but perhaps it means something.
It's tricky because it depends a little
bit on how you're understanding control.
So one way to understand control is it's an ability to
kind of like perfectly execute the content of your plans.
And in these fragmentation cases, you're trying to
get outside the structure of your plans a little bit.
There's a way of understanding control that's much broader, which is like
the ability to kind of reliably satisfy your goals or achieve your aims.
And there, like you might think, like the way to reliably satisfy my goals and
achieve my aims is to behave in this kind of really fragmented, interesting way.
So that would be controlled by one standard, but then
it wouldn't be the kind of intentional plans control.
It would just be a different form of successful behavior.
So I'm not sure that there's like, and I'm not tied
down to either one of those accounts of control.
I think both of them are for different
purposes, useful ways of talking about control.
I know what I said before, there's something that came to my mind about the memory that
we say is accounting in part for what kind of perception of creativity we may have.
Is it a coincidence that many of these drugs that are
considered to enhance creativity are also memory impairers?
So they tweak your memory access, they
impair your retrieval of certain things.
And that seems to be like a pathway by which creativity is enhanced.
I mean, I kind of see a connection there. And then something else
that maybe that I want to tell you to do your common on productivity.
I'm not exactly a literature on creativity in your
science, but there's something very, very close.
That's on when talking about productivity and this switching tasks.
So normally when you want to enforce switching tasks, you do
what I did before that you were pharmacomedical intervention.
So now the mouse cannot resort, you
cannot sort a task. It's a memory task.
Now it's a model. Now it's a different
kind of task that needs to switch.
But there is no constant switch.
There's like a simple improvisation pathway.
But you have pharmacological interventions or
issues in the brain which last for very long.
But these days, I mean, for not more than
10 to 15 years, now we have autogenetics,
which is a technology that consists on light impulses into modified
brain cells, which are modified to react to these light impulses.
Now you can activate and deactivate these cells at the millisecond scale.
So you can do something like a mouse is solving a task.
I don't want the mouse to use this ability to solve this task anymore.
I deactivate it. And now the mouse does it in a different way.
And now I activate the cells that I
deactivated again. And now the mouse switches.
And there's a metric which is precisely how the mouse switches tasks.
So this may be interesting for you in order to
see if people have to make this reactivity switch.
Yeah, so in a draft of a paper on cognitive flexibility,
one thing I say, so this is just what I think about this is,
this task switching ability or switch readiness sometimes called is, I
think, a pretty promising construct for thinking about cognitive flexibility,
because a lot of that work on task switching and cognitive control literature is
really rigorous and there's good tasks and we understand what's going on there.
When you look for evidence or studies that look at the relationship of
that form of cognitive flexibility to creativity, you find almost nothing.
It's not that you couldn't find it, it's just no one's looked at.
So I think that's an interesting place to kind of like to do work to try
to relate task switching abilities to creativity in different domains.
But there's just no almost no work on it.
I want to ask you something similar along the same lines. In order to study creativity
in general, I would say, OK, if I were a scientist, I would use some kind of model.
So you've got computers, you've got human
brains, you've got biological processes.
I was intrigued before when you said that, you know, if you
distinguish the product that's creative from the process,
that there are some people who say that, you know, artificial
systems like computing systems are not creative at all.
I mean, the kind of way in which we, I would say, when you've got the
same problem, OK, so nuclear fusion, if AI will succeed in doing that,
I guess everybody would agree that it's a kind of creative achievement.
So I don't understand why you said that some people deny that.
If you can enlighten me on that, because I don't get it because
there are exactly all the elements that we're talking about.
You can build the architecture of a computing system in so
many different ways, which is similar to your fragmentation.
You can process data in a very different way.
In neuroscience, the same.
I mean, this idea that there is a self,
an agent, I completely agree with you.
It's much more like the Maslow says, I mean, it's very
disunified, very dependent on physiology and what we control.
So why do people deny that?
So the way it normally goes is you've got a kind of philosophical
account of creativity that's got three or four necessary conditions.
And one of those necessary conditions,
you think AI just doesn't have it.
So for some people, it's agency. They say, oh, well,
it's not an agent for or it's create curiosity.
You have to be satisfying curiosity to be creative.
And I can't be curious.
I mean, this kind of thing that I don't
find super, super fruitful way to go.
I mean, you're just defending a philosophical kind of creativity.
Yeah, that's why that's why the people I have in mind would
say AI isn't or can't or even can't possibly be creative.
It's usually either skepticism about AI or they lack some important
mental or psychological property for now that we think is necessary.
Yes.
We need to think that if you unpack human behavior and human choice
in biochemical molecular terms, you not get the same kind of outcome.
You don't see choice, you don't see agency, you
don't see curiosity or in my kind of phrasing.
No, no, no, no. Sure. I mean, I think I think there's still.
I'm not an expert on AI in the way that I currently works.
But, you know, friends of mine who work on this are just now getting around to
talking about whether, you know, whether I has beliefs, whether I has world models.
And what sense does it represent? So that's beginning to have like
psychological level explanation of the way that these new technologies work.
Whereas before it was always just about, well, you know, what's a transformer and what's
what's the algorithm and how many layers these kinds of like really ground level explanations.
And of course, if you look at. Nervous systems and you're just looking at neurons firing, you're not going to
be asking these questions that philosophers have been asking about curiosity or this kind of stuff, of course.
So I think there's something analogous going on.
There's three minutes of questions. It's very short.
It's about the control and the skills and integration and integration.
There is a paper by Fred Land, I think it's 2020, when she she said that skills are defined by being partially automatic,
but also employing a higher level of control, even though it's not a kind of planification, planificatory control.
And this looks a bit like the question that had been raised earlier about the fact that maybe creativity, if it's
skills, leads you to have a kind of control on even when it's not integrated in the sense that you presented.
Like, for instance, when you play piano, of course, you are not planifying anything,
everything you're going to play, otherwise you will not be able to complete the sequence.
And in the case of improvisation, it's the same thing, isn't it?
Like you, you cannot plan everything you're going to do,
otherwise you will not have the kind of results you want.
And here will be like, what will be the difference between the two? You will say that it's because
in normal kind of seconds, it's like kind of integrated or unified, not in the second layer.
But in both cases, you need to have a kind of
higher order control at any point, isn't it?
Yeah, so this is the part of this is the. This is, I think, the
relinquishing and reclaiming control idea that came up towards the end.
So the thought is to be coherent as a performer in a
lot of contexts, there does need to be the higher level.
What you're trying to do is allow for some latitude so that
the higher level is not dictating absolutely everything.
And that's how you get to the surprising parts, the novel
parts that seem especially creative with some improvisers.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.