Peter in Barcelona

Making insight happen.

Saturday October 3, Peter Carruthers is at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona at an interdisciplinary workshop on creativity, The Composition of Creative Intelligence, presenting his paper "The agentive nature of creative insight," abstracted below. Also presenting at the workshop is recent alum Aida Roige, who will discuss "Creativity in AI and humans: lessons from the history of intelligence."

We propose that creative insights result from active decision-making processes, similar to the unreflective (“System 1”) processes that issue in many everyday actions. Insights are not things that passively happen to us, as most people assume. After characterizing the target phenomenon, we briefly review the factors that are known to influence creativity of this sort, both trait-like and state-like. An account is then offered of the processes that serve as immediate causes of insight-events, showing how the account can explain many of those trait-like and state-like factors, as well as being independently supported. We then argue that the shifts in attention that bring insights to consciousness result from unconscious decision-making processes, and that attention-shifts themselves are rightly regarded as mental actions. We conclude that creative insight-events (albeit not their contents) are direct products of our agency.