Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity

Designer Andrew Lee and I had a discussion last Saturday night on the nature of musical creativity, and I was reminded of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter's ideas on the topic. I'm attaching an essay I read back in high school entitled, "Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity." I copied the pages from Amazon's Look-Inside-this-book feature, so before you get all huffy about copyright infringement, these pages are already freely available online over at Amazon. A few pages are missing unfortunately, but don't blame me--buy the book if you want more.

Hofstadter_Crux.pdf
from Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

Douglas R. Hofstadter directs The Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition (aka the Fluid Analogies Research Group, or simply FARG) which is an interdisciplinary center for research in cognitive science. CRCC research focuses mainly on emergent computational models of creative analogical thinking and its subcognitive substrate -- namely, fluid concepts. Several computer programs modeling the interplay between concepts and perception in the course of analogy-making have been developed; these include the Copycat and Tabletop programs. The Letter Spirit project, modeling the perception and creation of style in the world of letterforms, has now resulted in a Letter Spirit program capable of designing and evaluating gridfonts.

The group also conducts research (mostly non-computational) in a number of other areas of cognitive science, including error-making, creative translation, scientific discovery, musical composition, the comprehension and invention of jokes, the nature of sexist language and default imagery, philosophy of mind, and foundations of artificial intelligence.