Irrationality and the concept of mind

It is inherent to our very idea of mind that minds are restless. Minds are not mere algorithm-performing machines, and they do not merely follow out the logical consequences of an agent's beliefs and desires. Rather, it is part of the very idea of mind that a mind must be able to make leaps, to make associations, to bring things together and divide them up in all sorts of strange ways. Creativity isn't simply an empirical blessing - though it is that; it is a conceptual requirement: a mind must have at least the potentiality for creativity.

(Jonathan Lear, Open Minded, 84-5)

There is something intuitively right in what Lear says here. After all, when we think of the reasons why it seems like no computer, no matter how advanced, could ever constitute a mind, one of the reasons that first comes to mind is that no computer could ever display the sort of creativity that we associate with real mentality. This, it seems to me, is something very important that is often lost in the contemporary focus on consciousness as the unique factor that separates minds from mere computational devices. For in many ways the gap that exists between a mere computer and a creative mind can seem every bit as great as the gap between a zombie's brain and a truly conscious mind.

But, of course, it is far from obvious that a mere "algorithm-performing machine" couldn't display all of the creativity that we do. The tacit assumption here is that the sort of creative thought and imagination that we think any mind must possess could never be the product of the mere application of rules and algorithms to given data. And surely we do - at least in our more "artistic" moments - tend to think of creativity in this way. But is this anything more than cheap self-flattery? Or, in other words, even if this particular notion of creativity is part of our concept of mind, is it something than we ourselves display? For if it is not, then it will hardly matter much that other things cannot display it as well.

The difficulty here is that Lear seems to want to think of the sort of creative "restlessness" he has in mind here as involving something more than a mere mistake. But then the sorts of associations in question will have to be rooted in the architecture of the mind in question. And this might seem to imply that they will, after all, be the product of certain basic algorithms built into it's structure - even if these algorithms aren't anything like rules of deductive or inductive inference.

This, I think, points to any interesting tension in the very idea of creative thought. Such thought, it seems, can't be the product of the mechanical application of some set of already accepted rules or principles. For that would render it something other than creative. But, on the other hand, it cannot simply be a matter of a mere mistake or accident within the mind in question, and this makes it hard to see how it could be anything else...