In his book Le Ton Beau de Marot , Doug Hofstadter (1997) draws attention to the role of what he calls spontaneous intrusions into a creative process. In the real world, almost everything that happens leaves a wake, makes shadows, has an aroma, makes noise, and this provides a bounty of opportunities for spontaneous intrusions. It is also precisely what is in short supply in a virtual world. Indeed one of the chief beauties of virtual worlds, from the point of view of computer modelers, is that quietness: nothing happens except what you provide for, one way or another. This permits you to start with a clean slate and add features to your model one at a time, seeing what the minimal model is that will produce the sought-for effects.
This absence of noise makes computer simulations of evolution extremely limited, since evolution by natural selection feeds on noise, turning fortuitously encountered noise into signal, junk into tools, bugs into features.
Why? What is all this noise for? It’s not for anything; it’s just there so that every other process has that noise as a potential source of signal, as something that it might turn, by the alchemy of the creative algorithm, into function, into art, into meaning. Every increment of design in the universe begins with a moment of serendipity, the undesigned intersection of two trajectories yielding something that turns out, retrospectively, to be more than a mere collision. But to the extent that computer modelers follow this advice, they squander the efficiency that makes computers such great tools. So there is a sort of homeostasis here. We can see that, not for any mysterious reason, computer modeling of creativity confronts diminishing returns. In order to get closer and closer to the creativity of a human composer, the model has to become ever-more concrete; it has to model more and more of the incidental collisions that impinge on an embodied composer.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
