Page 175 - Deep Learning

158 Creativity

connections, the ladder steps, in the double helix. Watson and Crick learned
about the correct structural from of these molecules in conversations with the
American crystallographer Jerry Donohue who was visiting the Cavendish
Laboratory for reasons independent of Watson and Crick’s quest. Without
that communication, the problem of the structure of DNA would have been
unsolvable. Continued work might have pinpointed the structural formu-
las of those molecules as sources of trouble and so triggered the subgoal
of finding out their true structure, a research enterprise in its own right.
Communication of the correct structures preempted the need for such a
subproject. Once the correct structures were known, it soon became obvious
that one way of pairing the four types of molecules was more plausible than
its alternatives.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the individual and the collective
pertains to the consequences of insight. In the individual, a new idea enters
consciousness accompanied by a certain conviction as to its rightness. The
person feels no hesitation to act on it. In the collective, the emergence of a
new idea has no immediate effect. The originator has to convince at least some
others of the worth of the idea. This creates a need for dissemination, a process
that has no counterpart within the individual mind. The process of dissemi-
nation is complex. In particular, the sheer difficulty of applying language to
abstract matters, the negative balance between effort and utility in attending
to the daily steam of communications and the formal structure of an organiza-
tion can all get in the way and prevent the inventor from convincing others
about the value of his invention.

An Emerging Change Mechanism: Replacement
The fact that the processes and mechanisms specified in the theory of insight
have consequences at the collective level should not be taken to imply that those
processes and mechanisms explain all patterns at that level. A new system level
is likely to exhibit change mechanisms that are rooted in different processes.
A collective exhibits at least one emergent change mechanism: The indi-
viduals that make up the collective come and go. Replacement of group mem-
bers opens up possibilities for change that have no obvious counterpart at the
level of the individual. Over time, the individuals who hold the constraining
assumptions resign, move away, retire, die or are thrown out, as the case might
be. New individuals with different learning histories and contrasting back-
grounds join. If a constraining assumption is less prevalent among the joiners
than it was among those who left, the collective undergoes a change that might