Page 100 - Deep Learning

The Production of Novelty 83

of how people think throughout the long stretches between the insights, and
hence only half an answer to the question of distinctiveness. Creative thinking
essentially involves insight, but what effective analytical thinking consists of,
they did not say.
The most interesting but also most problematic aspect of the Gestalters’
theory is their answer to the question of what gives direction to the creative
process. The Gestalters claimed that restructuring moves toward better,
more balanced representations. By better they meant more responsive to
the task demands, but also more intelligent and sometimes even aestheti-
cally and morally better. They refused to separate fact and value. a better
structure is not only more effective or useful vis-à-vis the problem at hand,
but also more proper and harmonious, more in touch with the true nature
of things. Like Poincaré’s claim about the power of intellectual beauty to
guide mathematical discovery, the Gestalters relied on differences in the
goodness of the relevant Gestalts to select the right representation for the
problem at hand. 58
The obvious question is how this is supposed to work. if the material situ-
ation confronting the problem solver is compatible with a set of possible rep-
resentations, and the restructuring process is a lateral move from one of those
representations to another, then why cannot the restructuring process move
from better to worse, from a modestly helpful representation to a useless one?
What guarantees that restructuring moves up the goodness gradient and what
guarantees that a Gestalt that is better, in the aesthetic, almost moral sense, is
also more useful for solving the problem at hand?
Köhler provided a surprisingly contemporary answer. He claimed that
59
Gestalts were consequences of the laws that govern the electromagnetic fields
generated by electrical activity in the brain. He hypothesized that Gestalts
arise as a result of the interactions among local electrical processes such as
the discharges of individual neurons. He anticipated many of the observations
in later studies of self-organization in nature by highlighting physical systems
that tend to spontaneously organize themselves into patterns and regular
structures. Flames and soap bubbles were among his examples. restructuring
of a problem representation is analogous to the redistribution of tension over
the surface of a soap bubble when disturbed. The brain’s electrical activities,
like other material systems, move toward states of lowest energy. The Gestalt
of a problem situation moves toward a better structure in the same way and for
the same reason that water flowing downhill invariably collects in the lowest
point. No psychological theory before or since has linked the mental and the
physical in quite this way.